Reading the following article from Mother Jones.com got me thinking about this*:
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2024/04/minority-rule-is-threatening-american-democracy-like-never-before/
If you want to have an intelligent discussion about what sort of government was intended by the founding fathers, the first thing you have to do is understand what was meant by “the People.”
There was actually disagreement about that, and many concessions were made as to the structure of the government to appease the powerful, land/property/slave-owning, wealthy white males of the fledgeling country, i.e. The People, whose support was needed to form a government supposedly for the people, by the people and of the people, i.e everyone else.
The People well understood that a true democracy, i.e. true rule by the people, would ultimately result in higher taxes for them, more regulations to protect the people (they don’t need protecting, they have nothing to protect!), for the slave owners to have to free their slaves and actually pay a fair wage for labor (there were poor white folk in the south who needed work too), and other horrific assaults on their property rights and their self-perceived right to have dominion over others, i.e. the people.
So the Senate was specifically set up to NOT be democratic. And initially the president was not even elected, but chosen by legislature, via an electoral college with the same total number of representatives for each state. Again, a legislature that gives the minority the advantage because of the senate and its equal representation per state regardless of population of that state.
And then there was the 3/5ths rule that gave slaves a count of 3/5ths of a person for the census and for representation in the House, but of course slaves could not vote, so that gave the minority slave-owning states and slave owners even more power in government.
This was all because the smaller states were “afraid of oppression from the bigger states.” So instead, for eternity the bigger states should be subject to the oppression of the smaller states? Yes, that was the idea. And it worked. To this day.
If the will of the people were respected, GW Bush would never have been president, nor would’ve Donald Trump. Abortion would still be legal in all 50 states, assault rifles would be banned at a minimum, poverty would be lower, education would be better, health care would be more affordable, etc, etc, etc. All good things in my and the majority of Americans’ minds.
The point here is we have never had a democracy, we have always had an oligarchy. I have known and seen this since I was a thinking teenager. Who makes policy? The People. To this day. Who influences those who make policy? The People. Who convinces the people that it is really the people deciding their own fates? The People. Who makes sure that they strongly influence enough of the people in the right place to ignore what is best for the people and instead promote the interests of The People? The People. Who does the law bind but not protect? the people. Who does the law protect but not bind? The People.
And none of this is Donald Trump’s doing. As per the Mother Jones article linked above, this has been the trajectory of this country since its inception. Donald Trump was merely the person stupid enough to make no attempt to hide that he was of The People and worked solely for The People and that the ultimate right wing goal IS for The People to Rule for The People, by The People, and of The People, and that the people can just fuck right off.
This should all piss the people off. Well, in fact it does. It pissed the people off enough that we actually elected an 80 year old president. Nice enough guy, but old ideas rooted in The People, but more sensitive to the people than any conservative, but less so than any progressive.
So now we find ourselves in the situation that in order to resolve this and go back in the direction of moving the power towards the people, what liberalism and progressivism is mainly about, we need the cooperation from the very minority, The People, who have been benefitting from this minority advantage since the country’s inception over 200 years ago. Needless to say, they are not going to go silently into the night.
* Another good, longer read, on the subject is Democracy in Chains by Nancy MacLean.
** Also I touched on much of this before in my The Tyranny of the Minority post. So I was also glad to see a new book on the same theme with the same title: Tyranny of the Minority