this post was submitted on 27 Nov 2024
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Question: What is the mythical height that American “democracy” has degraded from? The country was founded by a bunch of settlers who violently kicked out the people living there. They set up the government and immediately restricted who could vote and how much influence that vote could even have. They kept some people as non-human property. They spent the next ~century arguing about it until it had to fight a war about it and the result was to leave those people being merely treated as sub-human rather than non-human. Moving on to the 20th century, it took movements of labor and minorities that were met with extreme violence to get anywhere and that’s still left us where we are today, begging for crumbs and for police not to just execute people in the streets.
Then of course there’s all the people we invaded or otherwise screwed with who never even got a vote in the first place. Were they not “doing their civic duty?”
America has never been the experiment in democracy it purports itself to be. It’s a nice ideal to strive for, but in order to do that you have to stop pretending and recognize that there’s nothing to protect or repair. Nothing to go back to. Just something we’ve yet to build.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt has entered the chat...
Look up the New Deal. Pretty good blueprint for a place to start.
Refer to my comment bellow for a more expanded discussion, but specifically talking about the New Deal:
The voter participation in this period was comparable to what we have today. Minus all the people excluded, but the comment I'm replying to was talking about people deciding to vote, so those without that option, these people aren't included in the asserted culpability for the success or failure of democracy.
The New Deal happened with significant context outside of the electoral system. A massive war with another looming on the horizon. A global financial collapse that threatened to incite people against the ruling class. Militant union organizing against violent state and private repression. The rise of the Soviet Union as a counterweight to capitalist hegemony and an example to show workers what was possible.
The goal was to placate workers enough to preserve the power structure. Far from being a democratic revolution, it was a stalling tactic that kept power concentrated and allowed those in power to slowly dismantle outside power structures like unions until such time as they could claw back those gains. The later end of the Keynesian government programs can be better attributed to the weakening of unions than the failure of people to vote or vote correctly at the ballot box. Government policy obviously had a big hand in this attack on unions, but there were also the material factors of automation and globalization that greatly reduced union bargaining power.
Nice revisionism.
There wasn't any chance of a massive class struggle like the USSR happening. There was more of a chance that the richest would have kicked FDR out and put in their own junta. That attempt only failed because Smedley Butler wasn't having any.
I was lucky enough to meet some old school Communists who'd been in the Spanish Civil War. They would have laughed at the idea that the US was on the verge of a Socialist takeover in the 1930s.
It certainly wasn't as extreme or successful as the soviet union, but there was a lot of unionization going on during the industrial revolution that was more radical than the tamer bargaining unions we see in the post-war era. And then the depression happened and things got really bad. It's not hard to see how elites would have looked out at what was happening in the world, looked at the bad economic situation at home, and concluded that something had to be done.
FDR even said that they were trying to reform capitalism to save it.
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Wikiquote:Transwiki/American_history_quotes_New_Deal
1933 “It was this administration which saved the system of private profit and free enterprise after it had been dragged to the brink of ruin.” President Roosevelt, on how his emergency actions in 1933 prevented a revolution and saved capitalism.
So we agree that there was no way there was going to be a Socialist uprising in America in the 1930s, which is what you were trying to imply.
Also, the idea that FDR's plans weren't radical is ludacris. The only evidence you can come up with is a cloying speech he gave to settle the nerves of people who feared an actual revolution.
My point is that something like the New Deal doesn't just happen because everyone decided to get out of bed and vote one day. There's a context to understand and that context is that outside pressure and extraordinary events were necessary for it to happen.
Things didn't get better because just that many more people decided to vote and things didn't get worse because people stopped voting. The numbers just don't bear that out. We've been stuck in the band of our modern voter turnout rate since before the New Deal. So if the claim is that Democracy works when everyone votes and the example is the New Deal, then it doesn't support that claim. So if differences in voter turnout can't explain that outcome, you have to look at other factors.
As for how radical it was. Sure, capitalists didn't like it. But fundamentally it left power in the hands of those capitalists. The quote is just providing insight on how the people involved thought/talked about it. The evidence is all the history that followed that. They kept their money, their influence over the political system, and given time, they used that to dismantle even something as reformist as the New Deal.
Well, since I never said that the New Deal just happened out of nowhere, everything you've written is moot.
I said the New Deal was a great place to start. Try dealing with that.
Tell me why we shouldn't have a CCC and a WPA as a start.
Well at this point it seems like half this thread is just people not being clear what they mean or misunderstanding someone else.
I was responding to the assertion that there was some time when most people voted and participated in the system and that time was good because of that. You offered the New Deal as an example of this. I was showing how that didn’t really match up to the voter participation rate.
It’s not like I was trying to say ND programs were bad. Just that they weren’t the product of mass voter mobilization and didn’t change anything fundamental about the relationship between workers, capital, and the state.
That’s all. I’m pushing back against the idea that American democracy itself has somehow fallen from grace from some mythical period of mass democratic participation. That’s just never been what the country was. If you want to get to that point, you have to start by acknowledging that the old system wasn’t what you wanted to preserve. Otherwise you just keep ending up in the same place.
You keep shifting the goalposts, misrepresenting what I said, and refusing to answer questions.
Good-bye.
The question that is an irrelevant tangent from the original discussion? The one that assumed something about my point that wasn't anywhere in the text? What do you even want out of this conversation? You aren't even engaging with the argument.
You haven't answered my question. You provided a suggested solution, but with nothing to back it up in relation to the question. If all you have to say is "The New Deal was good," that isn't pertinent to the discussion unless you can show how it was related to a mass voter movement. Instead of doing that you just started a different argument with an imaginary opponent.
Also for whatever it's worth:
Assuming your question is "Weren't ND agencies good? Do you not want them?" Then I answered that. That was never a point of contention in the argument. You're getting mad at nothing.
The height was when the vast majority of people understood the importance of informed voting, and did so with pride. We've never really been great in any other way, and even back then we weren't all that great because we kept the right to vote from huge swaths of the people, but democracy functions when people vote, and it fails when they don't.
Ok, when was this? I tried looking in to voter turnout rates over time. https://www.electproject.org/national-1789-present
As they say in the article, it's harder to get good estimates of earlier turnout rates, but for the sake of talking about it, lets take for granted that the numbers are in some reasonable ballpark of accuracy.
It looks like turnout tops out at about 80% (presidential elections) of the VEP in the later half of the 19th century. Before this the numbers were even lower than they have been in modern times. This of course was a time when many people could not vote. It was also a period of growing inequality and monopolization. It took 2 major wars, a lot of militant unionizing, and a global financial collapse to end up with the brief period of relative prosperity for specifically white working class men.
Throughout the 20th century though, the numbers pretty consistently dropped to between 50-70% turnout. Throughout a lot of this many people still could not vote, either explicitly or implicitly through Jim Crow laws. Even post-civil rights and voting rights act, prisoners still do not have the right to vote. Considering that we know that the war on drugs was started to pretty specifically target enemies of the state like minorities and hippies, this is a pretty clear attempt to once again implicitly deny certain people the right to vote. So even through multiple slices of the population being eligible to vote over time, we've never really had close to a significant portion of the eligible population voting.
This is also only talking about American citizens. Again, a fundamental tenet of democracy is that it only exercises government power over those who have consented to it. US imperialism, starting with the native Americans and African slaves and only expanding from there, has extended the application of that power to countless people around the world who never got a vote on the US fucking with their country and were often denied the opportunity to participate in their own democracies. Taken from this perspective, the majority of people under US rule/influence have NEVER gotten to participate in the "democratic process."
This is also all before we talk about the ways that the electoral system and government structure was explicitly designed to not allow the popular will to have proportional influence over the government.
The implication of the assertion that "democracy works when people vote" is that the condition of these millions of people who have been systematically denied the right to influence the government that rules over them is their own fault for not voting anyway. It's simply ahistorical. It's as much a call to a mythical glorious past that conservatives engage in.
Rights have never and will never be won through the ballot box so long as the US remains a plutocracy. It has always required people to work outside the system and engage with violence, whether they are doing it or it is being done to them.
This history isn't just some bad stuff that bad people did in the past. They're the events that created the world we live in today. We aren't free of their influence and we haven't even stopped all of them. You can learn from that or you can keep blaming people. You can't have both and still be honest with yourself.
You seem to be under the impression that I think our democracy somehow makes us superior, or that it functions more often than others, when my point is pretty much the opposite: regardless of the governing system, people will not do enough to avoid a corrupt tyrant of a leader from coming into power, which they will then need to literally fight to overcome.
Rights are not earned through voting, but they are lost due to lack of voting, allowing corrupt leaders to roll back the hard-fought advancements. That's what the quote means: the tree of liberty is refreshed with blood. White men own slaves? Fight to free them. Only white men can vote? Fight to achieve voting rights for everyone. Those were the times the tree of liberty was refreshed. We're now seeing these rights called into question because of political leaders that we allowed to be voted in; our rights are slipping due to our insufficient use of the freedoms we fought for, inevitably leading to us needing to fight yet again to refresh them.
If democracy worked unerringly, we'd be more free than ever right now due to the fact that the vast majority of Americans can vote, and while I believe that would be true if everyone did vote, the fact of the matter is that they wont. That allows corrupt leaders to slowly achieve strategic positions in all levels of the government over time, and eventually use their power to bring in the Tyrant mentioned in the quote.
The only people I'm blaming for the regression of our rights and democracy are the tyrants tearing them down. Yes, if we had all voted they never would have gotten the power to do so, but my point has always been that that was never going to happen.
Watch the movie 'Network.'
When it came out it was a cutting edge satire; it's become a quaint and staid docudrama
I watched it recently and it’s shocking how well it’s held up. Aside from the fashion, it feels like it could have been made last year.