US is a plutocracy, not democracy

By Charles Dunaway

Senator Lee, via Twitter, is informing the world that the beacon of democracy that has spent hundreds of billions of dollars and murdered hundreds of thousands of people in order to “promote democracy”, is not itself a democracy and shouldn’t become one. His comment raises two issues for me.  First, what is the US form of government and the form of government it has tried to impose on other nations for the last 75 years?  Second, what is the objective of government?

Democracy isn’t the objective; liberty, peace, and prospefity are. We want the human condition to flourish. Rank democracy can thwart that.

— Mike Lee (@SenMikeLee) October 8, 2020

The meme, “The US is a republic, not a democracy” has been popular among Americans on the far right for decades. They use it to disparage attempts by the majority of citizens to enact programs that they oppose ideologically. In other words, too much democracy would result in them being defeated politically.  

Historically, there’s some truth to the idea. The US revolution was not a revolution of the common people against an oppressive monarch, it was a revolution of the wealthiest landowners and merchants of the colonies. They wanted to be “free” to produce whatever they wanted and sell to whomever they wanted without supervision, restriction or taxation by the British Crown. They established a government that only permitted white male landowners to vote, kept Black people in slavery, and built in a number of restraints to prevent “mob rule” - in other words, attempts by the poorer majority to reap some of the benefits for themselves.

The current regime in Washington is best described as a plutocracy - a government controlled by people of great wealth. The candidates for President and the US Congress in this year’s election will spend $11 billion to finance their campaigns. They did not raise this money from working people, especially not this year, when COVID-19 has caused widespread unemployment and dramatic increases in hunger and homelessness. They got it from billionaires, big corporations and major banks. Those groups are not making donations, they are making “investments”, which most of us would call bribes.

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Senator Lee also has a very narrow view of the role of government. For Libertarians like Lee, the government's role is to promote “free enterprise” by removing all restrictions on corporations so they will have the “freedom” to pollute, poison consumers, bribe officials, and mistreat their workers, all without any interference from the government. The government is just there for the military, police and fire departments, the court system and critical infrastructure (that would be the infrastructure those corporations need to maximize profits). Democracy is definitely a threat to that kind of government.

What Lee fails to acknowledge is that government is the means by which people band together to make their lives better. They demand not only safety and security, but the opportunity to earn a decent living, the ability to house and feed themselves and their families, and access to medical care when they need it. People in democratic nations have the annoying habit of electing governments that provide housing, health care, and food to those in need, and reduce or eliminate extreme poverty. That’s why Mike Lee doesn’t like democracy.

US policy, at least since World War II, has been to overthrow any governments that seek to achieve these ends, whether they are democracies or dictatorships.  If a nation were prosperous, self-sufficient, and able to provide a good life for its poor and working people, that would require them to restrict the “freedom” of US corporations and banks to exploit their resources, place the nation in debt, and impose austerity on the people to pay off the banks. Removing those democratic governments and replacing them with oligarchies and plutocracies is what the US government calls “promoting democracy”.  I’m sure Senator Lee does not see the irony there.

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*Charles Dunaway is an American political commentator in Oregon. He is a retired computer systems consultant who has been producing and hosting a radio program called Wider View for the last 4 years. The program is distributed nationally by the Pacifica Network and is available as a podcast at widerviewradio.podbean.com.  The program focuses on the United States' imperialist role in the world and the political stagnation in the nation that helps maintain that role.

Dunaway recorded this article for Press TV website.

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