US

Trump “was elected fair and square,” states Hamid Dabashi. I disagree. He was not. Neither were the ones before him. Leaving aside the electoral college’s role, how is it fair election when just to be a mayor of New York you need to be backed by millionaires and billionaires? The power of the different lobbies with heavy money, of individuals and corporations, and the corporate media shapes many outcomes.

Money matters a great deal in elections,” Adam Bonica from Standford University said. It’s just that, he believes, when scientists go looking for its impacts, they tend to look in the wrong places. If you focus on general elections, he said, your view is going to be obscured by the fact that 80 to 90 percent of congressional races have outcomes that are effectively predetermined by the district’s partisan makeup — and the people that win those elections are still given (and then must spend) ridiculous sums of money because, again, big donors like to curry favor with candidates they know are a sure thing.

Dabashi: “ I am not merely suggesting the US is not a democracy; we have known that for a long time. I am suggesting that based on its more than two centuries of experimenting with the idea, the US is incapable of democracy.”

And I wonder why Dabashi does not put American “democracy” is the context of the American form of capitalism. The form bourgeois democracy in Germany, France, Sweden and Italy, for instance, has been shaped by social democratic social contracts. The US has never had a social democratic party.

 Americans must wake up from the illusion they live in a democracy