Can We Fix Our Democracy?

Democracy is a simple concept: People exercise their collective agency to rule themselves so they can ensure their own well-being. Democracy is the opposite of autocracy, serving as a disavowal of monarchs and militarists claiming the right to govern people without their consent. 

Not surprisingly, democracy is a very popular idea. A Pew Research Center survey of people in 24 nations in 2023 revealed that 70% of people support direct democracy, with the percentage rising to 77% support for representative democracy. However, since democracy is designed to equalize power among people, it tends to be a work in progress. Even in functioning democracies, the powerful may subvert democracy and use it to their ends, while those who have less power struggle for their fair share. 

The United States—the world’s second-largest democracy—was once regarded as a shining example of that form of government. But now, people around the world are disappointed in the nation’s approach to democracy. A 2024 Pew Research Center survey of people in 34 nations concluded that only about 21% of those surveyed believe the U.S. offers a good model of democracy for the world, while 40% believe the U.S. used to be a source of inspiration but is no longer. The view from within is hardly better: Most people in the U.S. tend to distrust the government, with only about one-quarter of Americans trusting it at any given time since 2007. 

Their suspicions are justified, as Bastian Herre, a researcher at Our World in Data, explains: “The data suggests that the U.S. is less democratic now than it was a decade ago, even though it remains much more democratic than it was for most of its history.” 

Because of the incredible promise it holds, democracy is fraught with contradictions and often triggers deep dissatisfaction when it doesn’t live up to its ideals. Indeed, democracy is declining all over the world. Herre found that the number of people living in democracies fell from 3.9 billion in 2016 to 2.3 billion in 2023, and that more people are living in countries that are autocratizing. 

To understand why democracies are in decline, it’s worth examining how systems are enacted. The devil is often in the details. In the space between our decision-making and the enactment of those decisions, nefarious and power-hungry actors can hijack processes and sow the seeds of autocracy. 

There are many ways to strengthen democracy amid a rise in authoritarianism. It begins with voters making wise choices: “People can work toward making [the U.S.] more democratic by voting for pro-democracy candidates,” Herre notes. Indeed, we tend to equate democracy with voting—the most tangible way representative democracy is enacted and a critical step in choosing the public servants who make decisions on our behalf. Beyond that, Herre suggests that to make democracy more inclusive, what’s needed is “supporting pro-democracy organizations, and expressing their support for democracy in protests and conversations.” 

Unfortunately, contemporary systems of representative democracy have become popularity contests in which participants are called upon every couple of years to pick between exceedingly narrow choices. In the U.S. especially, the question of who gets to vote—and therefore participate in democracy—has been debated and legislated for centuries. 

Further, there are structural obstacles to voting baked into the U.S. Constitution, which is the definitive document laying out the rules of democracy and within which are embedded those devilish details that determine the responsiveness of the system. Even after adding various amendments to right historical wrongs, the Constitution still references “electors” rather than individual voters when it comes to electing a president, and allows for the undemocratic, racist, and complicated Electoral College system. The Constitution also specifies the undemocratic makeup of the Senate, a powerful body that allows smaller, whiter states to have the same power as larger, more racially diverse ones. 

In other words, as Elie Mystal, justice correspondent for The Nation and author of Allow Me to Retort: A Black Guy’s Guide to the Constitution, told YES! in 2022, the U.S. Constitution is “a flawed document that needs to be perfected in order to achieve a level of fundamental fairness and equality that was … missing from the initial draft of it.” 

He points out that none of the original authors of the Constitution or its amendments were women.“[T]he same goes for LGBTQ communities. The same goes for racial, ethnic, and religious minorities in this country.” 

If U.S. democracy is exclusionary by design, is it even a democracy at all? 

Democracy for Some

The U.S. Constitution was inspired not only by ancient Greek ideas of democracy, but also by formations that had greater physical and temporal proximity to the nation’s modern founders. A 1987 Senate resolution acknowledged how the “original framers of the Constitution … are known to have greatly admired the concepts, principles and government practices of the Six Nations of the Iroquois Confederacy,” which today is referred to as the Haudenosaunee Confederacy. 

“Our ‘Founding Fathers’ based the U.S. Constitution on the Haudenosaunee Law of Peace,” says Fern Naomi Renville, an enrolled member of the Sisseton-Wahpeton Dakota and Omaha nations, and a Seneca-Cayuga storyteller from Minnesota. Renville adds that Benjamin Franklin’s 1791 memoir acknowledges this debt to the Indigenous peoples of the land. 

“At the time when all of the ‘Founding Fathers’ were having conversations, there were Native people at the table who were consulting … [and] giving input to the colonists, who weren’t all getting along, and they were being advised to come together in the way that the Haudenosaunee Tribes had,” Renville says. 

Through their experience, Indigenous advisers showed the power in forming a union of disparate groups and modeled how settler colonialists could do the same to counter the power of the British Crown. However, Renville says some of the differences between the U.S. Constitution and the Haudenosaunee Law of Peace were deliberately designed to preserve power for those who already had it: wealthy white men. 

“When people learn about the actual inspiration for the U.S. Constitution, it changes how we think about inclusion in those rights,” says Renville. “It changes how we might think about the Bill of Rights, which enshrines what are basically Haudenosaunee principles for good governance. … Just learning that might prompt people to do some growing around how we include everyone … men and women, rich and poor.” 

Tribes centered women in their democratic structures, and did not operate as capitalists or enslavers. In contrast, the Constitution’s framers imported European ideas of women’s disenfranchisement, human enslavement, and even landownership and property rights. 

When white women in the U.S. eventually won the right to vote in 1920, they were strongly influenced by Indigenous women who enjoyed political power and decision-making authority over land and food. In 2016, women’s studies historian Sally Roesch Wagner told The Washington Post that early white suffragists such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton “believed women’s liberation was possible because they knew liberated women, women who possessed rights beyond their wildest imagination: Haudenosaunee women.” 

“The Haudenosaunee Law of Peace that the Constitution is based on relies on the power of the clan mothers as the ultimate authority,” says Renville. “That is the one piece that got left out in the application of these ideas on the U.S. Constitution and so that might be a part of why these ideas haven’t been as successfully applied in our country that we have now.” 

For example, the U.S. Constitution does not enshrine reproductive justice or the right to an abortion because, according to Mystal, “the Constitution did not treat women as full people.” 

People of color and especially Black people were also excluded from the writing and passage of the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments to the U.S. Constitution, which ended enslavement, granted citizenship to African Americans, and legalized voting rights for Black men, respectively. And yet, white supremacist forces continued to curb the democratic rights of people of color until the civil rights movement forced passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. 

Calling it “the most important piece of legislation ever passed in American history,” Mystal attributes Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential win to the Voting Rights Act. “Forty years after the civil rights movement, we end up with the first Black president,” he says. 

U.S. democracy has suffered from constant push-and-pull factors, with excluded communities fighting for and winning rights, and reactionary forces working to undo those gains. Mystal laments how, after Obama’s election, the U.S. Supreme Court “eviscerated” the Voting Rights Act in 2013 and spawned a slew of Republican-led efforts to disenfranchise voters of color and dilute the impact of their votes. 

The exclusionary nature of U.S. democracy remains one of its central problems. Today, mass incarceration is seen as a continuation of slavery, with millions of people who are disproportionately Black and Brown forced to work for little to no compensation and nearly entirely excluded from voting. 

History offers many lessons in strengthening democracy: After the U.S. incorporated the poll tax, a pay-to-play patchwork system that required people to pay taxes in order to vote, women, people of color, and low-income people overcame the corruptive power of money. Eventually, Annie E. Harper, a retired domestic worker, successfully challenged the poll tax through the 1966 Harper v. Virginia Board of Elections Supreme Court ruling. 

And yet, the overrepresentation of wealth in politics remains one of the greatest challenges to U.S. democracy. A 2023 survey by the Pew Research Center found that 83% of Republicans and Republican-leaning people in the U.S. and 80% of Democrats and Democratic-leaning people in the U.S. feel that big-money donors and special interest lobbyists “have too much influence on decisions made by members of Congress.” 

What Renville considers “most terrifying” today is “the rulings that recognize corporations as equal to people, so that economic structures have more legal weight than a human being.” 

Democracy is healthiest when there is greatest participation and power sharing, especially among those who have been historically excluded.”

Gerald Horne, who holds the Moores Professorship of History and African American Studies at the University of Houston, agrees money has too much influence in politics. He offers a salient piece of advice to those seeking to strengthen democracy: “You would have to democratize the economy to begin with,” he says. “When you don’t democratize the economy, the malefactors of great wealth—as [Theodore] Roosevelt used to say—are able to use their economic strength to put a thumb on the scale with regard to politics.” A weighing scale is an apt metaphor for who has influence in U.S. democracy: The political power of historically marginalized people has been outweighed by the nefarious power of wealth and capital. 

Labor unions are microcosms of democracy and offer useful examples of how direct democracy via inclusive decision-making can counter the power of money. Horne says in the early part of the 20th century, the American Federation of Labor (AFL) tended to organize skilled workers but not low-wage workers such as secretaries in their quest for labor rights and better wages and benefits. 

In contrast, the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) “was organizing across the board, from top to bottom” in auto plants, Horne adds. “Obviously the CIO model was more democratic than the AFL model.” Ultimately, McCarthyism eroded the CIO, which was then absorbed by the AFL. “We have not learned that much from unions,” says Horne. 

Furthermore, unions are relatively small formations in which direct democracy is a more viable prospect than in nation states. Most of the world’s democracies are representative, which means that people choose leaders to make decisions on their behalf rather than making every decision themselves. In contrast, direct democracies allow people to directly choose policies that govern them. 

Direct Democracies Lead the Way

When it comes to large nations in particular, representative democracy seems more efficient than, say, how a small nation such as Switzerland—one of the world’s only direct democracies—is run. A nation of fewer than 9 million, the Swiss elect seven councilors every four years to carry out the day-to-day functioning of the government and participate in popular votes up to four times a year on specific measures. It is the closest to a direct democracy the world has today. 

At more than 333 million people, the U.S. is the third most populous nation on the planet, behind India and China. It is also the third-largest in size, behind Russia and Canada. By virtue of its sheer population and geographic size, U.S. democracy is complicated. A republic of 50 states and various territories, the federal government shares sovereign power with state governments. It makes little sense for residents of, say, Maryland, to vote on an issue that disproportionately impacts Oregonians. 

About half of all states have some form of Switzerland-like direct democracy, allowing residents to regularly cast votes on ballot measures—a sound approach, at least on paper, to ensuring state-level governments remain responsive to their voters. But there is no direct democracy at the federal level, even for something as simple as choosing the president. 

The Electoral College, where citizens vote for state-level delegates, is arguably one of the biggest tools used to dilute the power of democratic federal representation. Those delegates in turn cast ballots for the president. This is one step removed from representative democracy and could even be considered democracy by unfair proxy. 

The complexity of the Electoral College system becomes most apparent every four years, when adults attempt to explain to the children around them that the path to the White House winds its way through a handful of so-called “swing states.” Watch the face of a young person contort in confusion over the fact that a Michigan ballot is far more consequential than one from California, and try to explain why such a system is allowed to define itself as democratic. 

The fact that the Electoral College makes it possible for a presidential nominee to win office even if they lose the popular vote—which has happened five times in U.S. history, including twice in the past 25 years—has prompted many to call for its abolition. After all, minority rule is a hallmark of autocracy. About two-thirds of all people in the U.S. favor ending the Electoral College and want direct democracy—at least when it comes to choosing the president. 

“We don’t have to get into these complicated arguments about economic democracy and the power of billionaires,” says Horne. “You can just start with the Electoral College. It’s obvious that the Electoral College reflects a belief on the part of the framers of the Constitution that those small percentages of a potential electorate that could vote were not trustworthy and so therefore you needed this intervening force … to ‘correct’ any ‘mistakes’ that voters had made.” 

There are efforts underway to end the Electoral College system, the most promising of which is the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, a state-by-state effort to end the winner-take-all electors system practiced by 48 out of 50 states. Although the Constitution specifies the use of electors, it doesn’t require states to award all electoral votes to the winner of the statewide popular vote. Each state can therefore pass a law switching to proportional apportionment of electors and, as of April 2024, 17 states and the District of Columbia—representing 209 Electoral College votes—have done so. When states representing the majority of electoral votes—270—pass such laws, the Electoral College will effectively become a popular vote. 

Democratizing the Supreme Court

Another obstacle to people’s ability to rule themselves is the increasingly unaccountable U.S. Supreme Court, where only nine people with lifetime terms make decisions affecting hundreds of millions—a dynamic veering uncomfortably close to autocratic rule. 

The Court is prone to financial corruption, with justices having been found to accept lavish gifts from wealthy friends and then rule in their favor. It is also severely exclusionary in terms of race and gender—out of 116 justices since the nation’s founding, only eight have not been white men. Moreover, justices are increasingly setting policy instead of interpreting laws—in effect becoming proxy legislators. 

“One of the reasons why Republicans prefer to do certain things through the Supreme Court is that they can’t actually get them done at the ballot box, because they’re unpopular,” says Mystal, who sees the Supreme Court as one of the biggest counterbalances to U.S. democracy. “People support women’s rights. People, now, support gay rights. Taking those away politically is difficult. That’s why they want the courts to do it.” 

There are numerous ideas around reforming the Supreme Court, including setting term limits for justices—a popular idea—and creating a binding code of conduct. President Joe Biden has backed both these ideas, but so far, none of these efforts appear likely to come to fruition. 

Indigenous Democratic Principles

“I believe that how we treat land is how we treat people,” says Renville. The sentiment captures another major difference between the U.S. form of democracy and the Indigenous democratic principles on which the U.S. Constitution was loosely based: Landownership, which is the root of individual financial accumulation and capitalism, had no place in the Haudenosaunee Great Law of Peace. 

Per Renville, “the recognition of the ‘rights of nature’” is a critical piece of inclusion in the U.S. political system that can strengthen democracy. Humans exist within the context of their environment and consequently thrive when their environment is respected. Modern-day democratic systems tend not to consider the rights of nature. Yet, as Renville asserts, we need to begin incorporating “the right of a river or a forest or a mountain or so forth to exist and to be preserved and protected for the future” into our democratic system, as the Haudenosaunee did. 

There is precedent for such an idea. In 2008, Ecuador became the first nation in the world to vote on a new Constitution that centered the rights of nature and of natural systems to “exist, flourish, and evolve.” Remarkably, the idea originated in the U.S. and was pushed by a grassroots organization from San Francisco called the Pachamama Alliance, and drafted with the help of the Community Environmental Law Defense Fund, which is based in Pennsylvania. Today, the Global Alliance for the Rights of Nature is leading a worldwide effort to incorporate similar clauses in the constitutions of all democracies. 

Indigenous principles centering women and nature offer a pathway toward stronger democracy in the U.S. Renville cites the leadership of Frances Charles, the chairwoman of the Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe in the Northwest U.S. Charles was “a huge part of the force that brought down that Elwha Dam successfully and restored their ancestral beach, and restored the salmon run” so that people could sustain themselves, according to Renville. “That kind of female leadership, I see it as being very connected to the ability to advocate for land and water, and to take care of our lands and people.” After all, care for people and the land is the ultimate measure of success in any democracy. 

Democracy is healthiest when there is greatest participation and power sharing, especially among those who have been historically excluded. Or, as Herre concluded in a 2022 analysis of democracies globally, “People turned previous autocratic tides by advocating relentlessly for governing themselves democratically. We have done it before, and can do it again.”