The Biggest Problem of All Is the American System as Designed, but We Can Still Fix It

There have been a lot of recriminations and infighting on the left since the election, as everyone who did not vote for Donald Trump struggles to figure out how to build a durable coalition in the face of a true political realignment that threatens to shut the Democrats out of power for a generation or more. People have blamed the left, liberals, the media, the Democratic Party—you name it—and every earnest critique has had varying degrees of truth to it. We all have a hand in a failure this large.

But the root of the failure, as proven by the American electorate in every presidential change election save for one since 2008, is the American experiment itself.

It does not work for everyone. It is designed to serve the powerful, and people know it. Politicians who wax poetic about the establishment are allying themselves with the declared enemies of the American electorate, and they have been humbled by Donald freaking Trump who figured out how to play this game better than anyone else. While it is easy to say that this system does not work, and to a degree that is true, it’s far more accurate to say that this system of American governance is working almost exactly as it was designed.

Americans tell ourselves a lot of comforting lies about the supposed wisdom of our Founding Fathers, many who by the way, were in their 20s and 30s (the average age of a Founding Father was 44). Go to your local bar this weekend and see if you see any Founding Father types there. Check out the youngest guys in the bar, would you want to watch a play dramatizing the wisdom of their lived experience? There is an extremely childish notion to America’s conception of our Founding Fathers in that many think all these men were wise aged geniuses because they wore white wigs.

American voters correctly identify our government’s modern problems, but largely miss connecting it to our foundational document, and instead we believe a mythos about it that simply is not true. What we observe today is what its authors wanted. Our Founders were incredibly explicit in their desire to build a state for their budding aristocracy that was funded by slavery in both the north and the south. The story of our birth is not of principled revolt, but of aristocratic economic interests.

Our constitution is a compromise, as both slave owners in the south and slave financiers in the north did not have to come together for an agreement, it was just in their best interests if they could find some common ground to work together and streamline their slavery operation. This is how we wind up with things like Article 1, Section 2, Clause 3, also known as the “three-fifths compromise” where our Founding Fathers came to the conclusion that Black people were only worth three-fifths of a person in the eyes of this new America. Any analysis of the constitution that does not center the issue of its time, slavery, completely misses the point of how and why the United States was formed in the first place.

Mississippi, the first of seven states to secede in 1861, was very clear about this in their explanation as to why they were seceding from a union fighting to ban slavery to form a Confederacy that preserved it.

Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery – the greatest material interest of the world…and a blow at slavery is a blow at commerce and civilization.

White men who owned land were only allowed to vote in this new world. Women have had the vote for fifteen years longer than slavery was a legal institution in the United States. All this bullshit about freedom and democracy and blah blah blah is no different from the North Korean anchors telling you that Kim Jong-Un yet again made 19 holes in one in an 18-hole round of golf. This psychotic country is and always has been a playground for white male capital.

That doesn’t mean all the Founders’ ideas were bunk. The First Amendment is the greatest victory for actual freedom in the history of mankind. There is an infrastructure that resembles normal governance in which to work with here, it just requires matching it to the world we do and want to live in, instead of the one our ancient aristocrats envisioned for their slave economy that is now managing our modern times.

People look at Washington D.C. as a hindrance on their lives and see its institutions perpetually in thrall to billionaires who are leeches on society, making life more difficult for everyone else, and they’re right. But that’s how this is all supposed to work! The Senate is explicitly there to slow down any progress made in the House. Property is valued more than people because this government initially agreed that people were property, and those who owned property were the only ones who should have a say in this country’s future.

The story of America from the Federalist Papers onward is a nation struggling to reframe its management of a slave economy towards its lofty rhetoric about freedom for all men. Slavery still exists in America today because of a loophole in the 13th amendment so large you could drive a prison industrial complex-sized truck through it. We are more delusional than North Koreans who believe Kim Jong-Un’s handicap is negative infinity if we think this place is designed around freedom for everyone.

Americans have been demanding serious reform of how this system works at least since the days of hope and change, although I would assert it dates back to the original modern realignment of 1992 where another angry billionaire pointing to charts captured America’s attention. The Democrats operate under a myth where Bill Clinton was an electoral powerhouse and their full-throated embrace of the neoliberal establishment was a wild success story, but the fact of the matter is that Clinton was the beneficiary of one of the largest defections of voters from one party in American history. All over a revulsion to the status quo acknowledged by Ross Perot.

Fun fact: Bill Clinton got less of the popular vote than Trump did both times they won. 2016 Trump beat 1992 Clinton 46.1 percent to 43 percent, and with 98.7 percent of the vote counted, 2024 Trump is beating 1996 Clinton, 50 percent to 49.2 percent. If you ever needed proof that campaigning against the American establishment is more effective than running alongside it, there you go.

Donald Trump took over the Republican Party because he correctly identified the defenders of the billionaire class as full of shit and called them out on it. He harnessed the real rage Americans have long felt towards a government that opinion polls suggest we began to distrust en masse around the time of Vietnam and Watergate, and channeled it in hateful directions. The imperial mask has slipped off America over the last half-century, with its true face fully revealed in the genocide of Gaza, and establishment Democratic politicians have proven themselves to be the last ones on the planet to see this half-century trend. The only reason Trump has been so successful in this fight against the establishment is that there has been no counterweight to it from a party defined by its love of the status quo and temerity to change it.

Radical Reform Doesn’t Need to Be Radical

As I noted in my critique of lefties, a 2023 report by The Movement for Black Lives and GenForward Research found that “abolish the police” is barely supported in the Black community, but “when asked about supporting or opposing divesting from police departments and putting part of police budgets toward healthcare, education, and housing, support among respondents increased to 67%.”

I think this dynamic is generally how you could view large-scale reform to the American government and how most Americans would interpret it. Abolishing the Supreme Court is never going to happen and pursuing it would further entrench Trumpists in office, but did you know that the reason we have nine justices is because of a law from 1869? We are stuck at 435 Representatives in the House, supposedly the body most representative of the people, because of a 1929 law which assumed a very different America than the one we live in today. Congress has immense power to create transformative change, and the retreat from the ambition expressed by the Democratic Party in the New Deal and Great Society of the 20th century is a retreat from the best parts of the Founders’ vision.

They’re called amendments for a reason and the Founders didn’t think we would stop at ten. While the tenth has been cited in all sorts of anti-democratic states’ rights bullshit, the fact is that the message in “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people” is that the Founders looked at the constitution as a living document. Not all of them favored slavery, just the ones who won the debate, and they helped design a system where any party who controls both the presidency and Congress can do a lot to change this system if they wanted to.

Many may roll their eyes at this suggestion and give into fatalism and point to Trump’s reactionary Supreme Court as a perpetual obstacle to any real reform, and this is true, but only if we accept the world that Marbury v. Madison delivered to us. Perhaps the biggest misconception about American governance is that judicial reform, the basis of the Supreme Court having the final say about legislation, isn’t in the constitution, and we don’t actually have to put up with this bullshit where nine unelected schmucks in robes are the final arbiter on what nice things Americans can have. The Supreme Court literally gave itself this vast anti-democratic power, and if you’re wondering why they did this, the first time they used this power was in Dred Scott v. Sanford where they said Congress had no right to ban slavery while returning a freed man to his captors.

There is no reason that a more ambitious political party could not attempt to rip this unearned power away from the Court and use American politicians’ favorite thing as political cover, appealing to the wisdom of America’s Founders. Even in their slave-driven vision of the United States, they still didn’t think the Supreme Court should functionally be an unelected super-legislature with veto power over everything. A lot of what we believe is impossible to change is actually realistic if we are willing to aggressively take on the obstacles that have deliberately been placed in our way, and get over the gigantic mental block that the American government is a static enterprise rooted in the 18th century. There’s no reason the Senate couldn’t pass a bill abolishing itself. Sure, that notion is radical and would never ever get through the current Senate, but assuming we know what the future portends has already proven to be a fool’s errand in the Trump era, and if the Democrats began floating ideas for real reform now, there’s no predicting where it may take us down the road. At the very least, they would finally begin to look like they are responsive to voters’ demand for transformative change.

There is something to be said about the romanticized idea of the American government, but instead of looking at it as some altruistic and selfless form of governance bestowed onto us by wise elders rapping over sick beats, we should see it as a handful of folks fighting with the institution of slavery and trying to install trap doors for future Americans to escape from this 18th century slave economy. The blue dog Democrats have long been obstacles to progress in the House, but it’s encouraging to see Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, who won her Republican-leaning district, launch a Congressional task force to consider reforms to its winner-take-all electoral system. More Democrats should follow their lead in investigating specific aspects of how American governance actually works and what parts of it could be modernized or eliminated and how Congress can use their vast powers to help usher that change along.

People have been voting against the status quo for a very long time, and the Democrats have let two immensely talented politicians blind them to that fact. Americans are so sick of this unfair system that they are willing to vote for someone explicitly promising to destroy it over someone defending it–twice. There is a strong case to be made for historic, precedented reform of this American experiment as a matter of electoral expediency, it just requires the Democratic Party to accept that defending the establishment only benefits their own aristocracy at the expense of everyone else. Whatever the Democratic Party becomes next, if serious reform of American governance is not part of its platform, it will fail just like this version did.