The United States has never been even close to a genuine democracy, which is why no such "democracy" is under threat today
Furthermore, most people know this even if they fear saying it out loud.
The above Boston Globe opinion piece is typical of the massive propaganda campaign now ongoing by the mass media. The propaganda message is that we live in a genuine democracy. The propaganda tells us that we, the regular people, have the real say in what the government does because we decide with our vote who makes and executes the laws. The propaganda tells us that our government is all about shaping society by the values of ordinary people, not by the contrary values of a tiny wealthy minority: you know, “DEMOCRACY”!
Hardly anybody actually believes this propaganda lie. Everybody knows that the government serves the very rich. Everybody knows that Congress responds to the lobbyists representing Big $, not to the values and interests of regular people. Everybody knows that a congress person will vote whatever it takes to keep getting the huge amounts of money from the lobbyists that they need to wage their election campaigns.
Everybody knows that the United States president, whoever it turns out to be, appoints to his (not a her yet) Cabinet individuals who are top officers of Big $ banks or corporations, or individuals with proven loyalty to those Big $ interests, such as their top lawyers or a military general sitting on the board of directors of Raytheon or some such weapons manufacturer, or occasionally an academic like former Labor Secretary Robert Reich who absolutely supports the class inequality of our society (read about Reich here).
Everybody who has ever gone to a hearing conducted by their city or town government to supposedly get input from the people who live near where a big developer intends to build something big—a mega store or a bio-lab or luxury housing/hotel, what have you—discovers the same thing. What the Big $ developer wants, the Big $ developer will get, regardless of any contrary zoning laws and regardless of the contrary concerns of virtually all the residents affected by the development who, if lucky, might get to have some say on what color the exterior of the development will be…if they are lucky!
The poorest people know that when a toxic waste dump site has to be determined, the odds that it will end up in the wealthy section of the city instead of their neighborhood are the same as the odds that Jeff Bezos will be ordered by the government to hand over his hundred billion dollar fortune to raise the standard of living of poor people who work extremely hard in his Amazon warehouses and delivery vans to be the same as his own standard of living.
The millions of us who work for an employer know that there is no democracy in the work world, not even the pretense of democracy. It’s a “do as you’re told or be fired” system—the wage system. It is rightly called wage-slavery because you’re working to make somebody else profit from your labor (or if you’re working for a non-profit organization then you’re working not for your own goal but for your employer’s goal, which is typically that of the upper class.) Although—unlike the old slavery—one can quit, this only means—in 99.9% of the time—that one’s only choice is to be a wage slave for a different employer.
What most people thus know just from personal experience and keeping their eyes open was confirmed by a pair of top-notch academics in a rigorous scientific study to determine who had the real power in the United States. This academic study reported in the journal Perspectives on Politics published September 18, 2014, by Martin Gilens and Benjamin I. Page, (also described here and here and here) concludes with the following statements:
"Multivariate analysis indicates that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence. The results provide substantial support for theories of Economic-Elite Domination and for theories of Biased Pluralism, but not for theories of Majoritarian Electoral Democracy or Majoritarian Pluralism."
"When a majority of citizens disagrees with economic elites and/or with organised interests, they generally lose. Moreover, because of the strong status quo bias built into the US political system, even when fairly large majorities of Americans favour policy change, they generally do not get it."
"Americans do enjoy many features central to democratic governance, such as regular elections, freedom of speech and association and a widespread (if still contested) franchise. But we believe that if policymaking is dominated by powerful business organisations and a small number of affluent Americans, then America's claims to being a democratic society are seriously threatened."
In other less academic wording, we have a fake democracy that is actually a dictatorship of the rich. Some call it an oligarchy. I often refer to it as the ruling billionaire plutocracy.
The first author of this study, Martin Gilens, is professor of politics at Princeton University. The second author, Benjamin I. Page, is the Gordon Scott Fulcher Professor of Decision Making, Northwestern University.
Business Insider reports on this study this way:
Another online magazine reports on the study this way:
The BBC captured the story with some great artwork:
Why does the mass media keep telling us what we know is a lie?
The reason the mass media keep repeating the “you live in a democracy” lie is this. The purpose is NOT to make us believe the lie. That, the ruling class knows, is impossible. The purpose is to make us believe that EVERYBODY ELSE believes the lie, and therefore if we say out loud what we know to be true then our friends and neighbors and colleagues and fellow workers on the job will think we are crazy, or worse that we are some kind of RAAAAADICAL! So best to just keep quiet about what one thinks.
This is how the ruling class tries to prevent us from building a movement that aims explicitly to remove the rich from power to have REAL, not FAKE, democracy with no rich and no poor—a goal that the vast majority of people (as I prove here) would LOVE to accomplish even if they currently think it is impossible because (they wrongly believe) everybody else thinks we already have a real democracy.
But wasn’t the United States a real democracy in the beginning?
No! The United States has been a dictatorship of the rich from the beginning days of the Founding Fathers, as I show in “The U.S. ‘Founding Fathers’ Were Enemies of ‘We the People’.” The early Americans who wanted REAL democracy—who took the rhetoric of the Founding Fathers seriously and then discovered that it was ONLY rhetoric to get them to fight against the English King in the American Revolutionary army—were the kind of people who fought for real democracy in Shays’s Rebellion in Massachusetts and the Whiskey Rebellion in Pennsylvania and nearby states, both of which pro-democracy rebellions George Washington made sure were violently suppressed.
That great ‘hero’ of Founding Fathers vintage, Sam Adams, called for the poor farmers of Shays’s Rebellion—one of whom was Emily Dickinson’s great grandfather—to all be hanged! I urge you to read the above-linked article about this to learn what these rebellions were all about, and why the rich upper class suppressed them. Read about how, when the Founding Fathers met to write the Constitution shortly after Shays’s Rebellion, their overriding concern was to create a strong central government that would have the power required to suppress any future rebellions like Shays’s rebellion, which came exceedingly close to removing the rich from power in Massachusetts.
How can we get a real democracy?
Here are some suggestions about what YOU can do to help make it happen.