As his legacy burned around him, Joe Biden tried to strike a statesmanlike pose. Conceding to his predecessor and successor, the lame-duck president declared, “In a democracy, the will of the people always prevails.” Democratic Party politicians and liberal pundits are lining up to congratulate the winner, and they are calling on their supporters to accept the results. This is slightly unnerving, given that just a few days ago they were calling Trump a fascist. 

　　Did Trump win fair and square? He was indeed the first Republican candidate since George W. Bush in 2004 to win the most votes. But even if he did win both the Electoral College and the popular vote, this only means he won according to the rules of the U.S. regime — not according to the rules of democracy. These are not the same thing. 

　　As of this writing, just under 75 million votes for Trump have been counted — roughly the same number he got in 2020. That represents less than a quarter of the over 330 million people living in the United States. Tens of millions of people living in the country are deprived of their basic democratic rights, either because they lack proper paperwork (an estimated 13 million people), because they were once convicted of a felony (another 4 million), or because they are incarcerated for some reason. 

　　All kinds of voter suppression serve to keep minorities, the poor, and young people from exercising their rights — people are forced to travel long distances and wait in line for hours, on a workday. Owing to the wildly undemocratic Electoral College, the vast majority of U.S. citizens, everyone residing outside seven to nine swing states, lacks a meaningful vote. While the U.S. constitution does not prescribe a two-party system, in practice third parties are blocked from participation by all kinds of shameless bureaucratic tricks. And besides this official voter suppression, Trump-supporting “poll watchers” are there to intimidate people. 

　　Then there are tens of millions people who have the right to vote but don’t use it. This isn’t about laziness. Quite the opposite: people who need to work incredibly hard to survive have no time to think about politics. A society based on exploitation, in which most people have to sell their labor power to a capitalist in order to survive, itself suppresses democracy. 

　　As V. I. Lenin wrote in 1917, capitalist democracy like that of the United States is just a democracy for the capitalists: 

　　Owing to the conditions of capitalist exploitation, the modern wage slaves are so crushed by want and poverty that “they cannot be bothered with democracy,” “cannot be bothered with politics”; in the ordinary, peaceful course of events, the majority of the population is debarred from participation in public and political life. 

　　Yet we’ve only started to look at the deficiencies of U.S. democracy. The most obvious flaw in the recent elections was the role played by billionaires, with upwards of $15 billion spent on the election. Theoretically, each citizen gets one vote. In practice, however, a billionaire can spend money on advertising — or even illegal schemes to pay people to vote — and thus have a million more votes than the average person. 

　　Elon Musk spent tens of billions to turn Twitter into a megaphone for far-right conspiracy theories and Trump election propaganda. Jeff Bezos sacrificed “freedom of the press” to his business interests. All the media are controlled by rich people, and billionaires were behind both candidates. 

　　There used to be laws that limited this kind of blatant election interference by the rich. Yet with Citizens United and other decisions, these legal limits were gutted by the Supreme Court — an unelected, unaccountable, and thoroughly corrupt body that represents the very opposite of democracy. The Supreme Court is elected by the Senate, a wildly unrepresentative body in which half a million people in Wyoming have as much representation as almost 40 million in California. 

　　When he returns to the White House, we can expect Trump — with the backing of the Supreme Court and both houses of Congress — to attack basic democratic rights. Police, for example, will be further intimidating voters in the name of “election integrity.” Trump has a long record of advocating both state and private violence against protesters. Then again, we have seen Republicans and Democrats united in a major offensive against free speech and freedom of assembly in the context of the Palestine solidarity movement. 

　　In other words, the U.S. is not very democratic, and it would be silly to claim that Trump’s victory represents the will of a majority of the population. For years, Americans have been loathing a choice between two mediocre candidates. 

　　If the Democratic Party were truly interested in democracy, it would be calling for genuine reforms: an abolition of the Supreme Court, the Senate, and the imperial presidency, voting rights for all, democratization of the media. But the Democrats are instead committed to maintaining the rule of a tiny handful of parasitic billionaires — just a slightly different set of billionaires than those who back Trump. 

　　Socialists want real democracy, so we fight for these kind of radical democratic changes. But democracy isn’t just about voting. We also need to put the media — both old and new — under the democratic control of readers/users and journalists, instead of billionaires. Democracy requires ending inequality but socializing the big fortunes. If there were no billionaires, no one could buy elections and bribe politicians. 

　　If we, as workers, want democracy, that means controlling our workplaces and all of society’s wealth. That will never come from the so-called Democratic Party. Instead, we need a working-class party that fights for socialism — which will also give us democracy. 

　　Editor: Zhong Yao  Wei Xiaoxue 

　　From:https://www.leftvoice.org/there-was-nothing-democratic-about-the-2024-election/（2024-11-13）