The Racket and the Answer

THE RACKET AND THE ANSWER

The Representative System and the Democratic Alternative

Ted Aranda

Ph.D., University of Illinois at Chicago

version 1: original

democracyfortheUSA.org

Preface

Can we talk? There will be no pulling of punches in this book. The stakes are far too high: we cannot afford to indulge in comfortable delusions.

The American system of government is a racket. You, dear reader, are being played. This racket, however, is a venerable one, and it will not go down easily. This book is meant to elucidate the historical underpinnings of the System and to reveal its true nature as clearly as possible—and to point us in the direction of our salvation. May we succeed in making the transition.

In essentials my critique applies to all nations with a presidential or a parliamentary political system. The historical study, however, is specifically of England and the U.S.A., while the analysis of contemporary politics is confined to the latter.

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I would like to thank the many scholars upon whose works this study is based, including all those listed in the Bibliography. Those whose books I found especially useful will be evident from the text. For their invaluable insights, corrections, and guidance in the production of this treatise, special gratitude is due the members of my dissertation committee at the University of Illinois at Chicago: Leo Schelbert, James Sack, Greg Anderson, Dan Smith, and Robert Johnston.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Preface 2

INTRODUCTION 7

PART ONE: ATHENS 12

I. THE ATHENIAN DEMOCRACY 12

A. Democracy and Slavery 12

1. Context 12

2. Slavery in Athens 14

3. Slaves or workers? 15

B. The Athenian Democracy: Institutions 17

C. The Athenian Democracy in Action 21

1. The Megarian debate 22

2. The Mytilenian debate 23

3. The Sicilian expedition 23

4. The Arginusae generals 26

5. The trial and execution of Socrates 28

6. Athens and Philip 31

D. The Ancients on Democracy 32

1. Description 32

2. Criticism: Plato and Aristotle 36

a. Plato 36

i. Phaedo 37

ii. Republic 38

iii. Gorgias 40

b. Aristotle 41

3. Defense: Protagoras 46

a. Protagoras 47

b. Theaetetus 48

E. Modern Analyses 52

PART TWO: ENGLAND 59

II. KING VS. NOBILITY 59

A. The Norman Conquest 60

B. King John and Magna Carta 62

C. Henry III and the Revolution of 1258 67

1. The problem is monarchy 67

2. The minority 69

3. Personal rule to 1258 70

4. The Revolution of 1258 72

D. Parliament vs. King 79

1. Edward I and the development of Parliament 79

2. Edward II 82

3. Edward III 83

4. Richard II 84

5. The Lancastrians: Henry IV, Henry V, Henry VI 86

E. Failure of the System: The Wars of the Roses 87

1. Analysis 88

F. The Resurgence of Monarchy 89

1. Edward IV and Richard III 89

2. Henry VII 90

III. MONARCH VS. REFORMATION 92

A. Medieval Religion and the Early Reformation 93

1. The medieval Church 93

2. Wyclif, the Lollards, and the pre-Reformation Church 94

3. The new reformers 97

4. The Henrician reformation 98

5. Edwardian progress and Marian reaction 100

6. The Marian exile and the making of revolutionaries 103

7. The Puritan psyche 108

B. Elizabeth 110

1. The Elizabethan Settlement 110

2. Parliamentary freedom of speech 113

3. The Puritan Presbyterian movement 116

4. Archbishop Grindal and the prophesyings 118

5. Puritanism stymied 121

C. James 124

1. James in Scotland 124

2. The divine right of kings 125

3. James meets the English Parliament 129

4. The outbreak of the Thirty Years War 131

5. Arminianism 135

IV. REVOLUTION I 138

A. Charles I 138

1. The Caroline counter-reformation 138

2. The Scots war 142

3. The Long Parliament 143

4. The Civil War 146

B. Revolution 148

C. The Levellers 158

1. The Leveller program 158

2. Natural law and "reserves" 166

3. Representation 171

D. The Interregnum 173

V. REVOLUTION II 183

A. The International Context: Louis XIV of France 184

1. Background 185

2. Absolutist rule 185

3. Protestant persecution 188

B. Restoration to Glorious Revolution 189

1. 1660-1670 189

2. 1670-1678 191

3. 1678-1681 192

4. 1681-1688 194

C. The 1689 Settlement 196

1. The Bill of Rights 196

2. War and finance 198

D. The Political Ideology of John Locke and the Whigs 199

1. Divine right 199

2. Natural law and property 201

3. Natural law and elite rule (vs. monarchy) 204

4. Natural law and parliamentary power 206

E. The Alternative Political Philosophy of Thomas Hobbes 209

1. Background 209

2. The state of nature and natural law 209

3. The nature of man and the state 211

PART THREE: U.S.A 215

VI. THE RADICAL PROGRESSIVE REFORMERS 215

A. The Radical Challenge 216

1. Populists and Progressives 216

2. The Populist program 217

B. The Trust 220

1. Standard Oil 220

2. The Seven Sisters 222

C. Early Reformers 223

1. Henry George 223

2. Edward Bellamy 226

D. Democratic Reformers 229

1. Henry Demarest Lloyd 229

2. Frederic Howe 234

3. William U'Ren 237

E. Representative Government vs. Democracy 241

F. The Initiative and Referendum vs. Democracy 244

CONCLUSION 247

APPENDICES 249

Appendix A: A Modern Democracy 249

Appendix B: The Athenian Revolution 251

Appendix C: War and Empire at Athens 256

Appendix D: Magna Carta 268

Appendix E: The Song of Lewes 271

Appendix F: William III's Mode of Governance 277

Appendix G: The Literature 280

Appendix H: Rogue Economics 287

BIBLIOGRAPHY 288

INTRODUCTION

From its founding until today the United States of America has been governed not by the people but by a tiny fraction of the people: by those who occupy the offices of government on behalf of the unacknowledged ruling class. These persons are, as former president George W. Bush correctly stated, albeit with reference to himself alone, "the Deciders." We, the general citizenry, are mere spectators and occasional cheerleaders in a regime of pervasive, institutionalized civic powerlessness and passivity (not apathy), our votes constituting not policy directives but blank-check grants of power. Countless things big and small are done in our name by our national and local governments about which we have little say and no ultimate control. Without question ordinary Americans are not the masters of the game being played.

In a word, "we the people" do not rule. The plain fact, the truth to which, however, official ideology and orthodox opinion are completely blind, is that we are not a democracy and we never have been. Indeed, the conventional characterization of the U.S. and other Western nations as democracies is nothing less than a monstrous lie and a ludicrous sham. The modern representative political system is a type of oligarchy, not democracy.

Who rules? This is the most fundamental question in politics. It is not about particular governmental policies or specific political issues. It is about the formal structure of societal power and control—i.e. the political system and the sovereignty that it institutionalizes. In the United States the immediate rulers are the 545 officials of our national governmental bodies (1 president + 100 senators + 435 representatives + 9 supreme court justices), while the proximate rulers—the ruling class—are the rich and powerful whom these officials for the most part represent and serve. This extreme concentration of power in the hands of a relatively small number of individuals is no aberration, no temporary distortion of an otherwise popular order. Rather it is the very essence of the modern representative system, replicated at lower levels of government through governors and state legislatures and mayors and city councils. And a central, intrinsic, and perfectly natural feature of such a political system is that the major governmental policies devised by its officials advance first and foremost the interests of society's elite, only secondarily—in fact very often directly contrary to and at the expense of—those of the vast majority of the people.

This of course does not mean that non-elite Americans have no influence at all on their governors or on the policies that the latter choose to implement. Not only can we petition our elected officials but we can also periodically replace them with others. Nonetheless they are still the rulers and we are still the ruled. We can plead with our elected officials to do as we desire but they are never under any compulsion to do so. We do not command or instruct them, and they are free to ignore us utterly if they so choose—which they commonly do. Therefore, although like children in relation to their parents we occasionally manage to get our way after endless nagging and begging, it is the politicians' will, not ours, that generally predominates in the political arena: they, not we, are the governors of the community.

In any event, only minimally and marginally do true progressives—the only breed of politician we might plausibly expect to pursue and safeguard the people's interests—participate, much less succeed, in the elite-managed electoral dog and pony show. Presidents especially, whatever their origins or their outward personas, cannot by any stretch of the imagination be thought veritably to represent common folk. By the time they attain the highest office in the land they have long since become bona fide members as well as prime agents of the power elite, and it is in this capacity that they are ordained by the plutocracy to occupy their exalted positions. It is simply not their function to be the people's champion, and they never truly are. The country's latest president, Barack Obama, despite the mildly populist image he donned during his campaign, is by no means an exception to this rule—as becomes more apparent and undeniable each succeeding day of his term. In fact almost all elected officials at the upper reaches of government, like the rest of the elite, share fairly similar conservative positions on core issues such as wealth distribution and imperialism, their alluring rhetoric and their solemn promises to the people notwithstanding. None of this is avoidable happenstance. Rather it is the inescapable reality stemming directly from the oligarchic nature of the representative system established by the U.S. Constitution, for when a few persons are selected in extravagant, lavishly funded popularity contests and raised above the masses as their so-called leaders, it is certain that most of them will be of relatively high social status and of an exceptionally ambitious or venal personality type, that they will form a self-promoting privileged club, and that they will therefore be neither representative of the people at large nor particularly solicitous of their welfare. (It is no coincidence that most congressmen, unlike most people, are extremely wealthy.)

Yet modern political activists systematically refrain from confronting or attacking our form of government as such, preferring instead to involve themselves in agitational campaigns around particular policy areas (e.g. anti-war, labor rights, environmentalism). Such activism, employing various means from lobbying and petitioning to protest-marching and engaging in civil disobedience, is no doubt useful for the purpose of educating the public on the issues of the day; it is also not without concrete positive effects, occasionally monumental. But, taken as a whole, it manifestly does not amount to a derailing of the corporate machine or the effectuation of a serious break in the pro-ruling-class workings of the established political system. In other words, it simply is not radical, since it leaves the larger governmental edifice unscathed and completely intact. At the end of the day a president is still sitting in the Oval Office, senators and "representatives" are still sitting in their respective chambers in Congress, justices are still sitting in the Supreme Court, and mayors are still sitting in their City Hall headquarters, all engaged, unencumbered by popular oversight, in crafting policies, making laws, and fashioning budgets out of astronomical sums of money in the day-to-day business of real governance. It is in these drab and quiet rooms, not in the colorful and volatile "street," that constant, methodical, proactive, and enduring power lies. It is the very existence of these commanding offices that condemns the people, activists included, to a reactive, after-the-fact, blunt-instrument, scattershot mode of politics at best, and a state of rank impotence at worst.

If the point of our activism is to have us be herded to the cliff's edge a little less quickly and then dropped only 500 feet instead of 1000 feet, with smiles on our faces rather than frowns (since we've done "something"), then it is quite adequate in its present form. But if our goal is to march toward the inland garden rather than the cliff, then this kind of activism is entirely insufficient.

The lesson we must finally learn is that, important as they certainly are, the issues themselves—whether the facts about them, questions concerning their absolute right or wrong, or even the specific measures required for their solution—should not be our primary focus. The enormity of our general problems (such as extreme wealth concentration resulting in the relative impoverishment of the vast majority of the population) and the vileness of our government's concrete actions (such as handing over trillions of dollars in public funds to predatory financial corporations)—to touch on just one of many critical policy areas, namely economics—are such that most people are either already aware and concerned about these things or could easily be made so. Moreover there is no shortage of good ideas about how to rectify them. To make good use of a hackneyed phrase: in most cases it's not rocket science (e.g. adequately and effectively tax the rich). No, the principal impediment to a betterment of the human condition and an improvement in our collective behavior is not any lack of information, understanding, or vigilance on the part of the people. The great stumbling block that Americans—laborers, professionals, and intellectuals alike—face in the realization of their long-held civic aspirations is that they generally do not possess the power to act in a decisive and efficacious way on the concerns that their knowledge generates. In short, the great underlying cause of the American political pathology is that we, ordinary Americans, do not control this nation and we never have. Our society's large-scale failings are thus quintessentially systemic and not, in the final analysis, attributable to the intellectual shortcomings of individuals or groups per se.

Progressives must look beyond the picture and focus on the frame. The picture, composed of particular issues and personalities, is a constantly changing cacophony. Specific issues are manifold. Individual presidents and other politicians come and go, with Republicans and Democrats regularly alternating in office in a grandiose game of political musical chairs. But the frame—the stage setup upon which the interchangeable theater props are exhibited and the various actors are made to perform—is constant. The framework of a polity is the structure of power that defines what the citizenry can do directly and effectively through the established system, which in the current dispensation is literally nothing. Tinkering with this framework through electoral reform (e.g. term limits, campaign finance reform), as some advocate, is both pitifully inadequate and inherently impractical. Who is to pass the necessary legislation? The politicians themselves. It's like asking a lion to declaw itself or a dog to bite the hand that feeds it. No, this feeble type of reform will not do. It is time for us to step back, recognize the overarching problem, and do what needs to be done to move forward. The representative system, by conferring on a certain few individuals authority over the rest of us, is thoroughly undemocratic in its core design and therefore must be replaced entirely. It is time for us to start governing ourselves.

And the first step in this revolutionary process is to examine the current political system in historical context. This entails asking two large questions:

(1) If we are not a democracy, then is there a historical example of such a polity? Yes. The prototypical democracy was ancient Athens. And this state can easily, with the obvious, necessary modifications, serve as a model for a modern democracy. An exposition of the Athenian democracy is therefore the first object of this study.

(2) Again, if we are not a democracy, then how did we arrive at our present condition of oligarchy? The political system now prevailing in the Western world developed out of the medieval monarchy. Specifically, the political history of England from the Norman Conquest to the seventeenth century consists in the broadest view of a continuous struggle by the nation's collective elite—first known as the baronage, then as the parliamentary class—to wrest sovereign power from the king. This very long, hard-fought, and ultimately successful struggle achieved the historic triumph of oligarchy over monarchy. It illustrates the kind of constitutional upheaval that it takes to bring about truly fundamental political change. And just as the effort by seventeenth-century Englishmen to realize religious aims brought about a consciousness of the broader "slavery" under which they lived and an awareness of the necessity of dramatic constitutional transformation, activists of today who focus on particular issues might finally come to see that if they really want to remodel present society they will have to adopt a much more comprehensive political program: the replacement of oligarchy by democracy. In the United States this will involve replacing the U.S. Constitution with a completely different frame of government. The radical reformers of the American Progressive Era made a start in this direction, and for this reason a consideration of their movement is most educational.

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The scope of this book is clearly audacious if not outrageous. When I was in graduate school and would be asked what my dissertation was about I would reply, only half-jokingly, "Everything."[1] It should be obvious that I could not hope to cover every sub-topic in the exhaustive manner that is customary with narrow scholarly work. Entire books, for instance, have been written about each of several English kings whose reigns I summarize in a matter of paragraphs. Although I do chronicle a number of key historical episodes in substantial detail, the overall point of the book is breadth rather than depth. I have aimed at providing the reader a big-picture view of the historical foundations of our governmental system as well as a general understanding of the democratic alternative. I believe that attaining a wide viewpoint, even at the cost of telescoping immense swathes of history into relatively short synopses, is imperative if we are to see the political morass we are in for what it is—a profoundly systemic predicament—and to start to envision and create a new kind of polity. Put another way: we live, as it were, in a maze with no exit, and we wonder why we are lost if not imprisoned. It will not do for us to spend all of our time diligently studying the individual tiles comprising the floor of this maze, or fastidiously examining the many segments making up its endlessly zigzagging wall. If we do not at some point come to the realization that we live in a maze, a constitutional prison, we will never recognize that it is necessary for us to demolish it if we are to free ourselves.

One final note: Once, when I was working as a door-to-door canvasser with Greenpeace and I was, as usual, reading in the car as we rode out into the field, a young colleague sitting next to me asked me, "Ted, why do you read that boring old b.s. about kings and queens?" It was, and is, a fair question. My study of archaic subjects might well seem peculiar to modern-day activists. It is no doubt more exciting and certainly easier to focus on current events and controversies. But our current mode of politics, though it has gained such an adamantine hold on our minds that it is difficult to imagine there could be a different one, is not the way politics has to be. The modern setup came into being some time ago, through a specific historical development; moreover, a totally different arrangement existed in ancient times. In order to understand the present, therefore, we must step out of it and peer far into the past.

PART ONE: ATHENS

I. THE ATHENIAN DEMOCRACY

Americans and Western Europeans today, especially politicians and political commentators, talk incessantly about "our democracy." In fact the system of government in place in the U.S. and many similar countries is not democracy. Democracy was a political system employed by some of the ancient Greek states, most notably Athens. Athens was the leading democratic state in the Greek world.

The immediate purpose of this chapter is to describe the institutions of the Athenian democracy and demonstrate how they operated in real life. The broader goal is to provide a solid point of reference for my later examination of the emergence of the English parliamentary system. The contrast with the Athenian system will be seen to be so great that it will be abundantly clear that the representative system never was and never has become democracy but rather is a species of oligarchy.

It is curious that relatively few historians seem to be anything more than very superficially acquainted with Athens or knowledgeable about how profoundly different it was from so-called modern democracies. Without such a perceptual grounding, it is much more difficult to differentiate fool's gold from the genuine article.

DEMOCRACY AND SLAVERY

Context

Athens had slaves. For this reason many commentators dismiss Athens out of hand as a true democracy or as a viable model for modern democracy. This is a mistake.

The issue of slavery immediately poses a general question: For purposes of classification what is the relationship between type of political system on the one hand and inclusiveness of citizenship on the other? Let us imagine a number of societies with different governments. The first society's government consists of a single hereditary, all-powerful Ruler. This is a simple monarchy, with subjects (or serfs or slaves) but no citizens. Such a governmental arrangement is "closed," since no sizable sector of the population plays any part in the filling of the sovereign office; we'll call this government Mc (monarchy, closed; see table below). In a second society a single Ruler is elected every few years by a special and limited—yet numerous—subset of the people, the citizens, and the office is open to anyone. The government of this society is also a monarchy, but it is an elective and "open" one; we'll call it Mo. In a third monarchy the single Ruler is elected by, and from among, the entire adult population, who are all citizens. This is an "ideal" elective monarchy—Mi. Now imagine three oligarchies. Instead of a single Ruler these societies have sovereign Councils consisting of a small number of Rulers. In Oc the Council is closed and self-selecting. In Oo the Rulers are elected periodically by a subset of the people; it is an open, elective oligarchy. In Oi the Rulers are elected by all the adults, who are all citizens; it is an ideal elective oligarchy. (The United States came close to becoming an ideal elective oligarchy when first blacks and then women were allowed to vote for the Rulers—members of Congress and the president. There are still, however, some residents of the U.S. who are denied the vote; moreover, the third branch of government, the Supreme Court, is unelected.)