The United States is not a democracy. The Senate, the Electoral College, the courts, the unaccountable security state and the concentration of power in regulatory agencies staffed by the people they’re supposed to regulate means the political process and the state are resistant to popular pressure. This is only going to get worse. Voting didn’t stop it in 2008 and it won’t stop it now. The scale of mass media, the expense of running a campaign and the fact that neither party has a mass base makes it impossible for the people to control either political party in any meaningful sense.
Once, the electoral left has argued, voting was the only game in town. This was never historically true, but the expansion of the franchise between 1865 and 1965 made it possible for liberals to claim that America was on the road to democracy, as the left secured important gains and democratic advances for tens of millions of Americans. Since the Voting Rights Act, we’ve witnessed the erosion of democratic rights and the construction of institutions that remove political power from the working classes.
In a system where only those favorable to the rich have the resources for a large campaign, the ruling class does not need hammers and firing squads to build a dictatorship. Sometimes the best check on popular power is a limited expression of it.
Still, if voting mattered, they’d take it away, which many Republicans are doing. They are making it impossible for many people to vote using ID laws, address regulations or by closing polling places and purging hundreds of thousands of people from the voter rolls. They started this decades ago: Purging the Florida rolls was key to Bush’s theft of the 2000 election, but as Republican policies grew more hated and their party more despised, the Republicans began a new offensive against the franchise in America. In many ways, it’s too late to stop this. They have won undemocratic majorities in the House for the last eight years, the same in many state houses. The interference in our electoral system isn’t coming from Moscow, but from Sen. Mitch McConnell. All this is necessary because their party’s base -- the racist upper-middle class and the right wing of the rich -- have discarded democracy to protect their class interests. Dictatorship in America is legal and extant.
Voting has hard limits to it, especially as long as both parties serve the interests of the rich, but it can be useful for protecting rights, ratifying some gains or as a test of strength. Voting "yes" on 3 in Massachusetts or voting "yes" on public banking in Los Angeles are important acts to protect and expand what is possible with popular power in America. But these fights will be lost before they even begin without strong, organized movements behind them. We cannot win dignity for workers and oppressed people unless we are willing to confront the fact that our elections are rigged, that both parties are our enemies and that radical systemic change is needed before America can even approach ‘democracy.’
Red Star: The death of democracy
