The United States Isn’t a Democracy—And Was Never Intended to Be

Voting has always been restricted to empower a minority

November 5, 2018—Voters cast ballots for early voting at the Los Angeles County Registrar’s office in Norwalk, Calif., a day ahead of the midterm elections. Photo: Frederic J. Brown/AFP/Getty Images

By Michael Todd Landis

While voters go to the polls and celebrate democracy in action, the sad truth is that the United States has never really been a functioning democracy.

Since the founding of the nation, a minority of wealthy white men has always ruled, using legal and extralegal strategies to deny representation to women, people of color, immigrants, poor people and indigenous Americans. What we forget, and must confront, is that this was by design. Explicit restrictions on popular voting were written into the Constitution and are still being used today, though in far less obvious ways.

From its inception in the hallowed halls of the Pennsylvania State House in 1787, the United States was intended to be a very limited democracy. The only part of the federal government elected by the people was the House of Representatives, yet even that chamber was skewed in favor of a minority because of the infamous Three-Fifths Clause of the Constitution. The Three-Fifths Clause boosted representation of white Southerners (who were in the decided minority in the new nation) by allowing them to count every three out of five enslaved people toward the overall population of their…