ON DEMOCRACY
By Jack F. Matlock, Jr.
Newspaper headlines and television pundits are screaming that Donald
Trump’s election is a threat to “our democracy.” A strange charge following an
election when a clear majority of voters chose the winner. Isn’t that consistent
with the very definition of “democracy”?
That does not mean that another Trump turn as president is a good thing.
Given what he had promised to do, his presidency is likely to subject our
constitutional order to severe testing. The fact is, the United States is not a
democracy. That word does not occur in any of our foundation documents. It is
not in the Declaration of Independence, or in the Constitution, or in the pledge of
allegiance (“to the flag of the United States of America and the republic for which
it stands,”) or in the oath of office every federal official takes.
The United States is a republic which at present is controlled by an
oligarchy. It is also becoming more authoritarian. The separation of powers
among the three branches of government, essential to avoid autocracy, is deeply
eroded, To cite two of many relevant examples:
Congress has given the president the permission to make war without a
formal declaration, and to impose sanctions on foreign governments and
citizens for behavior not relevant to U.S. security or well being.
The supreme court has proclaimed the president partially immune from
prosecution for violation of laws he is sworn to uphold.
To point out that the United States is not legally or constitutionally a
democracy is not just a quibble over dictionary definitions. The United States
government—not the American people--has organized much of its foreign policy
on the presumption that creation of “democracy” elsewhere is necessary for
American security. Successive presidents, from Clinton to Bush, to Obama, to
Biden, set the United States up as the sole judge of what is a democracy and what
is not and reserved to the United States the right to use military force and
economic sanctions to “defend democracy.” Since the end of the Cold War both
Republican and Democratic presidents have embraced this fundamentally flawed
assumption.
If democracy is, as Abraham Lincoln specified, “government of the people,
for the people, by the people,” how can a foreign government create it for another
country? Attempts to interfere in the politics of foreign countries will normally
backfire because those “democratic forces” we try to support will be regarded as
instruments of a foreign power.
In this 21 st century the United States fought a war in Afghanistan for more
than twenty years, causing the death of well over 100,00 people, then left the
country with a more oppressive government than it had when the U.S. invaded.
The United Sates attacked Iraq on specious grounds (that it had retained nuclear
and biological weapons), removed its entire government on the assumption that all
that is required for “democracy” is elections. Yes, elections were held, but nearly
5,000 Americans lost their life; thousands more suffered serious injury, hundreds
of thousands Iraqis were killed and the Islamic fundamentalist ISIS suddenly rose
to occupy much of Iraq and Syria. Today Iraq is more friendly to Iran than to the
United States.
Currently the United States is feeding—in fact enabling--two horribly
destructive wars in the name of “defending democracy” when none of the
belligerents we are defending meet the most fundamental requirements of
democracy.
Ukraine is one of the least democratic countries in the world today. The
current government resulted from a coup d’etat in 2014 that removed an elected
president, received votes from only a portion of the territory claimed and has
suspended scheduled elections. The Russian government had reason to suspect
that the United States engineered the coup that brought the current government
into power. How would the United States react to a more powerful foreign
government forming an anti-American government in Mexico or Canada? Have
we forgotten that President Woodrow Wilson took us into the first world war when
he learned that Germany was trying to arrange a military alliance with Mexico?
The other site of extreme violence supported by the United States in the
name of “supporting democracy” is in the Middle East. The U.S. is supplying the
weapons for Israel to commit genocide in Gaza and to bomb large areas of
Lebanon. Yet Israel illegally occupies the Palestinian territory on the West Bank
of the Jordan river, has for decades kept the Palestinian residents of the Gaza strip
locked in an outdoor prison. The Netanyahu government has violated key
provisions of virtually every United Nations resolution that legitimized the
creation of the Israeli state in the first place. The Israeli government has
consistently followed policies the United States opposed, yet the Biden
administration has been enabling crimes against humanity in the name of
supporting “democracy.”
Should we aspire to democracy at home in the United States? Well, if the
latest election was an exercise in democracy—and who can doubt that it was—I’ll
take instead the republic of limited powers our founders created. That republic,
whose basic principles have been violated by both our dominant political parties,
is what is threatened in America today.
Chicago, Illinois
November 9, 2024