Well, hello, boys and girls and enpals.
It's me,
your plucky and upbeat Professor Johnson here to talk to you about America.
America
is a big, important place, and one of the things
America takes a lot of pride in is its freedom.
See, America has no king or queen.
The people reign supreme.
America is a democracy,
and they even help other countries find their own democracy.
So without further delay,
let's discover what makes America free.
All right, kids, are you ready to learn about the American government?
Yes, OK.
The greatest freest democracy on Earth has many different branches.
You know, the president, he's chosen by all the people coming together and voting.
They do it with the Electoral College.
You see, a long time ago, a compromise was needed to make the country.
one side had a lot of small states, so they preferred a strong Senate.
Their citizens votes would count more than the other states.
They fought against the southern states.
Those states were full of people who wanted their slaves
to count for representation.
That would mean every slaveholder could elect a congressman
with the power of their enslaved workers.
Well, almost for the sake of counting
votes, slaves only counted as three fifths of a person.
The Electoral College was the best of both worlds.
Vast numbers of people
didn't get the vote, but they had their numbers counted anyway.
Small states also got a massive boost to their voting power.
That's why
a vote for president in Wyoming is worth 600 times more than one in California.
The system works great, and the presidency
almost always goes to someone with the most votes,
except in 1824, 1876,
1888, 2000 and 2016 and it looks like things will get worse.
The growing rural urban divide
means that those in cities will find their presidential vote diminishing.
And of course, there are the U.S.
colonies like Puerto Rico and Guam who don't get to vote at all
and election days on a Tuesday, which isn't a holiday.
Polls get really overcrowded, and there's no early voting.
If you want to mail in your ballot.
Well,
the Republicans
are doing a whole lot of work right now to try and stop you from doing that.
Consequently, people of color and the working class
often can't get the opportunity to get to the polls.
That is, if they weren't purged from the voter rolls without their knowledge.
So actually, every aspect of the presidential election
seems to contain as little democracy as possible,
at least as little as it can, while still calling it an election.
But then there are the real protectors of the Constitution,
the people whose decisions uphold the most significant civil
rights legislation these days the Supreme Court.
Yes, nine people
serving for life in an unelected position.
They guarantee that those presidents elected
through dubious means get to shape
human and civil rights for decades.
I don't know about you, but I don't feel comfortable thinking that abortion rights,
interracial marriage and gay marriage all rests on not laws,
but a decision from this body that can be reversed at any time.
And it does seem they're going to be reversing it soon.
six out of nine of the Supreme Court members are conservatives
appointed by president who lost the popular vote.
Isn't that a joy?
But then there's a Senate, a body
the founding fathers explicitly designed to reign in democracy,
whether a state has less than 1,000,000 or several million.
All of them get two senators.
Only a few senators, about a third get elected every cycle.
And the staggered elections
means that a new party or movement won't have an easy time taking it over.
And that's by design.
They saw too much democracy as anarchy and honestly same,
but they thought of that as a bad thing to be avoided at all costs.
The Senate wasn't even an elected body until the 20th century.
Its purpose is to act as a check
and balance on the will of the people.
But America is a republic, not a democracy, right?
Silence.
America never called itself the arsenal of republicanism.
All right.
So two of the three branches of government are not democratic.
Half of the third is an explicit check on democracy.
But at least we got the house and any number of representatives
from local elections and up.
Right?
Well, you'll just have to learn about how America can rig even elections.
But first, these messages.
one man, Ron Doniger, here one mission.
Aliens have arrived on Earth and they want to kidnap the prime minister.
I can do this, but I'll need my partner.
one partner
can Ron Doniger, save the prime minister,
rescue the original Magna Carta and save Britain.
And the. World.
You'll have to see in this summer's blockbuster Ron Doniger out of this world.
High Overlord Gleep Glorp.
Consider yourself.
Donnagered.
Well, that's right, Marmy.
And we're back.
So after that discussion of American Civics,
you might be a little disheartened.
Yes. America's institutions are not only undemocratic, but anti-democratic.
But in practice, the vote is sacred.
So you can't say America isn't a democracy,
because every two years there are elections.
So let me talk about how a country can have elections
but still keep the people they want in power.
And I'll do so with sock puppets.
Well, hello, boys, girls.
My name's Steppy the elephant.
I'm going to tell you today about American history.
You're after the Civil War.
White supremacists in the South wanted to keep black people from voting.
This is despite black people being free and full citizens.
It was clear the law wouldn't let them do it.
They resorted to terrorism.
Oh, but even that didn't work forever.
So Uncle Sam had to get clever.
A straightforward way to keep people from voting is finding
new and novel ways to make people ineligable.
They were already re implementing slavery using the prison system.
So why not use it to keep black people from voting.
The equation is simple,
you use the police to over arrest people of color.
Put them through a legal system that gives them extra harsh sentences.
Then take the right to vote away from people with a criminal record.
It's as easy as that.
Florida kept so many black people from voting it
helped George Bush, win in the 2000 election with fewer votes.
Isn't that wild?
Another trick used to make elections moot
is to have politicians choose their voters.
We call this one gerrymandering.
If you draw the boundaries of election districts,
you see you could do all sorts of funny things.
You can concentrate people who vote for your opposition
in their few districts, then give people who vote for you.
A slight majority in the rest, you can get way
fewer votes but still hold all the power.
This process has become so sophisticated
that experts use advanced software to optimize it.
Why? Golly, the Republicans who use me as their mascot use this little trick
after the 2010 census to rig the house
for themselves in a colossal way .
Given the undemocratic advantage, the Senate that Electoral College
gives rural states they can exist under minority rule for years to come.
And running for political office has a vigorous vetting process
to make sure no one disapproved by the elite can ever get elected.
America keeps only two major political parties.
Both have extreme forms of gatekeeping
to make sure corporate friendly candidates make it through.
Let's take Bernard the Tiger over here.
Come on, Bernard. Hello. Bernard
wants to run for president.
He wants everybody to get access to medicine they need,
as well as a good education, and a raise of the minimum wage.
That's great, Bernard.
But the party doesn't like any of those.
So we're going to have a complex delegate system and a series of primaries.
None of them has any necessity to be democratic.
That's not my words.
They argued that in court, mix friendly journalists,
horse registration requirements, removing polling locations, causing huge lines
and heck, maybe even a few in-person primaries
during the early chaos of a pandemic, just for good measure.
You get a nice brew going and then you can have any leader you want,
even if he's only half alive and maybe an election can take place and you lose.
Even that might not be a problem.
You can always call into question the integrity of the election.
If that doesn't work, you can always agitate your supporters
into an attempted coup of the government, even if that fails.
You can use the media narrative you made to pass many laws
making it nearly impossible for people of the other party to vote, then just sit.
Back and.
Watch either your victory or just dismiss election results forever?
Boy, does that future sound fun?
OK, well, that's all fine and good at home.
But what about abroad?
How do you stop people from other countries voting for leaders
you don't like?
Well, the United States government has.
That. Long figured out.
For decades, the US government has used the CIA
or funded right wing coups of elected governments they don't like.
They often led to regimes of terror that committed mass murder,
and this stuff still goes on today.
It's why you have any clue who Juan Guaido is.
Is there any way we can solve this?
Can we make America in any way democratic?
I dunno.
So what can you do to turn this problem around?
Well, that's complicated.
first, I would say that there are many questions
about how democratic elections are as a concept funneling political action
down to a curated list of people self-selected to be power hungry.
Doesn't seem like the people ruling.
In fact, I wonder if democracy and representative government
are even compatible participating in elections is OK.
It can be an effort to mitigate damage.
But as we saw in the story of Bernard the Tiger,
the amount you can do will always be limited.
Activism is a good option, too.
The problem is, protests planned and approved by the city amounts
to little more than asking your rulers for a better world.
You're just asking really loud.
Nothing that elite interests can't live without will ever be up for grabs
this way.
There's really only one solution at the end of the day.
The people need to rise.