The USA at 250: Televised, but Whose Revolution Was it?

Behind the brittle, historically contingent, and crumbling facade of liberal democracy stands a nation-state whose settler-colonial DNA is remarkably similar to that of apartheid South Africa

“The first thing I want to say is, mandate?! Mandate, my ass…” It was late 1984 and I was driving away from a conference of the United Democratic Front, plotting strategy for a “revolution [that] would not be televised”, but would (we hoped) put ordinary working people in the driving seat liberate our country from a system of white minority rule. Democracy was our goal. And on that note, the mighty poet Gil Scott-Heron, via my car’s cassette deck, wanted me to understand that the United States was not quite the democracy advertised by its Cold War branding. “It seems as though we’ve been convinced,” he continued, “that 26% of the registered voters — not even 26% of the American people, but 26% of the registered voters — form a mandate, or a landslide…” He was referring to the 1980 election, pointing out that Ronald Reagan’s win was an Electoral College landslide, but reflected the choice of just 1 in 4 registered voters — and, at the time, only 72% of voting-age Americans were registered.

Of course, if you were fighting for liberation anywhere in the Global South, or the Third World as we proudly called it back then, you didn’t need Gil Scott-Heron to tell you that what the U.S. was exporting was anything but freedom and democracy — millions of dead, maimed, tortured and imprisoned bodies strewn across Asia, Africa and Latin America in defense of friendly despots had made that much clear. Cold War logic had even made Washington a key enabler of South Africa’s apartheid regime. And the poet laureate of untelevised revolution (whose father, BTW, became Glasgow Celtic’s first Black footballer in 1951!) was extending the inquiry, inviting us to question, also, the extent to which the U.S. government actually represented the American people.

I was reminded of that moment 26 years later when George W. Bush, who had lost the 2000 US presidential election by more than half a million votes, was declared the winner — after a Supreme Court dominated by judges appointed by his party had stopped the Florida vote count. Did the Democrats seek to stop what was clearly a steal? Nope. Their candidate, Al Gore simply shrugged and conceded, he said, “for the sake of our unity as a people and the strength of our democracy”. Our “democracy” being the system that had made a loser of the candidate chosen by the most voters.

By the time Donald Trump won the presidency after finishing second by a margin of 3 million in 2016, the idea that the winner of the most votes could be the loser of an election had been so normalized for 21^st Century Americans and their media that the term “popular vote” was understood to designate the secondary status of the voters’ overall verdict. Like the audience award at a film festival, always secondary to the verdict of the judges. Just another symptom of a “democracy” whose elite media expected the population to simply accept that not all votes are equal.

As I’ve noted previously on here

… if in any African or Asian country, the candidate who finished second by 3 million votes was declared the winner, Western media and political institutions would deem this to have been a result of cheating. (Yet that’s exactly what happened here in 2016, and in 2000 – though in that year the winner had finished only half a million votes behind the loser.)

Yes, but that’s the Electoral College, say those weaned on the narrative of American “democracy”. But the Electoral College, which literally elects the president, is designed as a restraint on democracy: For example, it gives California one seat for every 709,000 residents, while Wyoming has one for every 193,000 residents, making a single presidential vote in Wyoming three times as powerful as one in California.

Joe Biden won 7 million more votes than Donald Trump in 2020, but he was the winner only because of the 10,000 votes by which he won Arizona’s Electoral College seats, the 11,000 votes that handed him Georgia’s, the 80,000 votes that won him Pennsylvania, and the 20,000 by which he won Wisconsin. Those 120,000 votes made him president; Trump would have won if he’d won those votes, i.e. even if, nationally, he finished 6.9 million votes behind Biden.

American democracy, then, to borrow from Gandhi, would be a good idea…

Do all U.S. citizens have the right and opportunity to cast a vote of equal value? No, they clearly don’t. And not only because of the Electoral College.

The U.S., bizarrely for a modern nation state, has no single national set of voting laws or national election commission; voting laws vary from “state” to “state” (provinces, really, in international terms). And state authorities are able to make it difficult for voters they suspect will vote against them to actually get to the polls to cast their votes. [The U.S. Supreme Court upholds their right to do this as long as their stated motivations are partisan, not racial… Yeah, exactly.]

Republicans have leveraged their state-level majorities to place a thicket of legal and logistical obstacles between the ballot box and poorer Black, brown and indigenous citizens: voter ID laws, a dysfunctional voter registration system, reduced numbers of voting locations, etc. Rolling back the voting rights won by Black people in the bitter civil rights struggles of the 1960s has been a core part of the GOP strategy for years. Another key plank has been taking control of the Supreme Court, which liberals refuse to understand is a partisan political chamber even if it conducts its business in the language of jurisprudence…

And if the Electoral College is a distortion of democracy, the U.S. Senate — the most powerful legislative body, which of course also effectively picks the Supreme Court — is an even more grotesque example. That’s because the U.S. Constitution awards two Senate seats to each state, regardless of population size. Wyoming’s half-million residents pick two Senators, as do California’s 39 million — meaning, of course, that a single vote in Wyoming has the same value as 78 votes in California. The U.S. Senate can, in fact, be controlled with the support of less than 20% of the nationwide vote. Etc. etc.

The morbid symptoms of the USA at 250 — far too many to parse here, and more added every day — are not unconnected from the way power is structured in this society. They’re enabled and fostered by it. And the founding DNA of the U.S. system, which is shares with the apartheid states of Israel and South Africa pre 1994 — settler democracy and independence from its colonial patron — is not coincidental here.

In 2016, Trump won a majority in every demographic slice of the white vote, whether measured by age, income, gender or education level. Even then, of course, his tally remained a minority of the electorate, but “our democracy” did not require that he win the support of the majority of voters to become president. Trump never offered -- nor later even pretended -- to be the President of all Americans; his electoral strategy focused on rallying white voters to deliver him the Electoral College. The political institutions bequeathed by America’s 18^th Century Constitution made that a plausible path to power; they had been built to enable a minority of rich white men to rule while inventing “whiteness” to enlist support beyond their elite circles, and that’s what they did.

Trump had not staged a coup, and it’s a self-soothing liberal delusion to imagine that it was some kind of Russian mind-manipulation of the voters that got him elected; he was and is, again, legitimately the President of the United States, thanks to a Constitutional system whose design enables white minority rule.

Is democracy — as in a system where governments are chosen by elections in which every citizen has the right and ability to cast a vote of equal value — even possible under the rules of America’s 18^th century constitution? Quite possibly not. That was certainly never the intent of its framers, any more so than the South African state created by the Act of Union in 1910 could be said to have intended democratic equality among all those who inhabited its territory.

The U.S. Constitution was written by and for a coterie of rich white settlers freeing themselves from British rule — the community imagined as “We, the people” in the US Declaration of Independence, though, was confined to property-owning white settlers, proclaiming self-government first and foremost in order to continue their rapacious theft of the land of the indigenous nations by defying the British crown’s prohibition on Westward expansion of the settler-colony to seize more native land beyond the Mississippi River. The spirit of independence was unapologetically tied to the expansion of the settler-colonial realm, by an economy still heavily dependent on the industrial-scale brutalization of enslaved Africans. And it gave free rein to the genocide of the native nations that stood in the way of colonial expansion. (Here, I really recommend the work of Gregg Grandin, or for a quick primer, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz’s “Indigenous People’s History of the United States”, which also informed Peck’s excellent film).

Like the settler-democracies of apartheid South Africa and Israel, both also created by the settler population violently shrugging off the supervision of the colonial power under whose auspices they were settled, the USA was created principally as a polity to regulate the interests of the settler population, and rule over those displaced and subordinated by the settler-colonial project (including the white women and unpropertied men also subordinated to the wealthy settler class by and for whom the system was designed).

Like its cousins in the later settler colonies of South Africa and Israel, the “Founding Fathers” created a political system designed by and for settler communities to break from British and create a form of representative government restricted to the settlers themselves as they amassed wealth by brutalizing the millions of Brown and Black people all around them.

And it’s clear that America’s settler-democratic constitution remains the most important weapon in the arsenal of today’s white nationalists, who leverage its many anti-democratic provisions to remake the electoral map in ways likely to cement Republican rule for the foreseeable future without needing to resort to violence to ensure white minority rule.

The idea that South African settler-colonialism might have conceptual relevance to our understanding of the U.S. political system might even be deemed ridiculous by mainstream American liberals, but making such connections is hardly new: Malcolm X did so repeatedly, as did numerous other Black liberation thinkers in the United States. Even the journalistic legend, Edward R. Murrow, in his 1960 excoriation of the treatment of farmworkers in the US, Harvest of Shame, opens with images of Black day laborers in Florida, with Murrow’s voice telling his audience that these images were not, as they might have assumed from the poverty and degradation they captured, from South Africa. His point was to draw a connection between the circumstances of Black life in the American South in 1960 and that under South Africa’s apartheid regime. Support for South Africa’s liberation struggle in the United States in the 1970s and 1980s was driven by an acute awareness of that connection.

Like the United States created by the Founders, apartheid South Africa was a nation-state of laws and elected government, but its democracy was exclusive to the settler community, enabling the ruthless dispossession and exploitation of its Black population, which was policed as if under colonial occupation. America’s European settlers had created a sovereign nation state of laws and representative government free of British imperial rule, with citizenship confined to a settler elite that built its own wealth and power through the violent dispossession and subjugation of indigenous and enslaved African people.

It turns out they even exchanged notes, according to Mahmoud Mamdani, whose research has noted that the official term “reserve” used for proto-Bantustans in South Africa derived from a study mission white officials had undertaken to the USA, to learn from the experience of Native American “reservations”.

Settler democracy in the United States followed a trajectory quite different from South Africa. Decades of struggle by those excluded has forced a formal expansion of the American community of citizens with the attendant political rights to include white women, and Black and brown people. But the country’s transformation from an oligarchic settler state into an inclusive, egalitarian democracy was never completed. Whether the racist terror that ended the promising interlude of post-Civil War Reconstruction, Jim Crow segregation and mass lynching, incarceration and other measures in force for decades in the U.S. South for many decades after the Civil War to ensure white supremacy remained undisturbed — despite democratic rights being formally extended to Black people. The trajectory was different, again, though not fundamentally so or in the often violent urban ghetto segregation in the major cities of the West, Midwest and Northeast over the ensuing century. The crisis created by the urban rebellions of the 1960s, coinciding with the peak of the Cold War which arguably boosted Washington’s incentives to stabilize the home front, resulted in milestone victories in the Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts.

But a long view of American history suggests those gains may yet turn out to have been products of a temporary interlude in which the narrative and even the structures of US governance were determined by the Cold War, and which are being steadily eroded in the post-Cold War era.

Today’s struggles over voting rights remind us that progress towards democratic equality in America was uneven, its promise only partly fulfilled — and that the Republican Party makes no bones about its intention to roll back some of that progress. The apartheid DNA of the US Constitutional system provides them with the tools to do just that. Today, state-level Republican Parties are using Constitutional means to ensure Black and brown citizens are denied the ability to effectively shape the country’s future via electoral participation.

Post-apartheid South Africa had invited its citizens to reimagine the national community based on a new set of institutions reflecting radically transformed structures of power. Has there ever been an equivalent moment in the United States, an effective dismantling of the settler-colonial state and a genuinely democratic reordering of power in a system where Americans are invited to imagine their national community anew, in inclusive and egalitarian terms?

The U.S. system appears to have adapted itself, without an equivalent reckoning to what we saw in South Africa. Instead, we’ve seen a kind of narrative sleight of hand, a pretense that the system was founded on principles of democratic equality, even if some glitches had to be worked out along the way (i.e. slavery, the genocidal wars of conquest against America’s original inhabitants barely get a mention even in the liberal telling). But all that unpleasantness is thankfully behind us, we’re told, and we are invited to annually mark Dr Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday by acts of neighborhood kindness as if the murdered Civil Rights leader had been a kind of harmless Mr. Rogers figure rather than the dangerous revolutionary haunting J. Edgar Hoover’s nights in the 1960s. (The same, btw, has been done with the image of Nelson Mandela in South Africa, now invoked by white elites — who have grown ever richer at the expense of the Black majority in the post-apartheid years — as absolution.) The union forged by the Founders has somehow been “perfected” over the years in continuity with their intentions – hence today’s discomfort over critically evaluating what has been sold as a glorious past in which the U.S. nation state only ever signaled freedom and democracy.

Mainstream liberalism, which has long venerated the very Constitution Republicans are using to buttress white power, wants us to imagine today’s American political drama as an aberration, a case of an established democracy imperiled by an authoritarian turn. But that’s misleading and disarming, and a failure to recognize the expiration of the Cold War-era bipartisan political contract. The post-Cold War Republican Party has reverted to a nationalist identity with diminished interest in proclaiming democracy as the American idea. Its ideologues now insist – not incorrectly – that democracy was never the intention of the framers of America’s 18^th century constitution. They also, clearly, see their own party as America’s only legitimate ruling party, as their actions have made clear through the Clinton, Obama and Biden presidencies.

It’s precisely because of the less-than-democratic nature of the U.S. system itself that a white nationalist party can quite legally and constitutionally, cement its hold on power by suppressing the votes of people of color (as long as it says it’s doing so not because of their “race” or ethnicity, but because they’ll vote against the ruling party!).

U.S. democracy is an unfinished project. The institutions and practices of settler democracy established by the constitution were not designed to create a society where everyone, and every vote, has equal value. They were designed to entrench the power of settler elites. But there’s a dialectic here: While those institutions can be effectively used to block progress towards democracy, they can and have been effectively used, also, as vehicles to pursue democratic equality — when driven by grassroots organizing and struggle outside of the corridors of power. But is the existing electoral system sufficient to complete the democratization of America?

Today, the GOP, likely America’s ruling party for years to come, is moving consciously and rapidly to limit the extent to which the electoral system can be — and has been — used to advance democracy America. The United States of America will never be a true democracy until every citizen is able to cast a vote of equal value in choosing our government. Perhaps the white nationalist backlash represented by today’s GOP can also be read as a sign that today’s equivalent of the settler elites, i.e. the corporate oligarchy, are anxious that too much progress was made towards democracy in the post-World War 2 era?

Whatever the case, the narrative glue of that post World War 2 “bipartisan” elite governing consensus has long-since dissolved, along with the national imaginary that constituted “American” identity to which it was hinged. Today, it is the institutions forged after 1776 that are buttressing an increasingly authoritarian, oligarchic system pursuing and maintaining a society that works for them, at the expense of most.

Yet, the pursuit of genuine democracy in the U.S. remains alive and active in political challenges to that oligarchy. The past is an unfinished story; the future is unwritten.