America Isn't a Democracy. Yet.

"Most Americans learn as schoolchildren that our country is the greatest democracy in the world. Democracy is part of our national myth and, as such, the pretext for many of our most consequential and disastrous national decisions. When we invaded Afghanistan, and later Iraq, Bush officials claimed we could achieve national security only by enforcing human rights and democratic politics abroad. In the 19th century, supporters of Manifest Destiny based their appeals in part on the spread of western civilization and democracy with it. By establishing a democratic government, the United States had discovered enlightenment as well as a certain moral superiority."

""Go where you may, search where you will, roam through all the monarchies and despotisms of the old world, travel through South America, search out every abuse, and when you have found the last, lay your facts by the side of the everyday practices of this nation, and you will say with me that, for revolting barbarity and shameless hypocrisy, America reigns without a rival,""

"In The Right of the People: Democracy and the Case for a New American Founding, the writer Osita Nwanevu addresses our mythology head-on and picks apart the political decisions and assumptions that undergird our failing institutions. A contributing editor to The New Republic and the Democratic Institutions fellow at the Roosevelt Institute, Nwanevu argues that democracy is still worth a fight. Indeed, it's the only solution to the bleak era we now face."

American democratic mythology claims the United States is the world’s greatest democracy and has served as a pretext for consequential and disastrous national decisions. That mythology has justified foreign interventions such as Afghanistan and Iraq and supported expansionist doctrines like Manifest Destiny that linked western civilization to democratic spread. The exclusion of enslaved people, women, and people of color from the franchise exposed a deep hypocrisy at the nation's core, as Frederick Douglass forcefully declared. Despite progress, recent trends show regression. Democracy remains worth defending and calls for a renewed American founding and institutional reform.

Read at Intelligencer