The Rise and Fall of Liberal Democracy in America
We have been here before
A few weeks ago, I published an article titled The Supreme Court Boils a Frog. It outlines the events and rulings around the Supreme Court that were alarm bells for the loss of our liberal democracy. Which alarms we pretty much ignored.
This time, let’s broaden our view and review how our liberal democracy grew to flourish after we almost lost it in The Gilded Age, and how it has been chipped away at ever since Reagan. I leave out everything that was covered in the Supreme Court article, but they fit right in here too.
Scan this article twice: once with a liberal hat on, and once with a conservative hat on. From a common-working-man/liberal/socialist point of view, Part I is a triumph and Part II is a tragedy. From an oligarch/conservative/fascist point of view, Part I is a tragedy and Part II is a triumph.
Part I: How we almost lost our liberal democracy and fought our way back
We have been here before in United States history. In the Gilded Age at the end of the 19th century (1870–1900), the oligarchs almost scored the victory. John D Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, and J. P. Morgan were the Bill Gates, Elon Musk, and Jeff Bezos of their time.
In fact, they had the victory, but oligopoly inevitably fails. (Kleptocracy and dictatorship, as in Russia today, maybe not so much.) That time it failed in 1929 with The Great Depression (1929–1933). Here’s how liberal democracy reclaimed America.
1902: The great Coal Strike marks the beginning of the rise of the power of the trade unions for collective bargaining and worker’s rights.
1904: President Teddy Roosevelt, The Great Truster-Buster, is elected. He busts down J. P. Morgan’s railroad trust and many other monopolies that were responsible for many oligarch’s fortunes.
1920: The 19th Amendment to the Constitution grants women the right to vote, after decades of struggle by Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and the rest of the suffragettes.
1923: The Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) is introduced into Congress to guarantee equal rights to women. One hundred years later, it is still not yet ratified to this day.
1932: FDR, the second President Roosevelt (and a distant cousin of Teddy), is elected. His “New Deal” institutes the Social Security program and establishes various programs to put people back to work. In addition, FDR strongly supports unions.
1941: America enters World War II. Wartime spending and production finally end The Great Depression once and for all.
1945: World War II ends with a bang — two bangs, actually, Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Waves of returning servicemen take advantage of the GI Bill to get an education, creating the great middle class and the economic prosperity of the 1950s and 1960s.
1957: “President Eisenhower signs the Civil Rights Act of 1957 into law, the first major civil rights legislation since [the failure of] Reconstruction. It allowed federal prosecution of anyone who tried to prevent someone from voting. It also created a commission to investigate voter fraud.” source: history.com
1964: Following a decade of protests, marches, and demonstrations, the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1965 further solidify voting rights and introduce integration via bussing.
1965: President Lyndon Johnson’s “Great Society” program institutes Medicare and Medicaid.
1973: Roe v Wade guarantees the right to access abortion services
Part II: How we are losing our liberal democracy
The oligarchs and corporations continuously fought all of the gains of liberal democracy that we just reviewed. But it was probably the election of President Ronald Reagan in 1980 that marked the beginning of its end.
Reagan declared that it was “Morning in America” while he introduced “trickle-down” economics, which actually hoovers up money from the lower classes to the oligarchs. He busted the Air Traffic Controllers union, firing the striking workers and bringing in scabs. Reagan generally portrayed our government as our enemy.
1916 — : Long before Reagan’s election, the right-wing began creating “think tanks” to promote the conservative agenda. Some of the most famous think tanks are:
- The Brookings Institution (1916)
- The American Enterprise Institute (1938)
- The Heritage Foundation (1973)
- The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC, 1973)
- The Cato Institute (1977)
- The Federalist Society (1982)
- The American Civil Rights Union (1998, not to be confused with — or deliberately to be confused with — the left-wing American Civil Liberties Union or ACLU, founded in 1920)
1971: Much-loved Republican President Nixon declares the fascist and ineffective “War on Drugs” that goes on to ruin so many innocent lives.
1978: Newt Gingrich is elected to Congress, quickly rising to become the House Speaker. Also, the Foreign Intelligence Service Act (FISA) is passed into law; it would later be used for warrantless surveillance of Americans.
1980: President Reagan is elected; it is morning in America. Woo-hoo!
1984: Reagan is re-elected to a second term, which is dominated by the arms-for-hostages Iran-Contra scandal. By the end of the term, the man is in serious dementia, although it is kept secret from the public.
1985: Grover Norquist creates the group Americans for Tax Reform to advocate for tax reduction. Norquist says, “I’m not in favor of abolishing the government. I just want to shrink it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub.” He says it every opportunity he gets.
1987: Bill Gates becomes the first high tech billionaire after Microsoft went public in 1986. Today there are 813 American billionaires. We are expecting to see the first trillionaire soon. Jeff Bezos (Amazon.com) and Elon Musk (Tesla, SpaceX, X [née Twitter] and more) are likely candidates.
1988: Reagan’s vice-president George Bush (Sr.) is elected to the presidency, despite being deeply involved in the Iran-Contra affair. A lawyer named Bill Barr, then Head of the Office of Legal Counsel in the Justice Department, is instrumental in saving Bush’s ass. Bush rewards him with the position of Attorney General of the United States. Barr will pop up again in the following century during the Trump presidency, up to his same old tricks.
1992: The Democratic Party panics after Carter’s single term followed by three consecutive presidential losses; they tack hard to the center (“triangulated” as they said at the time) with Bill Clinton. What is meant by “triangulation” is abandoning a strategy of continued liberal gains in favor of supporting the status quo, i.e., the corporations and oligarchs. Bill Clinton wins the presidency.
1994: Newt Gingrich writes “The Contract with America,” a conservative agenda for shrinking government, cutting taxes for the rich, and “reforming” (i.e., cutting) welfare. Gingrich generally shifts the working relationship between the two political parties from civility and compromise to incivility and demonization, a trend which continues to worsen to this day.
1996: Rupert Murdoch puts Fox News on the air to pander and lie to a conservative audience. It soon becomes the de facto propaganda arm of the Republican party.
1997: Bill Kristol and Robert Kagan start The Project for a New American Century (PNAC), a right-wing education group that advocates for American world domination including bombing the hell out of countries that don’t cooperate with us. Their wet dream is a war with Iran, but they will have to wait for the George W. Bush administration to get it.
1998: Newt Gingrich finds a new way to cause trouble: weaponizing impeachment as a political tool. President Clinton is impeached for lying about getting a blow job in the White House from Monica Lewinsky. The Senate does not convict and expel him. (The Senate never does.) Gingrich resigns the speakership and declines to run for office again after the Republicans take a shellacking in the 1998 mid-term elections.
1999: Two teenagers mass murder 13 people at Columbine High School in Colorado, kicking off a deluge of mass shootings that is still accelerating to this day, while Republicans continue to bow down to the National Rifle Association (NRA) and refuse to pass any meaningful gun control legislation.
2000: President George W. Bush is elected and the United States is promptly hit with the terrorist attack of 9/11. (Apparently W didn’t pay enough attention to the President’s Daily Brief from August 6, 2001 that was titled “Bin Ladin Determined to Strike in US.”) Subsequently, Congress passes and “W” signs the fascist Patriot Act that greatly expands government surveillance powers. (Every tragedy is an opportunity for fascists.) W takes us into two wars based on lies about weapons of mass destruction, starting the trend of “truth is what we want it to be.” PNAC rejoices. The wars are disasters for Afghanistan, Iraq, and W. (And for Tony Blair in the U.K.)
2005: W makes a key objective of his second term to pursue conservatives’ long-time attack on Social Security. W’s intended weapon is try to privatize a large part of it. He fails. Conservatives continue to attack Social Security to this day.
2008: Barak Obama runs for president. The Republican party goes all in on lies and voter intimidation. Barak is such a great orator, he wins anyway, despite the Republican shenanigans and his being a Black man.
2009: The “Tea Party” movement, portrayed as a “grass roots” movement but really Astroturf, arises to advocate for lower taxes, smaller government, and other extreme conservative values. They rally against “Obamacare” and are successful in preventing it from becoming a true universal, publicly funded medical care (or medical insurance) program. The Tea Party also begins winning seats in Congress and helping tilt the Republican party more and more hard right.
2011: The “Arab Spring” spreads through the Middle East, toppling dictatorships in Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Yemen, Syria, and Bahrain. After a brief period of celebration, Egypt and Bahrain revert to authoritarian governments and Syria and Yemen are plunged into endless wars that are still ongoing today.
2012: For President Obama’s second campaign, Republicans decide that, instead of convincing voters to vote for them, they would simply control who is allowed to vote. They weaponize re-districting, purging voting roles, creating hours-long lines for voting in “blue” areas, and so on. Obama wins anyway.
2013: One America News Network (OAN), a Fox News clone but even more conservative, begins airing. A policy study, Democracy and Policy Preferences of Wealthy Americans, shows that the wealthy top 0.1% of Americans are steering public policy, against the preferences of the majority of common voters. We are living in an oligarchy, not a democracy.
2014: Newsmax, a Fox News clone but even more conservative, begins airing. Another policy study, Testing Theories of American Politics, Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens, confirms that we live in an oligarchy, plainly stating:
The central point that emerges from our research is that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while mass-based interest groups and average citizens have little or no independent influence.
2016: Con man, racist, television game show host, and business failure Donald Trump runs for president. Republicans double down on voter suppression, and add accepting foreign (Russian) help and lying via social media. Social media makes a mess of things. Trump wins. He begins trashing the constitution and governmental and institutional norms willy-nilly. He appoints a right-wing, racist Attorney General, Jeff Sessions, who supports Trump’s ultra right-wing policies, like preventing Muslims from entering the country and breaking up families and putting kids in cages to slow immigration and asylum seeking across the southern border.
2017: Trump counsellor Kellyanne Conway uses the term “alternative facts” on Meet the Press, declaring war on truth. Trump, a compulsive liar, promotes an alternate reality where he is America’s savior. His MAGA followers fervently believe it. (MAGA stands for Trump’s campaign slogan, “Make America Great Again.”)
2018 (to pick a year): Republicans decide to throw their full support behind Vladimir Putin and his Russia, America’s historical global rival and enemy since the end of WWII.
2019: Trump appoints Bill Barr as his second Attorney General. Barr, known for tanking the Reagan arms-for-hostages prosecutions, tanks special counsel Robert Mueller’s report that documents Trump’s acceptance of Russian interference in the 2016 election and his subsequent obstruction of justice. These offenses have not been prosecuted to this day. Barr also protects Trump cronies from prosecution and prison, and generally runs the Department of Justice to serve Trump, not justice and the constitution.
2020: Trump begins undermining America’s faith in free and fair elections, well before the election is even held. When Job Biden wins the presidency, Trump begins promulgating “The Big Lie” that the election was rigged and stolen and that he actually won, thereby testing the saying attributed to Nazi Joseph Goebels’, “If you tell a big enough lie and tell it frequently enough, it will be believed.” Turns out it is true.
2021: Trump and his MAGA mob stage a violent insurrection on January 6 to try to prevent election winner Joe Biden from taking office. They fail.
2022: A “Project 25” group begins to plan for another Trump presidency if/when Trump wins the 2024 election. The plan is pretty blatantly to establish a fascist federal government. Really. You can read it right here: Project2025.org. Or here: Media Matters For America. Buh-bye, democracy, we hardly knew ya’.
2023: [not really 2023 specific]: The United States has almost 2 million people in prison, the highest imprisonment rate of any major first-world country, and the sixth highest of all countries. We are one of the only developed nations that still has the death penalty. (Japan and Singapore being the others.) Is it beginning to feel a lot like fascism to you?
2024: The Republican party goes full speed ahead on voting restrictions, lies, racism, Trump-fetishism, social media and AI driven rumors, inuendo, and conspiracy theories, and accepting foreign assistance to do anything except run a free and fair election as they again support Trump — despite his being a convicted criminal (convicted of 34 state felonies and under indictment for 58 more state and federal felonies), and despite being adjudicated a rapist, fraudster, and insurrectionist. What’s not to love? Also, in April, President Biden signs H.R. 7888, a bill that reauthorizes the 1978 FISA law and expands its fascist powers for warrantless surveillance of Americans. Did you notice that?
Part III: Is our liberal democracy doomed?
As stated at the beginning of this article, oligarchies always fail. We live in one now, and it is failing. If the political trends of this century continue, it will fail by turning into fascism. However, if we continue to hold the line, perhaps we can turn the ship of state around once again, and head it back towards a liberal democracy.
The election this November may plunge us into fascism, or it may give us the opportunity to pursue the other fate.
However, please look back at Part I of this article. Notice that it was not just the elections of Teddy Roosevelt and FDR that won back our democracy the first time. It took hard, hazardous work by suffragettes, striking union members, soldiers returning from World War II, and civil rights activists to reestablish our liberal democracy and form “a more perfect Union.”
We’re in pretty bad shape as a nation right now. Besides the political history we reviewed in Part 2, we’ve also got a climate change disaster barreling down on us, driven by industrial capitalism, overpopulation, and natural resource overshoot. Many of us are hurting financially, despite an economy that is booming for the oligarchs. Racism, never really having been defeated, is raising its ugly head again and gaining strength. And we are experiencing the sixth mass extinction of life on earth in our long history.
I don’t believe there is any way to right the ship of state before the whole damn industrial society collapses. (I’m predicting collapse by 2030.) Hi-ho.
