I read an article in Vox the other day that pointed out that electoral democracy is relatively new in human history.
It makes a good point. According to the article, the United States is the world’s oldest continuous democracy. If you take the adoption of the Constitution as the starting date for that (1789), the U.S. has been a democracy for about 235 years.
And of course, there were a lot of flaws in U.S. democracy even early on. We started with a society where only white men could vote (in many cases, only white men with property) and it took a civil war when we were less than a hundred years old to change our Constitution sufficiently to expand that vote (and add in some other significant rights, including due process of law and birthright citizenship) to Black men.
Women didn’t get to vote until 1920.
Of course, since Reconstruction – which was supposed to make sure that the formerly enslaved got their rights – was killed twelve years after that war in political compromises with the traitors, Black people in most places didn’t get to vote until the success of the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s. That’s about 60 years ago, for those of you who didn’t live through that time.
It can be argued that the U.S. only approached being a fully functioning democracy in the 1960s. Given that white supremacists and other right-wing extremists have been trying to roll back the rights expanded back then ever since, it’s not hard to see that even in the oldest continuous democracy, the idea that everyone should have a say in who governs is still fragile.
When I look at our current ridiculous political situation that way, I find it easier to cope. Though I must say that even though I left behind the idea of American exceptionalism a long time ago (despite being immersed in it from childhood even in a liberal family), I did tend to believe in the exceptionalism of the changes we made in the second half of the 20th Century.
I thought the victories represented by the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts were more permanent than they’ve turned out to be.
However, democracy in general isn’t really that young. It existed long before the United States. In fact, as the late David Graeber and David Wengrow point out in The Dawn of Everything, many of the ideas that underlie democracy in both the U.S. and Western Europe came from the Indigenous North American culture, particularly that of the Haudenosaunee.
Similar forms of self-government existed in many places. Despite the usual dismissal of earlier cultures, especially non-European ones, human beings have organized their lives in a number of different ways over the thousands of years of our existence. Even the article that got me thinking about this dismissed earlier human history as “nasty, brutish, and short,” but reading Graeber and Wengrow will encourage you to question that.
But still, our modern form of democracy is relatively new and unfortunately more fragile than we have assumed.
Something I have realized of late is that even in a democracy when you elect progressive representatives and get laws passed that make positive changes, you have to stay on top of the representatives and the government employees to make sure those things really get done.
Which is to say, democracy always takes work. Voting is key, but you can’t just vote and expect everything to take care of itself.
In the case of the United States, we have a constitution, but it has some deep flaws that have led to the fissures we’ve seen in our democracy in recent years. We revere the Constitution, but it is perhaps unwise to hold it in so much awe that we don’t work to make some big changes.
To keep our democracy, we need to understand that it is imperfect and that it is vulnerable to attack – and that it is our job to protect and defend it.
That’s a tall order, but it beats the hell out of the divine right of kings.