How Democracy Can Be Made Possible and Durable

29 April 2025, by Eric Zuesse. (All of my recent articles can be seen here.)

Does a democracy even exist?

The first-ever scientific study of whether a given nation is a democracy was published in 2014, and it was based on and analyzed all of the most-relevant and highest quality data covering the U.S. during the period 1981 to 2002 and found that America is definitely NOT a democracy but is instead controlled only by is very wealthiest people — it’s an aristocracy of wealth, otherwise commonly referred to as an “oligarchy,” “plutocracy,” “kleptocracy,” or simply an “aristocracy,” but in any case, it is the normal way that Governments have been throughout recorded history (some of them have had single-person dictators, but, even then, they were an aristocracy of wealth, which was concentrated in the king, emir, or other monarch). That breakthrough first study, in 2014, was brilliantly summarized and explained in a 6-minute video here. So: anyone who says that America’s Government is better than other Governments because it is a democracy is either a fool or else a liar. The researchers on that breakthrough study stated that because of limitations that existed then in the available data, it was not possible for them to determine with any precision how wealthy a person needed to be in order to be able to participate in the control over the U.S. Government, but ONLY that a person had to be in the top third of income, and that actually, if higher quality publicly available data were to become available beyond that amount of wealth, then the “oligarchy” would become able to be narrowed down to far fewer people than that; but, of course, no one yet knew how few this would ultimately be.

A study published two years later (in 2016) reviewed the entire relevant scientific literature as-of that time, and found that “responsiveness [to the American public’s preferences] seems to have declined during the late twentieth century” and might be getting worse yet than that: “The picture appears to be even more ominous — that is, opinion and policy are negatively related — on highly salient issues that attract media attention.” (Consequently: the more media-attention, the less that the Government’s policy will reflect the public’s preferences on the given issue. This is indirect proof that the media which the public are being exposed to are controlled by the aristocracy and thus focus on and propagandize for, whatever the aristocracy most want to fool the public about.) This scientific report stated, in its “Conclusions,” that, “the trends seem to be moving in the wrong direction from the standpoint of democratic theory — that is, people seem less and less likely to get what they say they want from government.”

Two years later still (in 2018), another huge breakthrough study was published, and it found that the wealthiest 1% of the wealthiest 1% of Americans — the wealthiest ten-thousandth of Americans — donate 57.16% of all the money that funds U.S. political campaigns. The “Top 400 Donors” (all of whom are multi-billionaires, not merely billionaires) donate 29.86%, or virtually 30%, of all political money, in the U.S. But, actually (as I documented in 2019 in regard to the 2016 U.S. Presidential elections): only billionaires (and an occasional mere centi-millionaire) who are among the ten largest donors to U.S. politics in a Presidential-election year, have any real impact in determining whom America’s next President will be. Only those ten ultra-rich Americans do. And, from one Presidential ‘election’ to the next, many of those ten people will be the same both times. On 14 November 2024, right after the 2024 elections, CBS News headlined “The megadonors who fueled Trump and the Republican Party and what they may want in the next 4 years”, but only incomplete publicly revealed dollar-numbers were available then. On December 1st, the numbers were still incomplete, but I pointed out that the biggest 2024 donor of all was the Swiss-American multibillionaire and ‘humanitarian’ Hansjörg Wyss, $475 million to Democratic Party propaganda-organizations, not broken down further as to which contests were targeted; so, he might have been Kamala Harris’s top benefactor. The Harris campaign seems to have depended even more than Trump’s did on hidden money-sources. By the time when all of the known numbers were in, the Musk (“SpaceX”) total to Trump was increased from its initial $118 million to have been at least $276 million. So far as I am able to determine, NONE of the top-ten donors was less than being a multibillionaire. Back in the times of this Century’s first decade, I was able to find one Presidential campaign top-ten donor who was only a centi-millionaire — apparently ONLY billionaires count any more in American politics.

Even though the fact that America is extremely corrupt at the top is heavily suppressed throughout the U.S. empire, it is becoming increasingly known to anyone who thinks at all seriously about the matter — especially now that Donald Trump is again in power and is virtually flaunting the fact in his second term. On 11 June 2024, I had headlined “Biden is the most corrupt President in U.S. history.”, but Trump seems determined to exceed even him: Here is a good example of how corrupt the U.S. now IS:

senchrismurphy

A post shared by @senchrismurphy

and, if you don’t believe it, HERE is the source he is speaking from.

This is a very dire situation. And the available data for international comparisons suggests that America probably isn’t much more of a dictatorship than the average country is.

Consequently, anyone who thinks that the problem here is ONLY that democracy must be made DURABLE, is unknowing about the problem that democracy DOES NOT EVEN EXIST: that it has been, and is constantly being, poisoned to death, by corruption (including not just of the Government, but of the press, and of the social sciences, and of academia, and of think tanks and other ‘non-profits’, not MERELY of for-profit corporations) — all to fool the public for the benefit of the billionaires, at the public’s expense. This is the reality, but I find individuals to be extremely resistant to it: some say they know it, but even they don’t THINK accordingly. They still think as-if this is a democracy — even though they (think they) KNOW that it ISN’T.

Here is why this is urgently important: The myth that America is a democracy endangers the world enormously. All of the WW3 (WW III, World War Three) dangers that exist — between the U.S. empire versus Russia, and between the U.S. empire versus China, and between the Israel-U.S.-UK-Germany empire versus Iran and Palestinians— are based upon the aggressor, the U.S. and its colonies or ‘allies’, calling the leader of each country they are targeting for take-over, an “autocrat” or a “dictator,” in order to fool their OWN populace into thinking THEIR OWN nation to be on the side of “democracy” against “dictatorship,” though that’s a filthy lie about itself, and even about what a democracy actually IS. A democracy IS a national Government that has the same Governmental policy-priorities that its entire citizenry or “public” do. A democracy is NOT the same thing as a nation whose system of selecting the leaders of its Government is public elections between candidates of competing political Parties — THAT SYSTEM FAILS because the super-rich co-opt, take over, it, by controlling the ‘news’-media, academia, etc., in order to fool voters their way. And the super-rich become even RICHER by means of their then controlling the Government by means of this fake ‘democracy’. This is 100% corruption. By the super-rich. It is ruthless, and it succeeds — it succeeds IN this Governmental system that is based upon elections by the public choosing between political campaigns that are contests between candidates of political Parties that are controlled by their super-rich. And so, of course, the aristocrats, the billionaires, want the public to be fooled to believe that THIS TYPE of Governmental system IS “democracy.” Consistently, it turns out to be aristocracy instead — by means of the super-rich fooling the public. All of the available reliable data show this to be the case.

Corruption is a HUGE problem, vastly under-estimated, which has never been addressed — not EVEN in the U.S. Constitution (which I still consider to be better than any other of the over-a-hundred other national Constitutions I’ve read). Only a Constitution that allows for Amendments can even POSSIBLY be and become ever-better as, a democratic Constitution; and, fortunately, ours does. I am in the process of thinking through what the NECESSARY conditions are in order for a person to reasonably expect a democracy to come into existence and then be DURABLE — NOT like all other supposed ‘democracies’ are and have been. Only after this has been done can one even so much as CONSIDER what Amendment will be needed in one’s own nation’s Constitution in order to transition the Government into BECOMING and then STAYING a democracy. All of the philosophers have failed miserably — none can be cited on this. We need to do much better than that. We need to take an entirely scientific approach.

In order to see where I presently am in my thinking about this, click here; and, if you then want to comment to me with your thoughts about the matter, click here. (Reader-comments have helped me to improve my proposal. I appreciate them.) However, if you are unwilling to consider doing away with public political campaigns, Parties, and elections, then — since all of those would need to be replaced in order to have any realistic possibility of establishing a democracy that can remain one — then you wouldn’t be interested in reading any further from me about this.

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Investigative historian Eric Zuesse’s latest book, AMERICA’S EMPIRE OF EVIL: Hitler’s Posthumous Victory, and Why the Social Sciences Need to Change, is about how America took over the world after World War II in order to enslave it to U.S.-and-allied billionaires. Their cartels extract the world’s wealth by control of not only their ‘news’ media but the social ‘sciences’ — duping the public.