My argument is that the United States, or its forerunner colonies, was never a democracy nor can it become one for this reason: if democracy is a “government by the people,” where sovereign power is vested in “the people” who exercise power directly or by elected official,” that system of governance requires rational people and most of the 330 million people in the United States are irrational, including their elected officials. By rational, I mean a person or people able to think clearly, sensibly, and logically. The implication is that it doesn’t matter who becomes the president, nor which party is in power, for there’s a feedback loop where incoming regimes usually do their best to eviscerate the body of work belonging to the previous administration, regardless if that some of that work benefits “the people.”
Donald Trump
Voting as a Tool for What in 2020?
EssaysCommentAs the U.S. presidential election day approaches on Tuesday, November 3, there is the idea the (f)act of voting is a tool, but we need to ask for what? Voting presents us—or is presented to us—as a quintessential right, safeguarded by the blood of fallen troops and shrouded in mythos of liberty and justice for all… whom matter. Whether we accept or reject this presentation, we must admit voting as a performative act or a tool through which to direct action needs to be framed in history. “The great force of history,” James Baldwin reminds us, “comes from the fact that we carry it within us,” and that “history is literally present in all that we do.” But what has been carried into the present under the guise of voting and, through voting, what do we keep ever-present? We start where history nudges us to look—ancient Rome. The socio-political and economic structures regulating U.S. society, and around a globe molested by western European violence, are plagiarized forms of Roman law and institutions. Their story is a mirror to us.