Is the United States truly a democracy? To Camila Vergara, the modern signs and all forgotten historical facts point to no.
Vergara is a postdoctoral research scholar at the Eric H. Holder Jr. Initiative for Civil and Political Rights at Columbia Law School. From a farmhouse in Los Ríos, Chile, where she grew up under the Augusto Pinochet regime in the late 20th century, Vergara spoke to Street Roots about the inequities of the U.S. system of government on the eve of President Joe Biden’s inauguration.
The U.S.-supported 1973 coup, which installed Pinochet and resulted in the death of socialist President Salvador Allende, yielded a dictatorship marked by human rights violations, market deregulation and privatization. By the late 1990s, Pinochet was out, and Chile was several years into its historic period of financial growth spurred by the neoliberal ideologies perpetuated by its former regime. At the time, Vergara was just beginning to make a name for herself as an economic journalist there.
She saw firsthand what she described as a slow, steady “oligarchization” process of the government as the country’s wealth grew and the divide between the powerful few in charge and the disenfranchised majority deepened. The constitution did little to truly protect the rights of the vulnerable; it had no teeth for the financially insecure to keep the upper echelons in check.
Vergara later researched constitutional processes in the U.S. under a Fulbright scholarship, delving deep into political theory while examining the democratic processes of pink-tide countries such as Ecuador, Bolivia and Venezuela: what worked and what didn’t work when it came to crafting a governmental system with direct representation.
Vergara came to understand that the ticket to true democracy lies in the gumption of bite-sized local assemblies with real decision-making power to keep elected officials in check. Today, she’s advising local groups in Chile as the country undergoes a new constitutional process following a national plebiscite that drew overwhelming approval from the voters.
Vergara will discuss all this and her latest book, “Systemic Corruption: Constitutional Ideas for an Anti-Oligarchic Republic,” at a virtual event — “Dismantling Fake Democracy. Creating Real Democracy” — on Feb. 3.
The event is hosted by the Oregon Community Rights Network, which works to educate the public about “the many systemic barriers to local democracy and decision-making,” according to state coordinator of the network, Nancy Ward.
If you go
WHAT: “Dismantling Fake Democracy. Creating Real Democracy,” featuring
Camila VergaraWHEN: 5:30 to 7 p.m. Wednesday, Feb. 3
HOW TO ATTEND: To request a link to the Zoom presentation, email info@orcrn.org
LEARN MORE: www.orcrn.org
GET INVOLVED: The event is hosted by the Oregon Community Rights Network, which is forming a chapter in Portland. For more information, visit facebook.com/communityrightsnowpdx
Jessica Pollard: In the progression of a democracy, as it morphs into an oligarchy, where on the spectrum did the United States fall before 2016, and where does it fall now, in your eyes?
Camila Vergara: The first democracy in the world, as we understand the analysis taught now, is the United States. However, if you go to the actual discussion of the Federal Convention, democracy was a dirty word. (James) Madison was very explicit about this. He said, “This is not a democracy; this is a republic.” And this means a government in which representation takes place. It’s not real democracy as the ancient democracy in which the people themselves were in. (Working) classes were paid to go to the assembly and could put their name forward to actually be in committees and make decisions.
It’s only in the 19th century, and at the beginning of the 20th, where democracy became a good word. It’s kind of like a co-optation of this label that really never materialized. And why has it never materialized? Because supposedly the states were too large to allow for the people themselves to be engaged in decision making. The representatives would unburden their regular citizens from running things and making decisions. So it was like a win-win situation. But it really wasn’t in the sense that it was also crafted as a way to — and it’s also explicit — to keep the people away from power.
But there has been a period of time where there was more equality and the state was more present and an equalizer in a way, during the FDR era. The same as in Europe. Thomas Piketty, the French historian (who wrote) “Capital in the 21st Century,” says, basically, that the odd period was the after-war period, from the 1940s to the ’70s. And that’s a moment that we think of as normal because it’s our generation, the generation of our parents in a way. It is not.
Piketty says that today we are at that level of inequality of the 1920s and even of the unscanned regime of France before the revolution. It’s not one guy that is corrupt. It’s not a party that is corrupt. It’s the system, how it works. This process of slow oligarchization of power, it’s more and more like a path dependency.
The Obama years were no FDR, you know. The level of inequality has just been growing steadily, and with no limits. Trump is just a manifestation that has to do with the disaffection that this causes the welfare of the white working class. In the 1950s, a Trump would not be available because the people would be more secure in their financial stability.
What we have entered now is what others have called precarity capitalism. If you’re fired from your job and you live paycheck to paycheck — even if you are in a management position — you have a status and you lose that; you’re in debt. Even if it doesn’t happen, it is a very threatening thought that would spark you into fighting for your own things against others. So this kind of helps Trump to be here. But he’s just one manifestation in this progressive inequality process.
Pollard: Do you think that the Biden administration in the U.S. might halt that progression, or do you think it’s going to further it?
Vergara: Further it. The policies that would put a stop to, or at least kind of ameliorate, the situation would be, for example, a wealth tax. I don’t see the Biden administration going for a wealth tax. All the things are going and they’re coming from previous administrations. They’re putting makeup on it and trying to make it fit. The idea that universal health care is something that (Biden) is not in favor of. He’s reproducing the insurance system, which is private. When Obama was elected, he campaigned for a public option, and he didn’t do it. He wanted it to all be bipartisan, and at the end, it was the worst of both worlds.
Insurance companies had 40 million captive clients, basically. And there was no control of prices, and no public option. The insurance (companies), they don’t compete, and they just basically profit. Whatever Biden does is going to keep reproducing the same system.
And the thing with systemic corruption is that it just keeps going. It is how the system works. He’s not someone that is trying to make it work. It’s just, you enact a law, and the law reproduces itself. So the worst offenders, if you will, are the ones who are negligent, that don’t do anything. So I don’t see a way that he’s going to put a stop to the oligarchization process.
Pollard: Are you able to identify any examples of modern day governments, democracies, republics or otherwise, that are free from this systemic corruption?
Vergara: I don’t think any of the governments that actually exist are free from systemic corruption. All of them, even the new ones that have been reformed — Ecuador and Bolivia and these experiments — are still very unequal. One way of understanding systemic corruption is that if you measure a gross domestic product that is collectively produced, it’s appropriated by the 1% at a 30% rate, and the majority has less, like 2% or 4%.
This is something that is happening all around the world, even in the democracies that are more equal. The new governments and constitutions have been trying to address it. In Ecuador, you can see that there is a battle going on between the central government and the local government. In Ecuador, you have the rights of the communities to be consulted, previous to any policy that (resources) could be extracted in their territory. So if you have oil in your community that the government wants to extract in order to redistribute to the people, to be good to the majority and make them wealthy, there is a stop. There is this struggle now between a government that is supposedly redistributive, versus the Indigenous communities in the Amazon, fighting back against the exploitation of gas and oil in their communities.
So I think there are examples, but they’re not really working perfectly well. The problem is there is local power and local organization there, but it’s not really connected to the constitutional framework. In a way, there’s no framework that gives the local assemblies united power over government.
So when we’re talking about the American Republic, when the Constitution was drafted, the town halls were very active. People were actually meeting there and demanding things from the local government. And (Thomas) Jefferson said this local organization should have been constitutionalized. It should have been given powers and recognized in the structure of government, but it wasn’t. So I think, after 240-something years, that we are at this moment of crisis in our constitutional frameworks. I think we are at the point where the institutions are so delegitimized and that you can actually think about going back to the Jeffersonian idea, and giving institutional form to the local assemblies as a way of vetoing bad policies, corrupt policies and laws, and initiating things that are not being initiated.
Pollard: How can people reclaim power from the ruling elites in a place like the U.S.?
Vergara: I think it can be done. We are in crisis, and there is a wanting of solutions. People, I think, voted for Biden as a lesser evil. There’s a lot of people who are disaffected. There’s The Movement for a People’s Party going on. There are the Democratic Socialists of America movement, which could be a party. And then you have the fringe neo-Nazi fascist whatever from the Republican Party that could also become a new force. Everything is at play today.
I think it is possible for people to reclaim power. And I think that could be done at the local level. Of course, we need to test it out. We cannot do something at the national federal level. So we either have a very engaged community that could do this, and we say: OK, we’re going to have local assemblies in every neighborhood, and we’re going to start making decisions, and we’re going to aggregate them. And the moment that we have a majority, we’re going to push it to our mayor, or whoever is in charge.
When you have the majority of people assembled making decisions, that is uncontestable. It’s not that you elected someone who could be manipulated or self-serving or serving an ideology. No, this is not a party thing. I think people should have their own judgment based on their lived experience at the local level. There is a wisdom there that the elites in Washington do not have. So I think we need to start valuing our own popular wisdom coming from below and start organizing for a political organ.
This is the first kind of step in giving power, reclaiming power. So it has to be from below and from the top, at some point, in a way, to legalize it. But I think that people do not have to ask permission from anyone to start assembling and making decisions. And that is very powerful. And of course, you also have the media to help you out. Local media, promoting and giving visibility to people’s power.
Q&A: Ralph Nader wants us to break through power (from 2016)
Pollard: Portland made a lot of headlines this summer for protests surrounding the Black Lives Matter uprising. And out of that, in our city, we’ve seen an increase in grassroots organizing, like mutual aid networks, and also things like eviction defense. Do you see this kind of organizing gaining traction through the Black Lives Matter movement as a step towards establishing that localized kind of power?
Vergara: Crisis in Greek means two things: breaking, and also an opportunity, in a way. There is a breaking and a way out. So when you are in a crisis of racial inequality and police brutality, you have people reacting that before were dormant.
These community centers that are everywhere in neighborhoods, like senior centers, we need to reclaim them, occupy them in a political manner for people to meet, and to have a routine of politics. And you need to harness that energy that was created in an extraordinary crisis moment, and kind of bring it back to the base in order to organize something that is permanent. So I think there is a great opportunity, because we are in crisis.
In Chile, these political and social organizations are overlapping, because the people that are participating are producing many things. They tell me we need to have a mutual aid kitchen or a common kitchen, a soup kitchen, in the same place that as the local council. Because people need to eat while they’re discussing politics. So everything has to be kind of in the same ecosystem, in a way.
Pollard: What role do you believe our engagement in social media might play in reclaiming our systems of government or, possibly, furthering this oligarchical process in the U.S.?
Vergara: There are two sides of the same coin. The good side is that we can break through the oligarchic media. You can bring a lot of visibility to what you’re doing in a way, of something that remains really obscure when it’s local. I think it is kind of a democratizing of the means of communication. So there’s not a monopoly anymore of what is visible and what is not.
In Chile, we had all this repression during the popular uprising. With people losing their eyes and all these things. People were with their phones, recording this. So it is there, and people know about it. And even if the state keeps repressing us, at least there’s a knowledge. The same way with Black Lives Matter. Without those videos that went viral online, it’s impossible that this would have happened.
The bad side is that the majority of people are either on Netflix or watching Instagram and cute puppies. That is very convenient for the powerful few. When people get together, the truth really comes out. But if you’re at home with your phone or with your computer, you don’t talk to anyone. So you have no idea, no way to know what is true and what is not. Your timeline or whatever social media you have is very different from mine. It’s catered. It’s an isolation of the individual from others, right? So in order to break that isolation, you need to get together. You need to pair it with organizing.
Pollard: Where do you see tech companies like Twitter, which recently banned former President Donald Trump from the platform, fitting in with this?
Vergara: The United States is the only country in the world in which free speech is absolute. There are no limits, federally at least. In every country in the world, there are federal laws for hate speech. The supremacist groups are banned. So all the IP addresses of all the supremacist groups in Germany, for example, are in the U.S. So the U.S. is the hub that allows for all this supremacy speech to go around. Now these corporations, Facebook and Twitter, have their own rules of engagement. They decide who should talk and who shouldn’t.
People are very happy because Trump was banned, but this is giving fuel to the other side saying the tech companies are these feudal lords making decisions that have more authority than the U.S. government. So they’re right. Even if they’re doing the correct thing of banning someone that is inciting violence, they are doing it in a private manner, which is equivalent to censoring within that sphere which is not really private. It is open to everybody, so it should be public.
Pollard: Various news outlets describe the right-wing extremist attack on the U.S. Capitol as a strike or attack on democracy. Is that how you would describe the events? And what long-term impact do you think that the attack will have on the U.S. government?
Vergara: I think that it should be described as an attempt of a self-coup. It’s actually the supporters of Trump, going and doing whatever he said that they should be doing. If you’re saying that this (election) was a fraud and you’re there to support the system, then you’re a patriot, not a traitor. And the problem with patriots and traitors is that it depends on who’s talking and from which perspective. So this representative government and the authority that is generated through the institutions and procedures of election, and passing from one government to the other, all these kinds of rituals are being shattered, I would say, almost permanently. It’s very similar to what happened with Obama, with the birther movement. We need to remember that Trump originated the birther movement. So many people, it was a fringe of them, thought that he was not the president, and this lingered. Now it has grown into this skepticism about the system as a whole.
You need something really different that could — not bring people together — but give reassurance somehow that the system could work really well. How can you convince people who think that the machines are being manipulated with an algorithm, that they will not be manipulated in the future? You never know. So this kind of like doubt of the system has never been before. And I think this is very difficult to repair. I think it could be repaired with popular power. Because the people that are Trump supporters could be in a neighborhood assembly and say, “OK, we’re participating, we have power here.” Even if they’re going to be a fringe. They will be a fringe because they are a lot of people together but neighborhoods are heterogeneous in a way. If you participate, and you know that you’re not being blocked from participation at the local level, you think that the system is more legitimate than if you only vote every four years.