America is Not A Democracy
When I say America is not a democracy I don’t mean it in the pedantic punch me in the face “actually it’s a republic” way. Nor do I mean it in the “roll your eyes he’s about to say FEMA Camps” way. I simply mean that the institutions that run America are becoming less and less responsive to the will of the citizens who live here. And as we head towards a government shutdown that nobody wants it’s worth thinking about why this is happening.
In the 2012 election Democrats received 1.4 million more votes for the House of Representatives than Republicans did and yet Republicans maintained control of the House by a 17 seat majority. This was made possible by gerrymandering. Every ten years the US conducts a Census that determines congressional representation. It is up to state governments to redraw congressional districts accordingly and many of them do it by having their state legislatures draw up nonsensical districts that solidify partisan advantage for the next decade.
This is North Carolina’s 4th congressional district, not Ebola under a microscope. It was created by Republicans to pack as many liberal voters into one area as possible. You can see it curves to include most of the Research Triangle as well as left leaning Raleigh and Chapel Hill. “Packing” allows a party to effectively disenfranchise opposition voters by concentrating them in a few districts thus leaving the majority of districts in their state as favorable terrain. In 2012 51% of the people who live in North Carolina voted Democrat for the House while 49% voted Republican. The result? North Carolina sent four Democrats and nine Republicans to Washington. This is not democracy.
So it shouldn’t be a surprise that a bipartisan immigration reform bill is D.O.A in the House or that the House has voted 40 times to dismantle Obamacare or that the House is about to shutdown the government and possibly even default on the debt so that it can vote 41 and 42 times to dismantle Obamacare. The House of Representatives behaves in opposition to the democratic will of the American public because the House of Representatives is not a democratic body.
I could talk for a long time about the other ways America’s democratic tradition has been perverted. I’d start with our horrific income inequality mixed with the Citizens United ruling. 400 Americans now control more wealth than the bottom 150 million people who live here and they’re free to spend as much money as they want warping the political process and stacking our governmental institutions to behave in their favor.
I’d tie that into how we have a Justice Department that won’t prosecute white collar crime, a tax code that favors capital gains, and a healthcare system that lines the pockets of the medical industry by spending twice as much per capita as other developed countries while providing no coverage to 50 million people. Then I’d start to talk about how lonely I feel and you’d make some polite excuse and go to another section of the bar to watch Monday Night Football.
We’ve all heard the various Thomas Jefferson quotes about the necessity of revolutions for sustaining a democracy, usually from right wing skinheads when they try to justify murdering DEA Agents. But for the first time in my life revolution isn’t something that I just roll my eyes at or dismiss out of hand. If the institutions of our government have been corrupted to the point where our votes no longer matter then the majority of citizens in this country have to start looking at other ways to effect change. Revolutions don’t require violence, they just require us to say no. If we are out marching in the streets, if we engage in a general strike, if we simply say that this country will not run until things change things will change.
If our leaders are not careful they might yet live to see the second American Revolution.