The Oligarchic American Constitution

The official spin is that America is a democracy. It's a crucial part of the national mythology. Well, guess what: This is nowhere near the truth. The Founders never said they were setting up a democracy. In fact, in The Federalist, three of them argued repeatedly against democracy. The republic the Framers set up with their 1787 Constitution was intended to be an electoral oligarchy. What else would you expect from a constitution that originally gave slavemasters extra votes representing 3/5 of each of their slaves?

On the other hand, there is a lot of democracy below the federal level: in most states and localities, direct democracy has been implemented in the form of initiative, referendum, and recall. It's not quite as participatory as the Athenian assembly, in which all the citizens met every month or week to do what legislatures and city councils do today, but it's actually far more democratic than the US federal government, which restricts democratic participation to electing a limited number of officials and was far more restrictive in its unamended original version.

Naturally, there's a huge contradiction that is undermining the entire creaky 18th-century American system. On the one hand, you have the oligarchic federal government which has over the decades become increasingly monarchic. On the other, there's the long-term trend toward democratization which has led to the universal right to vote and to expanding civil rights for women, racial minorities, gays and lesbians, and immigrants among others. The democratic trend also involves the expansion of the vote until now all adult citizens can vote, where originally only propertied white males were eligible. Increasingly, these two opposite trends are working against each other. Eventually they will not be able to coexist, and one or the other must prevail at the other's expense. At that time, a revolution will be highly likely. That time will be when the colonial conquest campaign in the Middle East is lost and the troops come home.

The 1787 Constitution is obsolete. There might be a way to save it: state nullification, the right of any one state to veto or nullify any federal law, regulation, and decree. Thomas Jefferson himself came up with that, and insisted that it was the only thing that would ultimately prevent the American republic from degenerating into a tyranny. Now would be a good time to revive the idea. It would make an excellent 28th Amendment. Otherwise, it would be a good idea to scrap the dysfunctional federal system entirely, and replace the current 1787 Constitution with something at least as good at protecting rights but far more democratic.

The problem with an oligarchic constitution, you see, is that an oligarchy ultimately loses touch with the mass of ordinary citizens. Oligarchs are unaccountable to the people. Increasingly drunk on power, they lose touch with reality as well. In the democratic age, good government requires the rulers to be accountable to the citizens, or they will rule arbitrarily and tyrannically. So a modern constitution must make the government accountable. That means democracy in some form. Some critics of the current constitution advocate a European-style parliamentary system elected through proportional representation instead of the current setup. What was originally the equality of the executive and legislative branches has degenerated into the monarchic supremacy of the executive, or "Imperial Presidency". European-style parliaments subordinate the executive (usually called a "prime minster") to the legislature. This may be more workable. However, it still proves oligarchic in practice if it doesn't have at least some features of direct democracy (initiative, referendum, recall, nullification). But we won't know what we'll come up with till the revolution begins and the Fourth Republic is born.

The Third American Republic

Now let's talk history for once. Sometimes I speak of "the Third American Republic", numbering American republics like French ones. I have to explain it to most people. Some historians and pundits measure it differently, but in fact the periods of independent American history fall into three periods which can rightly be called republics:

• The First Republic is the period from independence to the adoption of the Constitution, 1776-1787, including the period of the Articles of Confederation.
• The Second Republic began with the ratification of the Constitution and ended with the Civil War: 1787-1861.
• The Third Republic was established by the Union victory in the Civil War in 1865 and is the government still in power in Washington, DC today. Because the American Empire was built during this period, it is also known as the Imperial Republic. There is strong evidence that it is coming to an end.

A Fourth Republic would be a good idea, as long as the power shifts from a bloated federal government back to the people.

One hallmark of the current Third Republic is a presidency far stronger than in any previous American republic. In fact, right now the presidency is being transformed into something of an elective absolute monarchy. Another is our not quite so laissez-faire form of capitalism in which corporations are defined as "legal persons" which in practice gives them greater rights than mere puny humans; right now, this is transforming into a full-blown state capitalism.

Counter to trends like these is the growing trend toward full civil rights for ever wider sections of the American people since the Civil War. This trend started in fact with two amendments to the Constitution: the Thirteenth, which bans slavery, and the Fourteenth, which promises full civil rights (or at least voting rights) to all men regardless of race and also extends the Bill of Rights to the state and local levels. It took some time for the full effects of these (and subsequent amendments that extended full civil rights to women and others) to sink in, which is why most of the great advances in civil rights were made in the 20th century.

Now consider the contradiction: a basically authoritarian federal government with an imperial obsession, opposed to a still growing trend toward democracy and civil rights for all. This contradiction is at the core of the problems in the later stages of the Third Republic. By now, the trends toward democratization vs. world empire have diverged so completely that they have begun to clash. Soon the contradiction will tear the country apart. It could get nasty before we get a Fourth Republic, but let's hope not.

I hope that's a good enough explanation. Hopefully it's not merely a private reference now.