Mainstream media and US policymakers ignoring the mass pro-Palestinian protests occurring throughout the country are slowly waking up Americans across the political divide to the fact that US is not a democracy, but an oligarchy controlled by a rich and powerful elite.
And this is no longer just the opinion of a fringe minority, but something actually backed up by data.
Almost 10 years ago a study by Princeton University Prof Martin Gilens and Northwestern University Prof Benjamin I Page made half a page in the BBC, while at the same time largely being ignored in the United States.
It concluded that “Multivariate analysis indicates that economic elites and organised groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on US government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence”
In other words, it is a wealthy elites that control the policies of the United States, rather than the average American.
The study further concludes that “When a majority of citizens disagrees with economic elites and/or with organised interests, they generally lose. Moreover, because of the strong status quo bias built into the US political system, even when fairly large majorities of Americans favour policy change, they generally do not get it.”
If the US is not a democracy then what is it?
In other words not only is the US not a democracy, but it is basically everything it claims the Russia is, an oligarchy controlled by an elite.
As Eric Zuess, writing in Counterpunch, put it “”American democracy is a sham, no matter how much it’s pumped by the oligarchs who run the country (and who control the nation’s “news” media), The US, in other words, is basically similar to Russia or most other dubious ‘electoral’ ‘democratic’ countries. We weren’t formerly, but we clearly are now.”
And it is not just professors and alternate media who have opined that America is not the “greatest democracy in the world”, with Reporters Without Borders, ranking the United States 45th in the world for press freedom.
For some context this puts the United States below countries such as Argentina, Moldova, Namibia, and Cape Verde, while only just above Papua New Guinea, one of the most corrupt and dangerous countries on earth.
Another interesting point from this list, with regards to the United States’s democratic credentials is with respects to the company it keeps, with staunch US allies Bahrain, Saudi Arabia and Egypt being among the 20 least free countries for journalist in the world. These allies also rank far below nations such as Venezuela, Belarus and Russia who are regularly vilified by the US for their lack of democracy.
In other words, it really does not matter if you are democratic, or not, so long as you play ball with the United States, something famously admitted by President Trump when he initiated peace talks with North Korea, only for him to be derided for doing so.
The Gun Debate and American democracy
When it comes to democracy and the lack there of in the United States, surely nothing proves that it is an oligarchy more than the so called “gun debate”, although including the words “debate” in this is somewhat of a misnomer.
After every school, or mass shooting polls are done which pretty much every time show that a majority of American citizens want gun control, but it never happens. Instead they get “thoughts and prayers” accompanied promises to check the mental health of those buying guns, without there ever being any real changes.
The gun lobby is so big that it gets to outvote the majority, the very definition of an oligarchy.
So, why does this all matter now? Because with what is currently happening in Israel and Palestine, Americans are slowly starting to wake up to just how anti-democratic and corrupt their system is.
You might not see it bin the media, but people are protesting
Of course you will scarcely see it in the establishment controlled media, but people have been protesting in numbers hitherto unseen against what Israel is doing in Palestine right now.
And these are not just left-wing cranks, or Antifa types, but people from a road spectrum of the US population, included amongst them a number of Jews.
Why this is not being reported needs little explanation, with Israeli lobbyists famously being so good at bending US foreign policy that Benjamin Netanyahu has showed off about it
Yet the world we live in in 2023 is not the same as 20, or 30 years ago, with online news, through which many now rely on showing the unpleasant truths ignored by mainstream media, another reason the establishment are trying to control it.
This has now led to a new breed of US politician following in the Trump mould who are now not afraid to stand up to the oligarchy and tell the truth. Chief among these has been Vivek Ramaswamy who has not only pointed out the absolute lack of democracy and corruption in Ukraine, but was also brave enough to talk about Nagorno-Karabakh and how lobbyists from Azerbaijan had been controlling the narrative on the forced removal of Armenians from their homes.
Whether someone like him, or even Donald Trump can take the presidency and return some form of democracy to the country will be seen at the next presidential election next year. For now though, the US is not a democracy.