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Opinion | The United States Has Never Truly Been a Democracy [nytimes.com]

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Opinion [nytimes.com]The United States Has Never Truly Been a Democracy

We haven’t yet perfected our system of government.

Dr. Older is a sociologist and science fiction author.

• Oct. 24, 2019

Between impeachment inquiries [npr.org], questions about the security of our elections [npr.org] and the proliferation of books [penguinrandomhouse.com] and articles [politico.com] announcing that democracy is dead, it’s clear that many people in the United States are disillusioned with democracy.

But it’s hard to claim that the United States, at any point in its history, has been a democracy in the rigorous sense of the word. This is partly by design. The foundations of the United States were defined by a struggle over how much democracy should be mitigated. It was terrifyingly radical to suggest that the people — even a very restricted group of people — might have a say in government, and the founders cautiously padded the rails to limit the power of the masses. This was still a huge step forward from dynastic monarchy, but it was not a place to stop.

And we didn’t stop.

Over the two and a half centuries since, we’ve grown more democratic, expanding the franchise to women and people of color and instituting the direct election of senators by popular vote (the 17th amendment, ratified in 1913). But we’ve also taken steps away from pure democracy; initiatives making it more difficult for people to vote [theguardian.com] and gerrymandering [nytimes.com] are good examples of this. We’ve watched the role of money in politics grow [marketwatch.com] and seen the proportion of our representation drop because of the cap on the number of members [house.gov] in the House of Representatives.

In the past 20 years, we’ve had two presidential elections in which the candidate with the most votes did not take office. But presidential elections are only the tip of the undemocratic iceberg. In 2014, a Princeton study by Martin Gilens and Benjamin I. Page [cambridge.org] found that the United States is an oligarchy, not a democracy, with policy driven by the economic elite and business interests. Furthermore, studies and polls showthat majority public opinion on many of the key issues of the day — abortion [pewforum.org], gun control [nytimes.com], universal health care [kff.org] — is nowhere near reflected in public policy decisions.

It’s hardly surprising that we haven’t yet perfected our system of government. Societies have been practicing democracy for a very short time relative to human history, and we’re still working out the bugs and persuading ourselves to commit to the difficulties. And democracy is still a terrifyingly radical idea — as much as we rhapsodize about government by the people, we are afraid to trust ourselves and much more afraid to trust anyone else.

Moreover, democracy was never supposed to be a perfect clockwork mechanism, functioning on its own while citizens went about their lives, mitigating with preternatural precision every failure of human nature. Democracy is about people actively engaging with the decisions of their government at every level. It requires creating the space and processes for that to happen, providing education to enable an informed citizenry and putting in place safeguards to prevent oppression by the majority — and then continuously improving and adjusting those components as society changes.

In our technology-rich world, with a surplus of wealth and leisure time, we should have more opportunities to facilitate and extend democracy than ever before. And we do. Municipalities across the United States and countries around the world are experimenting with different types of democracy, leveraging digital and nondigital innovations to better involve citizens. Some countries have mandatory voting [nytimes.com]; some have instituted e-voting [ndi.org]. Some localities within the United States are experimenting with ranked-choice voting [vox.com] or quadratic voting [wired.com]. Some countries are expanding the potential of direct democracy [washingtonpost.com], in which people vote on policies or laws rather than on representatives; some are looking for ways to engage people beyond voting, into broader engagement in governance and community. There are myriad ways that we can make our system more representative, more accountable, more reflective of what people want.

And yet most of the discourse in the United States treats democracy as a done deal, an achievement to trumpet and spread around the world, an enviable and unchangeable status quo. There’s an immense kind of hubris in the suggestion that the way we do democracy is the end-all and be-all of governance, and that if it doesn’t work it must be democracy’s fault rather than our own.

It’s telling that many of the arguments about the end of democracy suggest it’s because we’ve given too much power to the masses, that we’ve become too democratic. A paper by [politico.com] Shawn Rosenberg [politico.com], professor of political science and psychological science at the University of California, Irvine, claims that the problem is social media and that other technologies have disrupted the role of elites in guiding the masses through the intricacies of policy and economics. Other commenters suggest [theguardian.com] that the abysmal state of political literacy in the United States means the people can’t be trusted to make decisions about their government.

But how many of the recent “failures of democracy” have come about not because “institutions eroded” but because those institutions either were never intended to be democratic or have recently been adjusted to be exclusionary?

That the Electoral College system should result in a president who did not win the popular vote is not a failure of democracy; rather, it’s the expected effect of a system that was always supposed to be undemocratic, and it’s functioning as intended (if not quite as designed). If the checks and balances of our tripartite system have failed, it’s not only because of bad people acting in venal and unethical ways; it’s because those people were elected through undemocratic means of gerrymandering, party politics, voter suppression and intense injections of money, and they know where their incentives lie. If voter turnout is low, maybe it’s not because people don’t believe in democracy any more, but because the system they live in has shown them time and again that their vote doesn’t count the way it’s supposed to count and their representatives don’t need to care about representing them.

Our recent stumbles are reminders that we still have work to do on our system of government. Democracy is not a unitary state that can be achieved, but a continuous process. We need to keep reinventing and refining government, to keep up with changes in society and technology and to keep it from being too easy for elites with resources to exploit. And it is worth fighting for. Not because of the founders, or because it sounds good, but because while democracy may be far from perfect, it is still the best system we’ve got.

At least so far.

Malka Older is an affiliated research fellow with the Center for the Sociology of Organizations at the Paris Institute of Political Studies and the author of “The Centenal Cycle” trilogy [tor.com]. Her new collection of short stories, “ … And Other Disasters,” [masonjarpress.xyz] will be published on Nov. 16.

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters [nytimes.com] to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips [nytimes.com]. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com [mailto].

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