The Founding Fathers Were Correct- Just Not in the Way You'd Thought

    

     I found this on my friend Wendy Corsi Staub's Facebook news feed. This revelation that Lawrence O'Donnell makes should not be a revelation, especially to an old political savant like me. But it is. I always knew the senators during the Continental Congress then, as now, were every bit the patrician white males as their Roman forebears. But I never looked at the US Senate as anything less than the upper chamber of a legislative branch that was anything other than a democracy, representative government of the people, for the people, by the people.

       It isn't.

     O'Donnell reminds us that the Senate was never about representative government because the Founding Fathers were only PLAYING at democracy, toying around with it. Their main priorities were in first, establishing our independence from a tyrannical monarchy and, secondly, to build a government that was so radically different from the British monarchy so that there wasn't even a passing resemblance to it.

      But what they came up with was nothing so novel or radical. They merely adopted a model that had been around until exactly 1300 years before, which was the end of the Roman Empire in AD 476. Since the earliest Romans had overthrown the tyrannical Etruscans, they'd set up a governing body called the Senate. Then, as now, the Senate was made of patrician, wealthy males. Then, as now, women were not allowed to vote. Then, as until after the Civil War and the 13th Amendment, slaves could not vote.

      In other words, then, as now, the Senate and the immense power within it, especially when they were a Republic and not an Empire, was left in the grasping hands of a small handful of rich men (back in Roman times, 300). The idea was never to share that power with anyone, at least until Octavian (the first successor to Caesar) came along and became its first Emperor. There was no lower chamber. There was just the senate and the Emperor. The rich got to call the shots because they were supposed to know better. Their very wealth was in and of itself supposed to be the sole indicator of their vaster intelligence and pragmatism.

      That hasn't changed. In fact, it's gotten worse, this fetish for electing rich white men to elected office, especially after the Powell Memo of August 1971. (Lewis Powell himself got appointed to the Supreme Court that same year). And even after 2000 years of the same dysfunctional model of letting rich white men call the shots, we're still subverting our own democracy by electing these psychopaths, with Donald Trump, the first billionaire "president", as the ultimate apotheosis (or nadir, depending on how one looks at it) of the Powell Memo.

      Considering that and our horrid track record (and dismal 40-45% voter turnouts even in general elections), perhaps the Founding Fathers were right. Perhaps the American people SHOULDN'T be given the right to vote. Or perhaps we need to restructure our government so that it is a truly representative government for which people can be proud to vote.