America Was Never a Democracy By Lizzie O'Leary

[justaprogressive]

I think so much of the understanding of our country’s mythology can be explained by: “History is written by the victors.” But this goes deeper than that. It feels like this foundational American myth that governments and American organizations have really latched on to. What do you think gives it the emotional potency that goes beyond “These were the people in power who wrote down their version of what happened”?

I think the ultimate myth that we tell ourselves in the U.S. is that our founders created a democracy. That’s not the full story. Those men wanted an empire that actually wasn’t that different from what England was doing. They wanted to control land and people who actually didn’t have elections, representation, accountability, and any say in what that government would be. And at the same time, they were building up, while extremely limited, a representative democracy. They were also building out an empire, and that empire functioned by top-down tyrannical rule. That’s the part of the story that every side of the political spectrum gets wrong.

Even with “No Kings” protests—the whole name of the protest is the idea that our Founding Fathers said no to monarchy, to tyrants, and threw that off. What is more accurate is that they didn’t want to be colonial subjects themselves but still wanted to be an empire. They just wanted to be the center of power of that empire.

We’re experiencing the rise of authoritarianism in the U.S., and people are looking around and saying, “Where did this come from? How could this be happening?” They’re looking to Hungary and Germany and Russia, for example. The truth is, part of our government, since the founding, has been authoritarian. Part of our government has always governed people without their consent, without elections, without constitutional norms, without limits, without the kind of balance of power that we’re all used to. And it’s changed over time, but that first group of people that were governed that way here were Indigenous people. So much of what the current administration is doing isn’t borrowing from right-wing leaders from other parts of the globe or other parts of history; it’s just borrowing from this body of American law that’s always existed. That’s why it’s been so hard to fight: It’s baked into the system.

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2026/07/america-250-years-celebration-declaration-of-independence-native-americans-genocide.html