An Oligarchy En Route to Anocracy. Dictatorship Could Be the End Point.
Are we still a democracy? A republic? A constitutionally limited democratic republic? Or an oligarchy, an anocracy? I suppose we'll find out soon.
About a month ago, while knocking on voters’ doors to remind them to vote in the November election and informing them about candidates and ballot initiatives, I engaged in a brief conversation with a registered Democrat in his early eighties who proffered a common republican talking point: “We are not a democracy; we are a republic.”
He then insisted that democracy can exist in a dictatorship.
“Look at Russia,” he stated. “They have elections there, right?”
It took everything I had to hold back the historian in me clawing at the cage to be let out. I didn’t want to alienate him; I wanted him to vote. I wasn’t going to change his mind anyway. So I just left him some candidate literature, thanked him for his time and for voting, and bid him good day.
In a roundabout way he was correct.
We are a republic. But we are also a democracy (at least for the time being).
Our founders were cognizant of both terms, and often used them interchangeably, but they were wary about each’s strict applicably in the new governmental structure they were creating.
“Father of the Constitution,” James Madison, our country’s fourth president, defined “democracy” as a form of government where “the people meet and exercise the government in person” and decide issues by voting. He also, however, thought direct democracies were “spectacles of turbulence and contention.”
Our second president, John Adams (the man who thought presidents should be addressed as “Your Highness” or “Your Most Benign Highness"), thought straight democracy “impracticable.”
One reason is because it involves people deciding policy initiatives instead of representatives in government voters elect on their behalf. In that Adams, Madison et al. regarded it as a form of “tyranny of the majority”. That’s why Alexander Hamilton believed “ancient democracies” lacked “one feature of good government: their very character was tyranny.”
A strict republic, though, wasn’t their answer either.
Madison knew, in a republic, the people “assemble and administer” government through “their representatives and agents”. Because it required only representatives instead of the voting public to travel, a republic “may be extended over a large region.”
But some warned republics handed too much power to a small, usually wealthy, group of citizens.
In order to dodge the aristocratic tendencies they were attempting to avoid, the founders intended Americans to have their say as promised in the Declaration of Independence (“The consent of the governed) and the Constitution (“We, the People…”). So they melded the two systems — democracy and republic — into one concept: a constitutionally limited democratic republic, wherein voters would choose representatives to advocate for policies constituents wanted, framed within constitutional limits.
Was that octogenarian voter also right about dictatorships being able to exist within democracies?
While it’s true Russia engages in elections, they are suspect and predictably preordained. Does the presence of “elections” make it a “democracy”?
North Korea doesn’t call itself “North Korea”; it calls itself the “Democratic People’s Republic of Korea” (or “DPRK”).
Would we, in any rational sense, characterize the Orwellian totalitarian regime of North Korea as a “democratic republic”?
As Robert J. Sternberg and Christian Fischer wrote in their research titled “Diverging roads: Democracy, anocracy, autocracy, dictatorship?”:
For some people the world over, there is no longer a choice between democracy, autocracy, or anything in-between. They chose their road, or the road was chosen for them. For those who live in China, North Korea, Russia, Belarus, Venezuela, Nicaragua, or any of a number of other countries already controlled by outright dictatorships, the choice is gone, at least for now.
There are democracies and there are “democracies.” That is, there are many in-between states. The possibilities are infinite, which is why the study of possibilities is so important. Many nations will end up in intermediate states, like it or not.
Defining “democracies,” they add:
In a true democracy, all adults who are citizens — usually anyone born in the country or naturalized into citizenship — have one vote, and all votes count equally. Democracies are often under stress, as groups seeking power seek to limit or distort votes. Stress can be caused by not allowing certain people to vote, or by discouraging targeted people from voting. For example, the United States has viewed itself as a democracy, but has suppressed voting throughout its history, whether of Black people, women, or other groups.
So, what do we call nations that hold elections but don’t exactly fit the description of “democracy”?
One form of government I definitely did not learn in school is called an “anocracy” [on-AH-cracy].
Known as a “semi-democracy,” anocracy is a political system that mixes democratic and autocratic elements, permits limited political participation, and practices incomplete methods to address grievances.
According to Sternberg and Fischer, we are an anocracy, or at least we’re probably going to be.
“They [anocracies] typically are democracies in decay that are beginning to take on autocratic features, as happened during the presidency of Donald Trump,” they explain. “During Trump’s administration, the democratic score for the United States dropped precipitously. If Donald Trump is re-elected in 2024, there is a distinct possibility the score will drop again and, this time, continue to drop.”
Well, we all know what happened this month.
Director Center for Systemic Peace and the Polity Project, Dr. Monty G. Marshall, stated in May:
Democracy is not an abstract notion; it is a management technique that provides educated humans the ability to manage complexity…Democracy is not a voting system, although voting has become prominent as a decision-making method. All forms of governance employ voting procedures to some extent. Democracy happens naturally in well-developed systems when most citizens accept a vow of non-violence and recognize the legitimacy of enforcement through judicial law.
He darkly concludes:
Unfortunately, the Republican Party has abdicated its responsibilities and succumbed to a hostile takeover; it can no longer be considered a party to democracy. The Trumpist Party has become, rather, a Cult of Personality determined to further polarize and cannibalize the system and its future for the benefit of a small cadre of system pirates…Our responsibility as citizens demands that we stop for a moment and think rationally about what we’re doing, and where we are headed. We have no right to punish our children in this cruel way. We have given them life and owe them a secure and hopeful future in which they, other nations, and further generations, can live peaceably and prosper responsibly.
Anne Applebaum, senior fellow at Johns Hopkins University’s SNF Agora Institute and the School of Advanced International Studies, and staff writer for The Atlantic, wrote in 2021 in a piece titled “The Bad Guys Are Winning”:
If the 20th century was the story of slow, uneven progress toward the victory of liberal democracy over other ideologies — communism, fascism, virulent nationalism — the 21st century is, so far, a story of the reverse.
Some might ask, “Well, so what if we’re an anocracy? What’s so bad about it as long as we still get to vote? We could use a little dictatorship around here.”
Anocracies produce high human rights violation rates, unstable political environments, and political repression; and they are ten times more susceptible to internal conflict.
With these conditions in place, anocracies are more prone to civil wars, particularly within their first few years of chucking democracy, as Patrick M. Regan and Sam R. Bell report in their research “Changing Lanes or Stuck in the Middle: Why Are Anocracies More Prone to Civil Wars?”
While it’s convenient to pin it all on the election — and reelection — of the twice-impeached convicted felon, this downward spiral has been happening for decades. The adjudicated rapist is just the hood ornament.
On January 21, 2010, the United States Supreme Court (SCOTUS) handed down its ruling on the controversial Citizens United v. Federal Elections Commission (FEC) decision equating political spending with free speech covered under the Constitution’s first amendment. Under this ruling, the federal government is prohibited from interfering with corporations, nonprofit organizations, and unions from spending unlimited sums to support or oppose individual political candidates.
As long as they are not presenting funds to campaigns directly, corporations are free to pump as much as they want into political advertising and “super PACs” (political action committees) not required to disclose their donors’ identities.
It’s what former Massachusetts governor and 2012 republican presidential nominee, Utah Senator Mitt Romney, referred to in 2011 when he proclaimed “Corporations are people!”
But Citizens United was not the first high court decision to hand democracy to corporations. That distinction lies with the 1886 Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Company.
In 1976, the SCOTUS ruled in Buckley v. Valeo that political campaign spending limits are unconstitutional.
In 1978, SCOTUS Chief Justice Lewis Powell penned the First National Bank of Boston vs. Bellotti decision that states corporations are “persons,” money is “speech,” and corporate political bribery--what used to be illegal--was now to be considered an “expression of [corporate] free speech.”
In 2014, the McCutcheon v. FEC case further solidified the damage by determining unconstitutional any limits on individual contributions to federal candidate committees and national parties over a two-year period.
A cadre of wealthy elites controlling the levers of government is called “oligarchy,” something none other than former president Jimmy Carter believes we have officially become, as he stated on the progressive talk radio show The Thom Hartmann Program nearly a decade ago.
“Now it’s [our system] just an oligarchy, with unlimited political bribery being the essence of getting the nominations for president or to elect the president,” explained the president who served from 1977–1981. He continued:
So now we’ve just seen a complete subversion of our political system as a payoff to major contributors, who want and expect and sometimes get favors for themselves after the election’s over.
Thom Hartmann wrote earlier this month:
We just watched the final fulfillment of a 50-year plan. It was a plan to turn America over to the richest men and the largest corporations. It was a plan to replace democracy with oligarchy. A large handful of America’s richest people invested billions in this plan, and its tax breaks and fossil fuel subsidies have made them trillions. More will soon come to them.
The 2020 election was the most expensive in US history — $2.95 billion.
Until now.
The 2024 election saw a whopping $4.46 billion in outside spending, half of which came from “dark money” donors not required to disclose their identities the SCOTUS says are just exercising their “free speech”.
So, naturally, with whom is the slum-lord former host of Celebrity Apprentice just re-hired for his old job surrounding himself and appointing to cabinet positions? Wealthy donors, business executives, and a few Fox so-called “news” personalities.
Thom Hartmann further explained:
We’ll soon again have a billionaire president — helped to power by the richest billionaire on the planet [Elon Musk]— with his election campaign funded in large part by at least $2 billion in direct, reported donations from roughly 150 billionaire families.
But oligarchies are transitional periods.
Eventually, one of two things happens.
“People protest, what’s left of union movements stand up, and progressive political parties begin to get a significant toehold on the national debate,” Thom Hartmann explained. This can open a door to democracy reconstituting and the money-changers being driven from the temple.
Or…
The kleptocratic government can clamp down on their opposition, labeling protestors and democracy-advocating politicians as terrorists and “the enemy within,” using the power of the state (guns and jails) to suppress popular pro-democracy movements.
This is exactly what has happened in Russia.
Much of where these next few years are going to take us is unknown, but one thing that isn’t is that we are going to hit bottom.
What “bottom” will look like is anyone’s guess.
It might be the mass deportations the next president is promising and the republican party promoted at its convention this summer.
It might be “de-naturalizing” naturalized American citizens.
It might be declaring an indefinite “national emergency” that would permit the next administration to invoke the Insurrection Act to crack down on protests, peaceful or otherwise.
It might be another pandemic since bird flu cases are increasing and the next Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) head could be anti-vaxxer Robert Kennedy Jr., who just five years ago — before COVID--called the agency’s vaccine division “a fascist enterprise,” accused it of “knowingly hurting children,” and compared child vaccination programs to “the cover-up of child sexual abuse in the Catholic Church”.
It might be a “Reichstag fire”-style terrorist attack — perceived or otherwise — that provides the administration with a pretext to go to war to earn Trump and JD Vance just the right amount of pseudo-patriotism to ram through anything.
It might be a compliant republican-majority Congress that rolls over for anything the “dear leader” wants. (That was the 2020 RNC platform, after all.)
It might be locking up journalists, political “dissidents,” the intelligentsia, like dictatorships time out of mind have always done.
It might be a tariff war with our closest trading partners, Canada and Mexico. Couple it with a depleted migrant labor force due to deportation, and we are looking at a dearth of and ridiculously high prices on agricultural, building, and basic household products.
It might be an economic collapse for which the new king will insist is “Biden’s fault”.
It might be an extension of the “Tax Cuts and Jobs Act”, the massive bill signed at the end of 2017 that handed a $1.5 trillion dollar permanent tax cut to the morbidly rich.
It might the successful repeal of the Affordable Care Act that came within one vote of being repealed last time Comb-over Caligula occupied the Oval Office, which would leave millions of Americans with preexisting medical conditions like me without coverage.
It might rolling back so many environment regulations, our air and water become unsustainable and the climate crisis spirals out of our control.
It might be Russia overtaking Ukraine and marching into a NATO country, like Poland, inspiring China to invade Taiwan, kicking off world war three, for which our failure to stand up to Vladimir Putin would make us an Axis power.
It’s easy to assume “it can’t happen here”.
But we just willingly (re)elected a man who has promised every one of those possibilities.
Are we still a democracy? A republic? A constitutionally limited democratic republic? Or an oligarchy, an anocracy?
I suppose we’ll find out soon.