The United States: A Crisis Long in the Making

What transpired on Jan. 6 is unprecedented in the history of the United States: The entirety of a vast, ancient institutional edifice, designed by the Founding Fathers to avoid the dangers of ochlocracy — the feared mob rule — caved in like a house of cards. Reacting to Donald Trump’s incessant tirades, a mob of Trumpists overwhelmed the security forces and stormed the Capitol. The result: the Senate was forced into recess and Vice President Mike Pence was swiftly evacuated by the Secret Service, while a group of supporters in military uniforms, some of them armed, set up camp in the chambers of the Senate and the House of Representatives. The objective: to prevent Congress from certifying Joe Biden’s victory in the Nov. 3 presidential election of last year.

Trump’s responsibility for these incidents is irrefutable. A group of Republicans made their own contributions: More than 100 of them were willing to propose overturning Biden’s victory; they too should be considered instigators of the revolt. Nevertheless, it would be a mistake to believe that what happened is the sole responsibility of Trump and his sycophants. This episode demonstrates the severity of the crisis of legitimacy that has been rotting away at the insides of the American political system.

Electoral absenteeism is a chronic illness of a system that proclaims itself a democracy when in fact it is not. Abraham Lincoln defined it as a “government of the people, by the people, for the people.” Today, not only left-wing intellectuals like Noam Chomsky, but even mainstream academics like Jeffrey Sachs and Sheldon Wolin before him, assert in their spoken and written statements that the political system of the United States is a plutocracy, not a democracy, in the sense that it is a government of the rich, by the rich, for the rich. This explains the querulous reflections made by The New York Times a few months prior upon revealing that the wealthiest 1% accumulates more wealth than the poorest 80% of the country. In other words, a pseudo-democracy that, through the application of neo-liberal policies, wrote the last rites for the “American dream” and converted the country into the most unequal in the developed world.

In the seismic events of Wednesday, Jan. 6, 2021, typical of the work of the “populist anarchies” that Washington perceives and condemns everywhere in the periphery countries, there is undoubtedly a shared responsibility between both parties.

For four years, Trump’s outbursts and criminal policies, inside and outside the United States, fed on the absence of the Democrats’ political will to put an end to the politics that benefit the wealthiest 10% of the country (and especially the super-wealthy 1%) or even to put in the minimum effort to truly democratize the political system. In the face of the violent incidents on Jan. 6, it is worth remembering that, constructing a democratic system was never the intention of the Founding Fathers: Indirect election through an electoral college, the optional nature of voting and balloting on working days are the shackles on a system that was constituted as a republic but not as a democracy.

It is not by chance that even the United States Constitution does not mention, in a single instance, the magic word: “democracy.” In a society that has changed as much as the United States in the last 50 years, transitioning from a relatively homogeneous society to one that is multicultural and unequal, and with the absurdity of a party system that does not at all reflect these changes, the emergence of a demagogue like Trump, with his incendiary rhetoric, had the potential to open the doors to hell and release the demons within. That is what happened here. This is a long-term issue that will not be resolved without far-reaching social, economic and political reforms, something that Biden will be loath to promote.