Can we at least stop pretending we have an operational democratic system?
There is very little silver lining to a Supreme Court that is openly hostile to democracy, but maybe we could at least stop pretending our political system is responding to its citizens.
As I have written about here and here the system of alternating nominations and lifetime or 14 year terms for institutions like the Supreme Court and The Federal Reserve does not magically make them “independent” and above politics. Feel free to bury the dream of these very small decision making bodies being pure technocratic arbiters of law or economics or whatever as it is fucking dead.
Of course that dream should have died a long time ago with shit like Bush over Gore in Florida and allowing unconstrained money in politics. But if that didn’t convince people then surely an unsigned decision to allow the president to control the basics of the American voting apparatus is.
DO NOT BLAME TRUMP! The fault lies with a ridiculously inept system of American democracy. Even the Athenians knew better than to put nine or seven (Federal Reserve) people in charge of a major function for life or 14 years without any review or election.
The closest they came were the ten strategos (generals) who ran the military and they held elections for them every year with the ability to recall mid year. Everything else was large bodies of decision makers, like the 500 member Boule, chosen by lottery.
The Athenians did not have any pseudo king called president or an “upper” chamber of congress designed to specifically serve elites. Originally, state legislatures chose U.S. Senators, which insulated them from direct voter pressure until the 17th Amendment required popular election in 1913.
Examples of running realer democracies aren’t just ancient relics either.
You might think Switzerland’s federal council is a small number of people
but they replace America’s single pseudo king president bullshit.
Perhaps it’s easier to see how undemocratic the American system is if we compare it with Iran.
The Guardian Council is a powerful 12-member constitutional body in Iran that reviews legislation, vets election candidates, and supervises national elections.
Iran’s Guardian Council = America’s Supreme Court
Iran’s Cabinet = Trump’s Cabinet
Iran’s Supreme Leader = you get the idea
Not only is the American political system not very democratic; actual democracy is frequently maligned as some bogey man that would destroy the country if allowed to happen.
All the powers of government, legislative, executive, and judiciary, result to the legislative body. The concentrating these in the same hands is precisely the definition of despotic government. It will be no alleviation that these powers will be exercised by a plurality of hands, and not by a single one; 173 despots would surely be as oppressive as one. Let those who doubt it turn their eyes on the republic of Venice. — Thomas Jefferson
I’m guessing what Tom is referring to is the decline of the office of the doge, elected from the ruling families of Venice.
Thus, then, by the operation of this mobocratic spirit which all must admit is now abroad in the land, the strongest bulwark of any government, and particularly of those constituted like ours, may effectually be broken down and destroyed — I mean the attachment of the people. Whenever this effect shall be produced among us; whenever the vicious portion of [our] population shall be permitted to gather in bands of hundreds and thousands, and burn churches, ravage and rob provision stores, throw printing-presses into rivers, shoot editors, and hang and burn obnoxious persons at pleasure and with impunity, depend on it — this government cannot last. — Abraham Lincoln
The thing is the “mob rule” that Lincoln was up against wasn’t really a mob but the Klu Klux Klan, a terrorist organization. This conflating of terrorists, frequently funded by other nations or the very wealthy, and ordinary citizens trying to gain or preserve their rights is a common theme.
Democracy isn’t the objective; liberty, peace, and prospefity [sic] are. We want the human condition to flourish. Rank democracy can thwart that.
— Senator Mike Lee, October 7, 2020
In this mindset “rank democracy” causes candidates curtailing freedom to reach office. But is the ascent of an ultra wealthy authoritarian rapist really the result of democracy giving too much power to the people?
No because the elections that Trump won for president were not anything a democratic society would choose for themselves.
The 2016 matchup between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton featured the lowest favorability ratings for major-party presidential nominees in modern polling history.
This gets at the next wholly undemocratic aspect of the American political system — political “parties”. If one were to design an actual democratic election, it would involve candidates getting signatures to get on ballots and then some form of multi-round voting to achieve a winner. There is no concept of a political “party” in an actual democratic election so what the fuck is a political “party”?
According to AI:
When property requirements for voting were dismantled across the United States and expanded in Britain, the voting pool grew from a few thousand wealthy landowners into millions of citizens.
Candidates could no longer win by simply riding through a county and shaking hands with local gentry.
Without coordination, multiple candidates with similar views would run simultaneously, splitting the vote and handing victory to opponents.
Coordination required a gatekeeper to say: “Only candidate X gets to run under our banner.”
However this explanation makes no sense at all. In any kind of a real democracy you need a majority of the vote in order to be elected. The Athenians got around vote splitting by comparing each two candidates and runoff elections can accomplish something similar at scale. Also in an Athenian election you again need votes for to outweigh votes against in order to gain office.
First, the public herald (keryx), acting under the instruction of the presiding chairman, read the names of the officially recorded candidates for a given office. The vote was then taken by stages. When two candidates contested a specific slot, the chairman called first for those supporting Candidate A (diacheirotonia), and then for those supporting Candidate B. When an individual candidate was put forward for confirmation, the assembly voted first on the affirmative (katacheirotonia) and subsequently on the negative (apocheirotonia).
Political parties aren’t the solution to making democracy for the masses work; they are the solution for insuring that democracy for the masses doesn’t happen. Not surprisingly America’s first political party was formed by bankers, manufacturers, and merchants.
The Federalists called for a strong national government that promoted economic growth and fostered friendly relationships with Great Britain in opposition to Revolutionary France. The Federalist Party came into being between 1789 and 1790 as a national coalition of bankers and businessmen in support of Hamilton’s fiscal policies.
The Federalists were soon opposed by Democratic-Republican Party that favored a more slave based economy.
Coming back to the Supreme Court it of course didn’t escape their attention that political parties are innately anti-democratic:
On June 30, 2026, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 6–3 to strike down federal limits on how much money political parties can spend in direct coordination with their candidates. [1]
Which brings us to the second election that Trump won. In that election the presidential ballot was chosen by “delegates” — matching an older American system where popular vote didn’t matter.
At 4:00 PM Central Time, Tennessee became the first state to pledge delegates to Harris. Seventy delegates joined a Zoom call and voted unanimously to endorse Harris.
Unless you live in Illinois, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Maryland, or West Virginia then you don’t even vote directly on Democratic Party “delegates”; they are chosen for you. So even for Americans belonging to the Democratic party only a very few of them even voted for a “delegate” and none of them voted directly for Harris as their “party” nominee. (Plus throw pro-Israel lobbying groups into the mix and you have anti-democracy stew.)
And of course everyone is aware of the crazy “super” delegate nonsense that helped produce Hillary Clinton as the 2016 DNC candidate.
In short you don’t get Trump from an abundance of democracy, you get Trump from two of the most fucked up elections of all time. The Supreme Court is throwing gasoline on the fire by allowing more and more money into the election process and maybe helping stop mail in voting, but the fire started with a nation sitting on the fence on allowing mass participation in democracy from the beginning.