The Definition and Distortion of Democracy

(Why We Are Still Fighting The American Revolution)

Our founding fathers both defined and distorted democracy at the same time. Taking their cue, we are still engaging the same battles that inspired their revolution and birthed our nation.  However, instead of fighting the British we are fighting ourselves. We have made dramatic progress in overcoming the distortions and instituting an actual democracy but our present state threatens a regression to economic despotism.

Here is how our founders accurately defined the intents of democracy as implied in the two founding documents of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution:

• Its ground was the common worth of the citizenry.
• Its goal was the common good of the citizenry.
• Its rule was by the common vote of the citizenry.

However, they also distorted the application of democracy by limiting its scope to white male citizens. This distortion set up the evolution of democratic governance as a battle for blacks and women to be included in the common worth, the common good, and the common vote.  This evolution has been in process for almost two hundred and forty years.  And its state of progress is the actual degree of inclusion of blacks and women in the application of these intents.

This white male distortion also implicated the notion of democracy’s focus on the citizenry’s right to engage life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.  From the nation’s inception the use of women and blacks as economic pawns gave this right a decided economic edge and this edge has significantly influenced America’s history. It sparked the Civil War of the eighteen hundreds, the civil rights and feminist movements of the nineteen sixties, and the current two thousand twenty protest movement that is demanding a dramatic reshaping of law enforcement and the justice system. It has converted the Republican Party into a cabal devoted to economic imperialism and elected to office an avid racist and sexist president devoted to converting democracy into a cash register for an economic oligarchy.

The term The American Dream did not come into usage until the first part of the twentieth century.  It was supposed to emphasize the original constitutional notion of pursuing the larger vision of democratic values.  However, by the mid nineteen hundreds this label had come to signify the distortion of democratic intent into economic achievement.

This distortion has constantly been fed by the two primary historical enemies of democracy: Imported worth and individualism.  Imported worth translates economic achievement into a hierarchy of social status. Individualism encourages the citizenry to engage economic achievement without concern for the worth of other citizens. 

As a culture, we have come a long way in trying to complete the revolution our founding fathers started. But we have been marching in the opposite direction with astounding rapidity for the past twenty years.  We have allowed those committed to the conversion of democracy into a means of economic achievement to hijack and control the basic structures of democracy. Oxymoronically, this is the exact kind of economic imperialism against which our founding fathers rebelled. And we have reached a critical turning-point in this hijacking.

We will either reinvest the structures of American government with democratic intent or become the total servants of economic despots.  Let us hope Winston Churchill was correct when he observed:

You can always count on Americans

to do the right thing after they

have tried everything else.

Robert

Robert T. Latham

mythinglink.com