“Under the provisions of Title 2 of the 1950 Internal Security Act also known as the McCarran Act, the resident of the United States of America is still authorized without further approval by congress to determine an event of insurrection within the United States… The president is then authorized to
apprehend and detain each person for whom there is reasonable ground to believe will engage in future acts of sabotage. Persons apprehended shall be given a hearing… and shall then be confined to places of detention.” [Punishment Park, movie released in 1973)
Sound familiar? Like a dress rehearsal for a lot of broken promises. One stunning example is the political and law enforcement response to the January 6, 2021 hijinks at the Capitol when citizens, mostly weaponless and peaceful, protested the result of the 2020 election and attempted to enter the Capitol. That wasn’t how the powers-that-be saw it including Joe Biden set to be sworn in as president on January 20, 2021. Their unanimous reaction: rioters who “held a dagger at the throat of America and American democracy”. When he was finally “crowned,” President Biden (with overwhelming bipartisan support of congress, the media and his rich donors) decided that the events at the Capitol constituted an insurrection. Once what happened at the Capitol had been labeled an insurrection, the FBI and other law enforcement agencies had their marching orders— “to apprehend and detain each person [involved in the insurrection]
This can only be construed as an assault on the constitutional protections embodied in the Bill of Rights particularly the first amendment — “Congress shall make no law …abridging the freedom of speech or of the press or the right of the people to assemble peacefully” using national security as the excuse (justification). Don’t think almost every president hasn’t tried it, some more successfully than others going all the way back to 1798 and John Adams, second president of the U.S. A mere seven years after the Bill of Rights containing the first amendment was passed, he signed the Sedition Act into law making it a crime for American citizens to “print, utter, or publish…any false, scandalous, and malicious writing” about the government. Maybe presidential dementia is inherited. After that it was off to the races as insults to the civil rights of Americans became the sport of kings, or in this case, U.S. presidents.
Which brings us to two fundamental questions: What is a democracy? Does the U.S. qualify as one? According to Merriam Webster, democracy is a “government by the people… in which the supreme power is vested in the people and exercised by them directly or indirectly through a system of representation usually involving periodically held free elections.” How about the United States? Sure it has all the trappings of a real democracy, a constitution —“We the people of the United States in order to form a more perfect union… and Bill of Rights (Amendments to the Constitution).
The trappings of democracy. Every two years there is a national election for congress, every four years a presidential election. But that troublesome phrase, “supreme power is vested in the people” doesn’t reflect the way things work in the U.S. Unless you are one of the people who are major donors of either party, your opinions are only taken seriously every four years when both parties are trolling for votes. In a poll taken last year [Associated Press—Norc Center for Public Affairs Research) in a strident rejection of what most U.S. lawmakers call the finest democratic republic in the world, the majority of U.S. adults agreed that the laws and policies set forth by what passes for the peoples’ representatives, including the president, are out of step with what most Americans want. While 71% of Americans believe that laws should truly represent the will of the people, less than half (48%) think they do. If it’s not for the voters who elected them, in whose interests are American laws being made? One-third of Americans believe that politicians march to the tune of their donors (lobbyists and interest groups) while only 10% believe that peoples’ needs and wants drive lawmaking in America.
Whether America ever was a democracy is debatable but since 1945 America has definitely gone in a different direction. Throwing off the façade of democracy to reveal its neo-colonial imperial core, the U.S. got right to work establishing its bona fides as the world’s hegemon, lavishing billions on its military industrial complex (remember Eisenhower’s warning) to build a military colossus. With virtually no competitors, it didn’t take long to become the world’s sole superpower, financially, economically, even politically. Not just a garden variety empire but the self-described mightiest empire in world history, sitting astride a unipolar world.
U.S. politicians keep spinning the tale of America’s world class democracy but the facts on the ground tell a different story. Income and wealth inequality are higher in the United States than in any other eveloped country, and they’re rising. Twenty-six million Americans do not have health insurance, the number one cause of bankruptcy in the U.S. is medical debt, close to 700,000 Americans are homeless every night, more than 13 million children experienced hunger in 2022, 40% of Americans cannot afford a $400 emergency and 11.5% of Americans live below the poverty line. Does this look like democracy, “a government by and for the people,” to you?
For decades the U.S. has marched to the beat of the Star-Spangled Banner, possessing the
world’s reserve currency, maintaining 800+ bases all over the world, its defense budget far
outstripping any other country, obsessed with spending trillions on national security and
defense. Enriching the military industrial complex was a side benefit but for their “generous” BFFs a welcome one. Reveling in its empire status, the U.S. made its living by overthrowing other countries and promoting endless wars (most of which it lost)—Korea in the 50s, Vietnam in the sixties and seventies, Grenada and Panama in the eighties, Iraq in the nineties and then again in the 2000s along with Afghanistan, Libya, Syria and Yemen, and as an accessory to genocide in Palestine.
What is it about an empire that pairing it with democracy is an oxymoron? An empire has to rely on its wealthy benefactors to stay in power. The price of their fealty involves a dust up with Americans and their civil rights. The whole world watched as American college students peacefully protested the rape of Gaza. The answer to what was called “insubordination” was horrific. Students, and professors who went to their aid, were pummeled, arrested, in the case of students, not allowed to graduate. Constitutional guarantees of free speech and assembly and right to protest suspended. The excuse is always the same. National security in wartime. Since the U.S. is always at war, fomenting one or assisting another country who is at war (think Israel and Ukraine) that pretty much wipes out the Bill of Rights.
There’s another way an empire can keep its people under control — make laws. Here are two examples: In 2023, the government wanted to ban Tik Tok, an immensely popular Chinese-owned social media company that one-third of Americans watch. Popularity of that magnitude raised the empire’s blood pressure. It accused Tik Tok of being in cahoots with the Chinese Communist Party, providing it with access to the user data of millions of Americans. As usual, no evidence existed to support this absurd allegation outside of the nationality of Tik Tok’s owners — Chinese. You can guess what happened. A number of Congressional boneheads introduced the Restrict Act requiring the creation of “procedures to identify, deter, disrupt, prevent, prohibit, and mitigate transactions involving information and communications technology products in which any foreign adversary has any interest and poses undue or unacceptable risk to national security.” A bill specially designed with Tik Tok in the cross hairs. If it passes the senate, Tik Tok must either sell its U.S. franchise to an American company or get outlawed.
The national security state bared Its teeth again in 2024 when it was challenged by young American college students peacefully protesting U.S. complicity in Israel’s genocide of the Palestinians. It worked once, why not again? The Antisemitism Awareness Act was passed by the dim bulbs in the House on May 2, by a vote of 320-91. To be sure most congress people were not so much inspired by the cause as by the boatloads of money AIPAC (main Israeli lobby) handed out in advance of the vote.
A hegemon no longer in a world that is multipolar, the U.S. has gone from “America at this moment stands at the summit of the world” [Winston Churchill, Iron Curtain speech 1945] to a declining empire that “can neither see others for who and what they are nor hear what they have to say. [2024 Patrick Lawrence, journalist and author]
