No, the United States is not a "beacon of democracy"
The evidence against this narrative is overwhelming.
On March 4, Bernie Sanders published a statement saying “For 250 years, the United States has supported democracy”, expressing his concern that the Trump administration has taken an authoritarian turn that violates a centuries-long tradition of US democratic principles at home and abroad. This is not uncommon to hear from US politicians. Biden routinely referred to the US as a “beacon of democracy”, as did many presidents before him. The statement from Sanders simply highlights how widespread this narrative is in the US, across the congressional political spectrum.
One can understand what Sanders is trying to argue. But this claim about the US and democracy is fundamentally incorrect. Indeed, the evidence against it is overwhelming.
The United States was not in fact founded as a democracy. On the contrary, it was an apartheid regime, with institutionalized inequality on the basis of race, gender and class, and governed as an oligarchy. This is not hyperbole, it is a well-documented reality. US states generally limited voting rights to white males who owned property (about 6% of the population). Working class people, women, and people of colour overwhelmingly did not have the right to vote. Virtually all Black people were subject to mass enslavement and had no rights whatsoever, and Indigenous Americans were targets of government-sponsored ethnic cleansing and genocide.
The property criteria was only fully abolished in 1856. Women were not guaranteed the right to vote until 1920. For Indigenous Americans, it was 1948. Racial segregation — the US system of apartheid — was not fully abolished until 1964. And it wasn’t until 1965 that voting rights were formally guaranteed for all minorities. This point is worth underscoring: the United States did not have universal franchise until 1965, nearly 190 years after its founding. And in each case, the franchise was not handed down by a government committed to democratic principles but fought for and won by working-class people through organised collective struggle.
Even so, the extent to which the US functions as a democracy today is highly questionable. Power is passed back and forth between two establishment parties, both of which are run by rich people and committed to the interests of capital. Third parties are effectively frozen out of the national political process. And elites and corporations can spend unlimited money on campaign finance, to install politicians that will shape policy to their benefit, in a form of institutionalized political corruption. Democracy cannot function under these conditions.
This is born out by evidence. A 2014 study published by Cambridge University Press found that US policy implementation generally follows the preferences of elites and organized business lobbies, even when it runs against the preferences of the majority. In other words, the US more closely resembles an oligarchy than a democracy. This helps make sense of data from the Democracy Perception Index, which in 2023 showed that only 54% of US Americans believe their country is actually democratic, and only 42% say the government serves the majority of people.
So much for democracy at home. What about abroad? US politicians claim that the United States champions democracy around the world. But in fact, the US record on this is overwhelmingly the opposite.
The US regularly intervenes in foreign elections to corrupt the democratic process in favour of US interests. A recent study by Dov Levin documents that the US intervened in foreign elections at least 128 times between 1946 and 2014, usually to prevent left-wing parties from forming a government or retaining power.
During the 20th century, the US actively opposed anti-colonial liberation struggles in Asia and Africa, which were fighting for democracy and equal rights. It famously supported the apartheid regime in South Africa (the US government collaborated in the imprisonment of Mandela and listed him as a “terrorist” until 2008), and continues to support the apartheid regime of Israel today. The US propped up the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile, the Shah’s dictatorship in Iran, the Mobutu dictatorship in Zaire, the Franco dictatorship in Spain, and many others. This continues today: a recent report found that 73% of the world’s dictatorships receive direct military support from the United States.
The US also has a long history of engaging in regime change operations in other countries, to ensure the conditions for US geopolitical hegemony and capital accumulation. Academics and journalists such as Lindsey O’Rourke, William Blum and others have documented at least 113 such operations since 1949, based on official records (not including operations conducted in the late 19th and early 20th centuries under the Monroe Doctrine and the Roosevelt Corollary). Half of these were perpetrated against liberal democracies or democratic centralist states. The US famously backed coups or assassinations against democratically elected leaders such as Salvador Allende in Chile, Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala, and Patrice Lumumba in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, all of whom were replaced by dictators.
In sum, the United States was not founded as a democracy, has not been a democracy for the majority of its existence, suffers very severe democratic deficits today to the point where it continues to function as an oligarchy, and has a long record of preventing, undermining and even destroying democratic governments abroad. This problem did not start with the Trump administration; it is a structural pathology of the US system. The political objective for progressives in the US should be to fight to change it.
Image by Ralf1403