February 10, 2024

The issue of whether the USA is a democracy continues to arise. The simple truth is: No, the USA is not a democracy, not even a representative democracy, although it once was. That needs to change if America is to survive.

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Theoretically, we live in a democracy. Schools then and now keep saying America is a democracy, and our federal constitution and all our state constitutions say we are a democracy. But today, the actual structure of our federal government and of all our state governments violates all those constitutions, so democracy is effectively dead.

Let me explain.

The phrase in the Declaration of Independence about governments deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed affirms men’s right to self-government, implemented via “democracy,” a term that connotes “government by the people.” Taken literally, the term “democracy” implies that the people subject to the government actually govern themselves for their votes decide all the issues of government.

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For this to seem plausible, one must understand that democracy comes in two flavors, usually denominated “direct” and “representative.” A direct democracy is a government in which the people governed actually do decide all the issues of all three branches of government, legislative, executive, and judicial, in a big conclave or some such arrangement (e.g., old-style Vermont town halls). Obviously, this is not feasible where the people governed number in the millions.

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A representative democracy is a government in which the people elect representatives who staff the three branches of government and act on the people’s behalf. The democracy of the United States and of each of the States of the United States is supposed to be a representative democracy.

You might find it interesting to learn that the English Common Law—which (a) governed the 13 colonies and which the colonists valued so much they fought a war against Great Britain to retain because the latter was diminishing those laws and (b) is still the basis for our system of government and law today—is Teutonic in origin for ancient Teutonic people operated under a direct democracy.

Once Julius Caesar successfully conquered Germania by 50 BC and post-Caesar Romans conquered Britain by 88 AD, the Roman historian Cornelius Tacitus wrote his 97-98 AD work Germania. There, he noted that the Germani were the most formidable of all Rome’s opponents and attributed this to the Germani’s intense morality and strong attachment to freedom, of which Tacitus wrote, “The freedom of the Germani is a deadly enemy.” If you’re interested, he described in detail how their direct democracy played out.

In The Outline of History, H.G. Wells tells us that when trouble at home caused the Roman legions to be recalled from Britain to home in 410 AD, the Germani, Jutes, Angles, Saxons, and Danes switched from raiding Britain to settling in Britain, and became the fathers of the English.

Daniel Hannan, in Inventing Freedom: How the English-Speaking Peoples Made the Modern World, further asserts that the Anglo-Saxon political values these Teutonic migrants brought with them to Britain included personal autonomy, rights of contract, property rights, and rule by law, and thus became the headwaters of the English common law.