Democracy Betrayed and Redeemed: Populist Traditions in the United States

The study of political culture in the United States begins with the concept of democracy – the still revolutionary notion that the people ought to govern themselves. The very idea of what it means to be an American is often equated with the right of self-rule, of majority control, and of the superiority of such a system over other ways of arranging the civic order. The great historian Richard Hofstadter once wrote about the United States, “it has been our fate as a nation not to have ideologies but to be one.” It is impossible to imagine the American ideology without its democratic core – unruly, litigious, but remarkably optimistic. Yet it is also impossible – or, at least, terribly inaccurate – to talk about America’s democratic political culture without recognizing its limits, its silences, and its brutalities. For a start, the U.S. Constitution is not really a democratic document; its drafters perceived democracy as mob rule and sought to prevent the people from ruling directly in their own name. Thus, only members of the House of Representatives were directly elected – and that at a time when only white men with some property had the right to vote. Of course, the franchise was gradually broadened, and the electoral college became a virtual rubber stamp of the popular vote for president by each state. But voters could not elect U.S. senators directly until 1913. And the Senate, with two members from each state, continues to be an institution far more responsive to the democratic wishes of the people of Wyoming – which has fewer than a million residents – than to the desires of the people of California – where some thirty million people live. And, of course, the federal judiciary is even less democratic – federal judges are appointed for life, if they insist on staying around that long. But an opposite type of deficiency also runs through American democracy, one that stems from its very nature. This is what commentators from Tocqueville onward have called “the tyranny of the majority.” Democracy, understood as the majority’s right to have its way, has had bloody consequences for a nation settled on the lands of native peoples and where slave labor dominated the most prosperous sector of the economy. In the 1830s, when Andrew Jackson supported the removal of the Cherokees from their lands in Georgia, he cited the right of the majority. Later in the 19th century, the powerful anti-Asian movement on the West Coast argued that the majority of the people, that is whites, had the right to