Since the insurrection of January 6 which led to a violent attack on the US Capitol a common refrain has been: look what has happened to the oldest continuous democracy. The fact that the US is not a democracy has been cleverly shrouded in the mists of time and ‘pro-business’ and ‘free-speech’ myth.
Every nation has its founding myths and the US is no exception in this regard. The reality is that it is a nation founded on the genocide of the native population and its wealth built on slavery. Nobody rebels due to a tax on Tea as the Boston Tea Party myth would have us believe.
The union of Scotland and England in 1707 led to the creation of a strong antislavery movement in the new entity. By 1776, the writing was on the wall that slavery was going to be outlawed eventually. That was the real reason for the rebellion the so-called revolution.
The rebels were led by white slave owning landed men. Today in US mythology they are referred to as the founding fathers. Their first attempt at self government, the Articles of Confederation, was an abject failure. So after 12 years in 1788 they came-up with a new document which was simply a work of plagiarism.
They simply copied the British system as it had evolved over a hundred years between the so-called glorious revolution of 1688 and 1788. Whatever were the powers of the monarch, in 1788, they copied for the President, those of the House of Lords for the Senate and the House of Commons for the House of Representatives. Hence the idiotic concept of coequal branches of government was invented. It is the only country where the upper house, the Senate, is more powerful than the lower house.
Between 1688 and 1788 Parliament was trying to wrest power from the monarch and by the end of it had become an equal to it. The process however did not end there and it continued with the monarch reduced to the present status of a powerless titular head of state. The same dynamic was in play between the two houses of parliament with the lords reduced to a powerless revising chamber and all power monopolised by the commons.
The reason why the concept of coequal branches of government is grossly flawed, not to mention its above history, is that what is the purpose of the modern executive in a true democracy? The purpose is to execute the will of the legislature into force. That automatically makes the executive subservient and answerable to the legislature.
Plus they enshrined the concept of slavery in it. To further protect the privileges of the slave-owning states they created the bizarre institution of the electoral college. It took the 16th President under this document, Abraham Lincoln, the mechanism of a civil war to abolish slavery. However, the absurdity of the now redundant electoral college was left untouched.
The fact that they were going from a confederation to a federation led to some other peculiarities. Even elections to federal offices stem from a state prerogative. The system may have worked for 13 states clinging to the eastern seaboard but has turned into a theater of the absurd for a continental entity. The amending procedure is extremely difficult making it nearly impossible to fix problems with the document.
The founders had the wisdom to throw the Articles of Confederation in the dustbin but the succeeding generations have not had the common sense to get rid of a document that has lost its efficacy long ago.
(The writer is an expert on the European studies)
Copyright Business Recorder, 2021