Seven Historical Problems Which Make Much of America anti-Democratic and Receptive to the Ideas of the Trump Rioters
Seven Historical Problems Which Make Much of America anti-Democratic and Receptive to the Ideas of the Trump Rioters
By
David Gottfried
The vile men who rioted at Capitol Hill and sought to prevent the certification of Joe Biden’s electoral victory were, obviously, anti-democratic as Joe Biden won by a margin of seven million votes. Many commentators have concluded that their contempt for Democracy constitutes a deviation from the American political tradition and that the Trumpian rioters transgressed political norms that this country always held dear. I disagree. I contend that seminal features of this country’s founding and history have given America a starkly reactionary and anti-democratic streak.
Today, the far right is not only ideologically extreme; it is also extreme psychologically, i.e., the people who are in the far right have a tenuous grasp on reality. Make no mistake about it: When right wing conspiracy theorists rave and rant about elite Democrats, at a pizza parlor, capturing children and making them sex slaves, they are as psychotic as Son of Sam saying that his dog told him to kill young couples. Until we identify the sources of our right-wing political maladies, they are apt to fester like an abscess, and if that abscess is not lanced and the infection continues to grow, it will explode like a bomb spraying the shrapnel of bacteria and their concomitant toxins until the body politic suffers the equivalent of septicemic shock.
These features of American history cast an anti-democratic pallor over our national character:
1) CALVINISM AND THE CONTEMPT FOR THE POOR AND MARGINALIZED
Many Americans subscribe to Protestant beliefs and sentiments that originated with the theologian John Calvin. Calvin was a curious sort of Christian. Although Christians generally hold that anyone can attain salvation through Jesus, Calvin seemed to think that that tenet of Christianity was too damn lax. His harsh and forbidding temperament concluded that certain people were pre-determined to go to Hell and could not be saved even if they had accepted the divinity of Jesus. Calvin preached that in regard to certain miserable people, it had been determined, before they had even been born, that their natural lives were to be succeeded by an eternity in Hell and there was not a damn thing they could do about it.
I hold that Calvinism has distinctly deleterious social consequences. When one believes that many people are damned for eternity, one may become a sadistic scold. Furthermore, when a Calvinist encounters poor people, or disturbed people or anyone who deviates from socially approved conventions, the Calvinist may reason as follows:
A) That person is unfortunate and inferior.
B) He may be unfortunate and inferior because he is one of those poor souls destined to go to Hell.
C) Since he is destined to go to hell, I should have nothing to do with him and should not listen to his opinions.
D) Since his opinions should be rejected out of hand, he should be ousted from our sneering, anti-democratic political arena.
In short, since Calvinists believe that certain people are born irredeemable, they will believe that certain people have nothing worthwhile to say and should be excluded from the political discourse. They may be apt to see poor and marginalized people as among those who are consigned to hell and will, therefore, abrogate the political rights of the destitute and supposedly damned.
This harsh Calvinism manifested itself in all facets of Anglo-American life: In the work-houses of England where poor people were given a diet of bread and water, in American share cropping, in the lives of English tenant farmers who, after a lifetime of tyrannous toil, spent the closing years of their lives in poor houses where they starved, slaved and suffered. Indeed, some historians have said that the English poor became poorer when England went Protestant (See, Harold Laski, “The Rise of Liberalism,” 1936. Incidentally, although Joseph Kennedy was a right winger and an anti-Semite, he wanted his sons to have a diverse education and he hired socialistic Laski to tutor he elder sons.) And, of .course, Henry David Thoreau said that most Americans lead lives of quiet desperation. I would venture to guess that that desperation was caused by gnawing, noxious, economic insecurity. Finally, contrary to what laissez faire economists and neo liberals may contend, when one is poor, one is excluded from the political life of the country. When one has lost one’s car and may lose one’s apartment, one has no time to write letters to the editor to opine on political philosophy.
2. THE VIRGINIAN, ARISTOCRATIC STREAK.
The founders of this country were Englishmen, and they were a product of the political conflicts that roiled England. In the middle of the 17th Century, Cromwell deposed the King. The Kingly class, out of favor, sought a new home and many of them migrated to, and founded, the Virginia colony. Hence, Virginia was a colony of the aristocratic elect and this inculcated, in Virginia, and ultimately the entire South, the mood and spirit of feudal England.
The South’s largely agrarian economy which shied away from industrial innovations, the mansions that resembled the manors of English lords, the slaves who humbled themselves as the serfs of England bowed to haughty earls and barons, and the elaborate and fussy romantic rites that harked back to medieval notions of chivalry made the American South a huge and enduring hosanna to Old England.
3. AMERICA HAS TENDED TO DISPARAGE THE NOTION OF “ONE MAN, ONE VOTE.”
a) The electoral college derides the notion that no man’s vote should count more than another man’s vote as it gives smaller states an unfair advantage in the selection of Presidents.
i) The electoral college is anti-democratic not only because of the way the number of votes is apportioned to each state but also because of the way the electors, from each state, can be chosen. Although nowadays, in every state of the union, a state’s electors are chosen by the popular vote, the constitution does not state that a state’s electors are to be given to the candidate who got the most votes. Supposedly reputable jurists and scholars of constitutional law have held that a state legislature could select the electors from that given state.
b) The composition of the Senate is a brazen rebuke to the Democratic ideal as every state, regardless of size, has two Senators.
c) The Supreme Court did not invalidate the juridical notion that some people’s votes should count more than other people’s votes until 1962, in the case of Baker v. Carr, 396 U.S. 186 (1962), when it held that every man should have one vote and one vote alone. Two Supreme Court Justices, Frankfurter and Harlan, dissented from the Court’s decision and thought that one man’s vote could count more than another man’s vote. In Harlan’s dissent, which Frankfurter joined, the voice of hoary old English jurists came to life:
“A State's choice to distribute electoral strength among geographical units, rather than according to a census of population, is certainly no less a rational decision of policy than would be its choice to levy a tax on property rather than a tax on income. Both are legislative judgments entitled to equal respect from this Court.”
Harlan, bizarre as it may seem, endorsed what in England had been known as the “rotten borough” phenomenon. (Rotten boroughs were so anti diluvian that they were rectified in England’s reform laws of 1832. However, those reform laws were, apparently, too liberal for Justice Harlan.)
The rotten boroughs of England were sparsely populated English jurisdictions which had just as much representation as the teeming slums of London and new industrial behemoths such as Manchester. This ensured the continued rule of the lords and ladies of luxury. England saw fit to ditch this system in 1832. But Justice Harlan plainly said, in 1962, that representatives could be allotted on the basis of geographical units and not on population.
Actually, vestiges of the old order, which upheld the doctrine that some people shall have more votes than other people, have lingered on for years. For example, until 1989, New York City government contained what was called the Board of Estimate. The President of each borough was given one vote on the board of estimate notwithstanding that Brooklyn’s population was six times Richmond’s population. This asinine apportionment of power meant that residents of Staten Island were given six times as much deference as the lowly proles of Brooklyn.
4) THE RESTRICTED FRANCHISE
As we all know, for years many blacks and women could not vote. This was patently anti-democratic. However, many people do not know that through much of our history poor white men could not vote. The exclusion of poor white men from the franchise underscores the markedly antidemocratic nature of American politics. Very often, the overwhelming majority of white men were not sufficiently affluent to vote. For example, Alabama enacted a statute, in around 1910, which provided that a man had to not only own real estate but also had to possess $10,000.00 in cash assets to vote. Ten grand was quite a princely sum in 1910.
5) ONLY ONE MAN ON THE BALLOT
In many Southern and Western States, there is only one candidate, on the ballot, in “down ballot” races. (Down ballot races are contests for less prestigious offices, such as Congressman, state legislators and the like) When only one man is on the ballot, the election can hardly be interpreted as being the least bit democratic
6) THE BEGUILING WEB OF LOCAL LAWS DESIGNED TO FRUSTRATE THE POPULAR WILL
I am from New York, and I will restrict my discussion to New York. This supposedly progressive state is run by purported “liberals” who are a conservative’s best friend. I will relate just two galling frauds perpetrated on New Yorkers:
A) THE SHAM THAT IS THE LIBERAL PARTY. There is something known as the liberal party. Every year, tens of thousands of people, upon registering to vote, elect to express their liberal convictions by registering as members of the liberal party. However, because they are members of the liberal party, they cannot vote in the Democratic party and this contrives to ensure that the nominee of the Democratic party will be nauseatingly moderate and devoid of progressive inclinations. Of course, a liberal can change his registration, but that will only be of use if one can predict the future. For example, if one had been a registered liberal, and one had wanted to vote for Bernie Sanders in New York’s presidential primary in the Spring of 2016, one would have had to have changed one’s registration to Democratic no later than August 2015. However, most people, in August 2015, did not know that Bernie Sanders would be mounting a smashing campaign in the following Spring.
B) THE GROSSLY ANTI DEMOCRATIC PLOY OF KEEPING THE NAMES OF CANDIDATES OFF THE BALLOT.
Suppose it is 1968 or 1972. A New Yorker who opposed the war in Vietnam may want to vote, in the presidential primary, for a candidate who is against the war. However, he will not find his candidate’s name on the ballot because New York, in its infinite contemptuousness of the peoples’ will, refused to put the names of presidential candidates on the ballot. Instead, one would only find, on the ballot, the names of those people who were running as delegates to go to the Democratic Convention. The presidential choices of the delegates were not listed on the ballot. Before one went into the voting booth, one had to get a slip of paper indicating, for example, that George Smathers, who was running to be a delegate, supported Robert Kennedy.
Only a super genius could remember the names of all the prospective delegates and whom they supported. For example, in New York, in 1968, there were 190 delegates and about 150 alternate delegates and for each slot there were at least 3 competitors: A Kennedy delegate, a Mc Carthy delegate and a Humphrey delegate. Even if one could remember such a vast list of delegates, it still wouldn’t help as neither the television news nor the print media disclosed the names of the hundreds of people running to be delegates.
This state of affairs favored the Democratic Machine, the Carmine De Sapios, the Mayor Daley’s and other crude and cruel big city bosses who made sure that their foot soldiers and worthless holders of patronage jobs knew who to vote for. When reformers campaigned, they not only had to convince people that their candidate was right, but also had to tell the voters that candidates’ names weren’t on the ballot (And many people thought we were joking) and that they had to take our slips of paper identifying the delegates who supported our candidate.
Because New York Democratic Primaries were conducted in such an anti-democratic fashion, and because most people did not understand why candidates’ names were not on the ballot, most registered democrats had no discernable involvement in the “democratic” process.
7) THE BILL OF RIGHTS AND THE LIMITS OF DUE PROCESS
Most Americans profess a great love of the Constitution. Most Americans, however, never read the constitution and so don’t know what great rights it bestows on them.
The Bill of Rights, or roughly the first ten amendments to the Constitution, bestow many great rights on the people. But read the language and realize its limits. It only says that Congress shall not establish a state religion. Ditto for all the other rights in the Bill or Rights. They prevent CONGRESS from abridging certain rights; they do not stop the State of Alabama from behaving with all the Royal ruthlessness of an ancient European monarch.
After the Civil War, the 14th amendment was passed, and this legal innovation proclaimed that the States of the Nation could not deprive anyone of “due process of Law.”
Since the 14th amendment’s passage, the Supreme Court has held, pursuant to a legal theory known as the “incorporation” doctrine, that various provisions in the bill of rights were binding on the states pursuant to the 14th Amendment’s due process clause. However, the Supreme Court had been exasperatingly slow in ruling that various provisions, of the bill of rights, were binding on the states.
For example, in the 1920’s, the Supreme Court ruled that the 1st Amendment was binding on the States pursuant to the incorporation doctrine. Prior to the 1920’s, it would have been legal if the state of Alabama had made Baptism the state religion, banned all newspapers which criticized the governor, the sheriffs or Jim Crow etc.
In short America’s liberal traditions and presumed love of liberty and democracy is a thin veneer of civilized niceties barely covering and suppressing a roiling molten core of primitive and violent impulses forever at the ready to erupt like a volcano.