“But over time, the executive branch grew exceedingly powerful. Two world wars emphasized the president’s commander in chief role and removed constraints on its power. By the second half of the 20th century, the republic was routinely fighting wars without its legislative branch, Congress, declaring war, as the Constitution required. With Congress often paralyzed by political conflict, presidents increasingly governed by edicts.”
This article must be written by naive children. The moment “American Democracy” died would be with the Patriot Act after 911.
Snowden, Assange and all that.
American Democracy flourished from 1864 to 1877, only to be killed by The Corrupt Bargain of Rutherford B. Hayes. It enjoyed a brief resuscitation following the 19th Amendment in 1919 and the Civil Rights Act of 1964, before once again becoming moribund and unresponsive under the Nixon Administration of 1972. By the election of 2000 the institution barely demonstrated a pulse, enjoying one of the lowest turnouts in the nation’s history. Still, it was the Brooks Brother’s Riot that officially pulled the plug, with the democracy formally being pronounced dead on December 12th, twenty days later.
The Patriot Act was effectively just putting bullet holes into a corpse.
Subsequent gerrymandering in 2005, the ACORN controversy of 2009, and the 2016, 2020, and 2024 primaries were effectively just ritualized defacement of the grave.
You sure it wasn’t when we had the balls to write that all men are created equal while simultaneously denying the rights of anyone who wasn’t a rich man?
Like I know it was a different time but the plot was lost long ago.
Most “democracies” started off with slavery so I think the counting needs to start somewhere in the middle.
We’re supposed to evolve, intellectually and physically. It looks like we tried for a bit, then got way too comfortable/complacent, blissfully ignorant that our (relatively) high standards of living came at the expense of people far away that we didn’t see, routinely. The banana republics never really went away, we just became distracted with more entertainment culture, and when something broke through, grabbed our attention and outrage briefly, we just collectively shrugged, declared there’s nothing we can do and went back to American Idol, Fear Factor, The Apprentice, Ice Road Truckers and whatever else fake reality garbage. Then it came to our doorstep and we continued doing the same, and still are. It’s almost like we need a certain level of conflict to avoid complacency.
And it was still seen as radically progressive
Citizens United has entered the chat
Citizens United was about bribing the campaigns but there was still a “rule of law”.
The Patriot act basically threw the entire legal sysrem in the dumpster in a very blatant way.
Of course there were violations before that but the cut off needs to be made somewhere.
Who was actually punished for violating this rule of law?
I seem to remember a congo-line of Congressmen who flagrantly violated campaign finance laws, anti-bribery laws, and a host of other ostensibly liberal democratic strictures. But virtually all of them either had the charges dropped, were given fines far less than the sum of the corrupt money they received, or were pardoned or the decisions reversed shortly after conviction.
You can’t cut off what never began.
Eh, that was just a rebranding of “We the People”. Same bunch of rich white dudes with an aversion to taxes.
No, that was when we got Super Pacs which is how billionaires have a control over a majority of US Senators needed to break a filibuster.
“We the People” is how you got plantation-owning slaveholders to write the constitution (and be senators) so they could control U.S. policy despite being way fewer in number than their northern buddies. Kind of the same thing, all told.
Oligarchy masquerading as democracy.
No it was a democracy, but it wasn’t inclusive of everyone. What your argument is describing is a comprise that had to be made so that a new nation would not be divided almost immediately. Women weren’t able to vote either. Only land owning men.
But our democracy had a virtuous circle that expanded who was included in the political process. This expanded who could participate in our economic institutions as well, eventually. This is process also took place in England. And despite such an unequal start in America, it was working for most of our history.
It was with our adoption of neoliberalism in 1980 with Reagan’s election that the virtuous circle became a vicious circle. People were increasing excluded from our economic and political institutions. And our democracy has now fully transformed into a extractive fascist dictatorship.
Our capitalist system was always an extractive economic institution but our democracy had kept it in check. Things like trust busting, monopoly laws, and the New Deal prolonged the growth we were experiencing under the extractive economic institution of capitalism.
Now that our political and economic institutions are fully working in tandem as extractive institutions that growth will soon end. We can already see how Trump’s attacks on universities and scientific research are stifling innovation. Without any innovation fueling creative destruction, growth in our economy will stagnate. The extractive institutions run by the owner class will eventually run out of things to extract.
At this point it becomes a race between the collapse of America and it’s ability to consume neighboring countries in order to keep extracting. Much like Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Unlike Russia, even with fascist incompetence, America has the most powerful military in the world going off budget alone. It’s likely we will conquer quite a few countries before our extractive institutions cannibalize everything.
So no, not oligarchy. Not the same thing as neoliberism either. Your argument is a critique of people from over two hundred years ago from a modern moral perspective. Whether or not that’s fair, it isn’t a useful means of analysis. Even though it was not as inclusive as we would like it to have been American democracy was functionally a democracy from the beginning. And it became more inclusive as it went on. There was nothing stopping us from making different choices at critical junctures along the way that would have resulted in us reaching the kind of democracy that includes all people.
It is important to understand that this outcome was not inevitable. It’s not worth staying in the judging pit arguing who to assign blame to so we can sling mud at them. But we need to acknowledge that we failed so we can learn from this and move on. There’s no shortcut around it. The sooner we learn our lessons the sooner we can build a better world.
Or with the implementation of institutionalized slavery.
Neo libertarian with capitalism pleasure doing business with you.
Was it even alive then?
Died upon birth perhaps?