It Never Was America to Me

THE NEW YORK TIMES

Thursday, July 4, 2019

On our minds: American democracy, an unfinished project

Where were you before America was a democracy? And where will you be if it stops being one again?

Our childhood history classes may have told us that America has been a democracy for hundreds of years, a shining example of the ideals of liberty and justice for all. But an honest reckoning with history tells a different story.

In his book ‘Paths out of Dixie,’ Robert Mickey makes a persuasive case that the United States was not truly a democracy for most of its history. Until the 1970s, he argues, “southern states are best understood as 11 enclaves of authoritarian rule.”

It is widely known, of course, that black citizens were disenfranchised. Extrajudicial violence, including lynching, was used to keep them subjugated to white rule. That system was obviously not fully democratic — at best, it was what political scientists sometimes call a herrenvolk democracy, in which only the dominant ethnic group gets democratic representation.

But Dr. Mickey lays out evidence that the southern systems were not merely racist  and oppressive, but actually authoritarian — so much so that he does not think they even rise to the limited herrenvolk standard.

The Democratic party — which, at the time, protected southern whites’ racial and economic hegemony — placed so many restrictions on suffrage and politics that it became effectively impossible for any other party to compete in elections.

In effect, that created a cluster of single-party regimes, where white citizens who wished to support a different party were also effectively disenfranchised.

That those single-party regimes lasted so long, within a country that considered itself not only a democracy but a shining example of one is a measure of how difficult it is to ensure that political institutions match political ideals.

It is also a reminder that creating and protecting democracy is a continuous project, not something that can be accomplished by declarations of independence or emancipation.

In the past few weeks, the Supreme Court has ruled that partisan gerrymandering can be constitutional. That decision could further compound the effect of the Senate and the electoral college, which already weights the votes of mostly white rural America far more heavily than those of more diverse urban communities. U.S. citizens in Puerto Rico and Washington D.C. has no representation in Congress at all.

And in a stark reminder of how few guarantees there are people without a political voice will be granted their rights and the full protection of the law, a report from the Department of Homeland Security’s own internal watchdog has found that federal authorities are imprisoning migrants, many of whom are most likely entitled to asylum, in deplorable and dangerous conditions. At least six children have died in the department’s custody.

So before you go off to barbecue and swim and watch fireworks this Fourth of July, we’ll leave you with a few stanzas of one of our favorite poems, Langston Hughes’s “Let America be America Again”:

O, let America be America again—

The land that never has been yet—

And yet must be—the land where every man is free.

The land that's mine—the poor man's, Indian's, Negro's, ME—

Who made America,

Whose sweat and blood, whose faith and pain,

Whose hand at the foundry, whose plow in the rain,

Must bring back our mighty dream again.

Sure, call me any ugly name you choose—

The steel of freedom does not stain.

From those who live like leeches on the people's lives,

We must take back our land again,

America!

O, yes,

I say it plain,

America never was America to me,

And yet I swear this oath—

America will be!