Can The U.S. Become a Real Democracy? An Optimistic Perspective

By Janet C. Lindeman, PhD

What is the state of our democracy? Can we maintain seperation of church and state? Can we move to the middle and stop putting party over country? An optimistic perspective.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Paper Gold Publishing OLD
• Release date: Jun 21, 2024
• ISBN: 9798227974914

Janet C. Lindeman, PhD

Janet C. Lindeman, PhD Dr. Lindeman worked as a psychologist in private practice in Anchorage, Alaska, for 35 years.  Before that she completed a BA in History at Oberlin College and graduate degrees in Education and Counseling Psychology at Harvard University, the University of Alaska and Washington State University.  She is married and lives in Oregon.  She has published two books: 365 Wise Ways to Happiness and A Divided Nation Can Recover from Shame and Blame. You can reach her at [e-mail].

Book preview

Chapter 1:

Are we still Fighting the Civil War? Have the South, Big Money and Conservative

Christians Colluded to Keep the War Going?

In my opinion, as a psychologist and an amateur historian, the answer to both these questions is Yes. Our leadership was an aristocracy when the Civil War broke out and, after Abraham Lincoln was assassinated, it stayed that way for a long time after the Civil War. Congress and the existing aristocracy in the 19 century were neither willing to actually give the slaves full freedom, nor was it willing to move further toward a democracy. This conflict, between those promoting human adult equality (of voting rights and in law) and those promoting domination by the wealthy, is continuing through our history as a nation. The wealthy’s opposition to full democratic freedom is still strong and threatening the economic survival of our nation to this day.

Mostly what united Americans in the colonies during our Revolution was a desire for freedom and independence, both from the English government and from the Anglican Church, which was then part of the government. They wanted space to make their own way economically and religiously. Although our history books have focused on the Pilgrims and other Puritans, they made up only about a third of the colonists by the time the Constitution was written after the Revolutionary War.

When colonists revolted in 1776, they all wanted independence from English rule, but each colony didn’t want to significantly change its own governance, nor its economy. Each just wanted to have its own rulers and rules, not the English rulers. Nothing was said in the Articles of Confederation nor in the Constitution about slavery, other than counting slaves as the property of the landowners and whites who owned them. It took the Amendments to the Constitution to address human rights. At the time the Constitution was written, men without property, women and people of color were not considered equal people or voting citizens. The Declaration of Independence had said that all men are equal, but at this time women and slaves were considered property under the law. This contradiction was not addressed for over a century. The Civil War attempted to address this contradiction but did not solve it.

The colonies formed a federation to protect their economic and military survival. They were able to come together because of significant external threats and because they had fought in the Revolution against the English together. Other than that, they had many differences. Common folks were not trusted. Their form of government was really an oligarchy. An oligarchy is defined in the dictionary as a form of government in which the power is vested in a few, or in a dominant class or clique; a state so governed; the ruling of few collectively.

Gradually the Constitution was written to attempt to provide a central, federal government, a government capable of national defense, some centralized leadership, and a common currency. But the Constitution was written to give a lot of independence to each former colony which became a state. It was not written to include, as trusted voters, all the diverse people who then lived in the United States.

Only about a third of the early colonists had come to the New World because of their religious beliefs. Most came primarily for economic reasons. Almost all African Americans came as slaves. Many Europeans came as indentured servants who had to work almost a decade to pay off their transportation costs and earn their economic freedom.

The colonial governing powers would not have signed the Constitution if the colonies were not given a lot of independence from the central government. It contained many compromises, out of the necessity to form an early union. One of these was the compromise over slavery.

The original organization of the government was done to bring us together and to protect the wealthy, not all the ordinary people, certainly not the slaves, nor the indentured servants and farm workers, nor the women. The Constitutional Amendments, which confirmed the freedom of the slaves and gave women the vote and the right to own property, took until well after the Civil War. (See Appendix One for a summary of the Amendments.)

The Constitutional Amendments helped our nation to move toward a democracy, but, by themselves, they did not create a real democracy. The people depended on the government to make the laws which were needed to support the intent of the Amendments. Many of these laws have yet to be created. To this day, the one citizen, one vote democratic claim does not exist in this country. We are not a real democracy.  Many younger democracies and the European parliamentary system are really more constitutionally democratic than we are.

The Constitution is a wonderful document that has helped us to pull together for many years, but it is still incomplete. Unfortunately, the existing Supreme Court is too conservative to allow many, if any, changes to the Constitution, even though allowing for amendments was written into it. It will take a large, more united, nationally-organized citizens’ effort to make the U.S. a real democracy. It will take Congress accepting its responsibility to enact laws to support the intent of the Constitutional Amendments. There is a current threat from the Radical Right, which is now organizing state legislatures to rewrite the Constitution to limit its democratic principles more. There are groups in our nation that are willing to weaken our governmental institutions and economically threaten our national survival in order to fulfill their desires for power and for giving tax money to Christian organizations. These groups are now organizing within the Republican Party.

A divided nation was not the intent of our Founding Fathers. They knew that unity was necessary for the nation to survive. Currently, differences between liberal nationalists and illiberal nationalists (See Appendix Two for this difference.) in our country are still limiting the interpretation of our Constitution and dividing our nation.

Our government needs to be attending to all the forces which continue to unravel our union and undermine its movement toward real constitutional democracy. In my opinion, all three branches of government are now woefully failing at this task. Some of the reason for this failure is built into the Constitution’s limitations itself. But much of the failure is due to the neglect of all citizens, who have been ignoring this unraveling and allowing the wealthy and the politically powerful to create a de facto oligarchy, perhaps stronger than it was in the 18th century. It might even be said that our society is becoming a kleptocracy (a society or system ruled by people who use their power to steal their country’s resources.)

We have not been voting for leaders committed to helping our nation to protect individual rights and opportunities. We have not been voting for leaders committed to helping our nation to protect individual rights and opportunities. We have been focused on growing our economy at the expense of individual rights and opportunity. We are a nation of immigrants, and yet we have not been accommodating immigrants in an organized and effective manner. Many Americans are afraid of losing their political dominance as white male Christians. So, they have become afraid of new immigrants, even though we are dependent on them for a thriving economy. If we can pass a new immigration law which most people and both parties support, this would greatly help our need for more unity as a nation, as well as our need for economic progress.

We the People have been allowing the conservative Supreme Court and Congress to make decisions for us, leading to the rich and incorporations ruling our nation. We have supported presidents willing to do the same.

Recently, National Christian populists, and others, have been convinced that staying together as one nation and allowing a reasonable number of immigrants to enter and boost our economy are not necessary for their economic survival. The wealthy have united with these populists as a way of hanging on to their extreme wealth. We all have gradually allowed the rich, corporations and politicized religious groups to start making the laws and to take away the voting power of the average citizen. This is not only decaying and polarizing our democracy, but threatening our economy.

Economics played a huge part in the outbreak of the Civil War. In the southern colonies, the primary source of sustenance was the growing of cotton, which then required many hands to plant and harvest.  The slave trade from Africa provided these hands, so the Southerners supported it. In the northern colonies the climate was not suited to growing cotton, so small farms and various industries supported the economy there, including some cotton processing industries.

Our early settlers coped with immediate survival needs, so they had little time for effective healing of their losses, or attending to federal community-building or healing after the Civil War. Colonists and early immigrants had just left their extended families behind. Many had to learn new languages. Most arrived in poverty or in slavery. Many died in the Civil War.

In the early years there were still few roads connecting the colonies and later the new states. Few people had money enough to travel between the colonies, nor later the states. There was limited medical help or education.  The churches were of many different denominations. It is a miracle the colonists were able to form a Continental Army, defeat their English rulers and eventually draft a national Constitution which created a federation.

In the 17th and 18th centuries, enterprising women were accused of witchcraft and paganism by conservative Christian judges, some of whom are still being quoted by our conservative Supreme Court Justices. Women were still considered property, as were the slaves. The Native Americans were considered savages and often killed on sight by the colonists. It took many Amendments to the original Constitution and hundreds of years to create even the beginning of a nation which honored basic human rights and which wanted to make a democracy out of an oligarchical republic. (See the history of the Amendments in Appendix One.)

There was considerable resistance to the idea in our Declaration of Independence that all men are created equal. There is still resistance. It has been a long time since a new Constitutional Amendment was passed. Some updates are overdue, despite the resistance of our new, conservative Supreme Court. The Radical Right is already planning secretly to call a Constitutional Convention to 1) protect Christian Nationalists, 2) to lessen the rights of the average citizen and 3) to greatly increase the power of state legislatures. Democracy-loving citizens need to unite to prevent this from happening.

In the early years of our country, few people were educated above the sixth grade, if that. Child rearing was very strict.  Child labor was common on farms and in industries. There were many orphanages and indentured youth. Orphan trains brought youth west to earn their keep on ranches. There was little time to acknowledge sadness or loss. Mental health organizations had still not formed. All were expected just to move on and to cope. Grief was mostly suppressed. Domestic violence and child abuse was common. We are in a different situation now. We all need to pay attention, learn about what is going on and vote to promote real democracy, or we will soon suffer from deepening oligarchy.

Then the Civil War started over the right for the southern slave owners to keep their slaves and for new states to come into the Union with the right to own slaves. The northern abolitionists and their freed slaves were pushing for total emancipation of all slaves in the entire nation. Settlers were pushing west, and when their territories wanted to become states, there were disputes in Congress as to whether they would be admitted as slave states or free states. The southern states felt their economic survival threatened by the free states. When the Civil War broke out, Southerners considered it a War of Northern Aggression. They still describe it this way, even though the Southerners actually started the shooting and declared themselves a separate nation of Confederate states. The Northerners considered it a War of Rebellion Against the Union. These separate views, one very suspicious of government and one dedicated to a united, democratic government still divide our country.

The Civil War resulted in massive numbers of deaths on both sides of the conflict and tremendous property loss in the South. The fighting invaded land owners, shop keepers, farmers, and families on both sides of the conflict, but more so in the South.  No one was spared. The white Southerners felt like the Northerners were being imperialistic, like the English had been. They did not think their way of life could survive without their slaves. They wanted to break away from the Northern colonies, so they could keep their slaves.

The end of the Civil War didn’t allow time for careful acknowledgement of losses and of time to grieve and heal on both sides, much less to work toward common goals. President Lincoln was assassinated just as the war was ending. There was a lot of chaos, blame and shame to go around, once the military victory was announced in favor of the North and the Union. Lincoln’s Proclamation Pronouncement freed the slaves, but didn’t change the South’s economy. Much grief was just repressed, which added to the blame and shame and bigotry left after the War.

Leadership was in confusion, and both sides wanted to punish the other side for their losses.  There was little interest among Northerners in the government for helping the South to recover economically from the War. The post-Civil War Southerners, of course, wanted to protect their plantations and their former way of life, even after the slaves were legally freed. Leadership after Lincoln’s death was less capable of bringing harmony to the divisions. A democratic nation respecting equal rights for all, which Lincoln and the Northern abolitionists envisioned, was not what the former slave states envisioned.

At first, during Reconstruction, some educated, emancipated slaves were voted into positions of representative leadership in the federal government.  They were allowed university education if they could find the finances. Some became professionals. But soon the federal government capitulated to Southern politicians and gave in to their philosophy of separate but equal. President Lincoln’s Reconstruction in the South ended. This was aided by President Johnson who was a Southern, white-supremist. The South relapsed into taking the vote away from the former slaves in various ways created by the state legislatures. Ex-slaves were marginalized, and land promised by the federal government to them was taken away. Many were killed. This result was possible with the withdrawal of federal troops from the South.

Of course, southern segregation wasn’t stable. Separate was not equal. (Educational research proved this.) Ex-slaves and their children lost their voting rights due to white terrorist activities. Without the federal government in Southern states protecting the votes of former slaves, the Whites began economically and socially to re-enslave the Blacks. The Klan and other white supremacists groups took over the law, and hundreds of thousands of African-Americans were deprived of property and/or life. This went on for about a hundred years after the Civil War. Resentments did not heal. It took into the mid-20th century before the federal government was challenged enough by the Civil Rights Movement, led by Martin Luther King Jr. and others, to pass the Civil Rights Bill disallowing discrimination in the South, finally. This began to give equal political and economic rights for all races, and even women, who had only recently won their vote.

But, by the latter part of the 20th century, things began to change. Under President Reagan’s Administration leadership, attitudes changed. His many deregulation policies soon began to hollow out the middle class. Anti-trust laws were dropped; mergers and acquisitions swept during the 1980s and 1990s. The earlier ethos of expanding equality ended. Lifting restrictions on banks led to the savings and loan crisis and eventually the Great Recession of 2008; the IRS and other enforcement agencies were starved of funds. As Sarah Chayes (Chap.1, footnote 1) put it in On Corruption in America, measures requiring corporations to show basic respect for consumers, workers, communities and landscapes—not to lie or commit fraud, sell defective merchandise manufactured in dangerous workplaces or companies discharging poisonous waste wherever convenient—were berated as ‘inefficient or burdensome.’

Thomas Ferguson and Joe Roger’s book, Right Turn, (Chap. 1, footnote 2) shows how the majority of Americans didn’t support most of Reagan’s decisions. Reagan’s Economic Recovery Act reduced overall tax