No, the United States is not a "beacon of democracy"

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