At the time of the Revolution in America, the ideal of Democracy looked very much like Progress.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

It’s easy to issue a critique of even that. The Founders proclaim equality and some (mostly undefined) rights, but only for landowning white men in practice. Moreover, we have to accept that while these rights might be inalienable, they are not innate. They are rather gifts, from the Deist God, bestowed upon his chosen here in the colonies, and intended perhaps to be proselytized until the good news would be spread, and Equality would extend to “all men” in the real world, not just in theory.

Most of the guys who signed that Declaration owned other human beings, and in fact did not believe in Liberty for their chattel, much less Equality in any way but the most ethereal and abstract.

In essence, while the Fathers claimed most righteously to be founding a democracy, what they were really doing was making their world a better place for capitalism, and most specifically, for capitalists. For themselves and for their educated, owning class. For their inheritors.

We are living with the profound consequences of that split between the proclaimed ideal and the rather more brutal reality right down to this day hundreds of years later.

It was called the Declaration of Independence. It could just as easily, and more truthfully, be called a declaration of Exceptionalism.

The founding belief of what would become the Empire is that the chosen here on the sacred turf of the New World were both morally and systemically better than anyone else.

Better than the King and his capital-stealing taxes, for one. But not just the King. Anyone who was what we call today an ‘autocrat’, and also any people who still lived under one and had not yet been Liberated from their lives of darkness.

Everybody was equal, but only in theory. In practice, we had better ideas, better lives, and were thus just better full stop. We were just so dang smart, and clever, and innovative, and we thus self-evidently deserved all the good things that our Creator had bestowed, on us, as opposed to the darkies who picked our cotton, or the Injuns in the way of our manifest destiny, and our train tracks–or the Hindoos, or the Mussulman praying to something named Allah instead of Creator.

As we preached this new gospel, first among ourselves and then on the stage of the world, it was always in the name of Democracy, and never the more accurate label of capitalism.

It sounded nicer, and more egalitarian, even though it was something of a puppet show. Women wouldn’t be allowed to exercise their democratic franchise for over a hundred years. Gradually it was extended to them, and to the slaves of all colors who didn’t own any land. This too is often cited as a prime example of Progress.

But it wasn’t, in actual fact.

First of all, in 100+ years, Power had sorted itself into two Parties, which came to represent the interests of different parts of the Elite–the owning classes. Gaining the power to vote for either meant less and less to your own liberty or equality. Power could finally afford to let a woman or a black man vote, because they had fewer and fewer choices that made a damn bit of difference. They had the illusion of freedom without the reality of freedom. As Malcolm X put it, the institution of slavery never went away. It was just mainstreamed and extended to all the races (and genders, dare we say, in our woke age).

God had indeed blessed the Owners with a rich abundance of natural resources and ‘virgin’ land, with nothing living on it except buffalo and savages. It might have been enough. But by the late 19th century, the plucky little capitalist-‘democracy’ started to morph into an Empire, overthrowing governments in Hawaii and the Philippines among others, and always installing vast military bases wherever it conquered. Always in the name of spreading the superior ideal of Democracy, not in the more accurate names of capitalism and imperialism.

After the second world war, and into the one called ‘cold’, the masks came off. America was avowedly capitalist and imperialist and militarist, always still in the name of our ‘freedoms’, of course. We’ll fight the commies in Korea and Vietnam so we don’t have to fight them here!

It’s the right thing to do. We need to protect, we need to liberate, we need to make the world safe for capital, er … democracy. And as goes General Motors, so goes the nation.

You used to have to settle for an icebox. Now you get a fridge. You used to have to settle for Walter Cronkite, and now you have a smartphone.

One Nation. Under a blood god. Liberty for all. Justice for all, why not?

***

Today I listened to an American citizen who was born in China and currently resides in Bali. To Carl Zha, and a couple of his friends, who have a little more perspective on things than those of us who grew up more or less brainwashed in the heart of the Empire.

I found it enlightening.

IN-DEPTH: Chinese-Russian History with Mark Sleboda & Carl Zha

See also:

A Conversation About Imperialism with Dr Vijay Prashad and Carl Zha