Every resident of the U.S. empire is taught from a young age that we live in a democracy. No, not just a democracy, but the democracy. Sometimes this is tempered with “well, actually, it’s a democratic republic.” There’s usually some hemming and hawing about how the power is vested in the people, and the people exercise that power directly or indirectly. But is that true? What does it mean for “power to be vested” in the “people”? Which people?
In order to answer these questions, we have to examine several different layers of government through several different “branches.” We’ve all heard the division of the U.S. government into the legislative, executive, and judicial branches, a scheme that was originally put forward from the French monarchist and aristocrat Charles Louis de Secondat, better known by his title, the baron de La Brède et de Montesquieu (generally, we just call him Montesquieu), in the middle of the 1700s. It’s from Montesquieu that we get our political theory of the “separation of powers” and “checks and balances,” but originally the terms were used to mean checks and balances to prevent a monarchy from devolving into an autocracy.
Because the U.S. is a federated bourgeois republic, it has two major “layers” of politics, federal and state, and each of these layers has its own legislative, executive, and judicial branches. There are also a welter of local offices at the state level which are generally swapped back and forth between the prominent petit-bourgeois lawyers, business owners, and members of the local Chamber of Commerce.
In order to narrow the topic and provide clear examples, we will focus on the federal level and its three “branches.” For now, it suffices to note that the lower down on the state scale that one descends, the more intimately full of graft and naked political repression the system becomes.
Since the 2024 U.S. presidential elections are coming up, we will focus on the electoral process for the country’s executive branch.
The executive branch is embodied in the presidency; all other federal executive officers of the U.S. government are appointed by the president, and most judicial offices are as well. Many of those officers can be fired for any or no reason, giving them a theoretical absolute loyalty to the person of the president. Violation of this loyalty, violation of a presidential directive, or even just irritating the president, can cause an officer to be removed from their job.
Although the executive branch was initially conceived of as being fairly small and circumscribed to the power to execute wars and engage in foreign diplomacy, the power of the branch has grown in leaps and bounds since 1860 and it is now by far the most powerful constituent of the U.S. government. The executive branch now includes every administrative department of the federal state: the Departments of Agriculture, Commerce, Defense, Education, Energy, Health and Human Services, Homeland Security, Housing and Urban Development, the Interior, Justice, Labor, State, Transportation, the Treasury, and Veterans Affairs. There are hundreds of executive agencies that fall under the president as well including the Administration for Children and Families, Agency for International Development (USAID), the CIA, Environmental Protection Agency, the Federal Reserve, the Federal Communications Commission, the Federal Trade Commission, NASA, the National Labor Relations Board, the Small Business Administration, the Social Security Administration, the Postal Service, the CDC, the Census Bureau, and on and on. This massive array of bureaucrats and functionaries answer to the White House.
Electing a President
How is the president chosen? Well, here we have one of the central myths of the American ruling class, and that is the primacy of voting during presidential election season.
By law, candidates for president must:
- Be natural born citizens of the United States,
- Be at least 35 years old, and
- Have been residing in the United States for 14 years prior to running.
These factors alone do not qualify someone to run for the presidency, however. They must also pass the hurdles set forward for ballot access in each of the 50 states and the city of Washington D.C. in order to appear on the state ballots. A candidate who does not appear on a presidential ballot materially is unable to win the presidency. It is functionally impossible to raise sufficient awareness among the entire voting population of the U.S. to get the number of write-in votes required to secure even a single state delegate, let alone the presidency. Some states do not permit write-ins — Arkansas, Alaska, Hawaii, Louisiana, Mississippi, Nevada, New Mexico, Oklahoma, South Carolina, and South Dakota do not permit write-in candidates.
Altogether, that makes 57 delegates unavailable for write-in candidates. A majority of 270 electoral votes, out of a total 538, is required to win the presidency. Thus, the total pool of available electors to those who do not make ballot access is only 481. A candidate that didn’t have ballot access would be required to win 56% of the electoral college (of which, more below) in order to win the presidency. If no one wins the required majority of electoral votes, the sitting House of Representatives elects the president.
In nine states, candidates don’t need to do anything special to be eligible to receive write-in votes. In fully 31 states, write-in candidates need to file special paperwork for write-in votes to count for their candidacy, which represents yet another hurdle to outsiders.
Ballot Access
What’s required for a candidate to appear on the presidential ballot? In the 2024 election, as in most U.S. presidential elections before it, the Democratic and Republican candidates appear on the ballots automatically. This is because the Democratic and Republican parties write all of the election rules and sit as the Secretary of State in every state. In order to appear on the state ballots, independent candidates or those running from parties other than the two dominant ones are required, in most states, to garner a number of signatures to present to the state government. This ranges based on the state; Idaho requires only 1,000 “verified” signatures, while Florida requires an enormous 145,040 signatures and California an overwhelming 219,403 signatures.
To appear on every ballot in the U.S., candidates would have to collect a total of 952,807 verified signatures. To be verified, generally a signature must also have an associated street address which can be confirmed. In almost all states, these petitions are collected, examined, and processed by the Secretary of State — a state official appointed by the state governor and a member of one of the two major parties. How the Secretary of State confirms and strikes names off the petitions differs depending on the state, but typically one-third of the submitted signatures are immediately invalidated at random and the remaining half are checked to see if the names comport with state records of addresses. Should any address be incorrectly entered or not updated in the state’s own record, that name is struck from the petition. Petitioners generally understand that, in order to pass through these filters, they must gather double the number of signatures that the law requires. This means that, in order to appear on every ballot in the United States, a third party candidate must gather 2 million signatures. No third party candidate has ever appeared on every ballot; the most that any third-party ever appeared on was the run by Ralph Nader in the year 2000.
136 million people, 54% of the voting age population, voted in the 2016 presidential election, and that was a particularly high turnout. That means, before any vote is cast, third party candidates must gather roughly 2% of the eligible voting population, that is, the group actually voting, in signatures. The infrastructure required to stage even a preliminary campaign of this nature doesn’t spring up overnight, nor is it free of charge, and it only represents the very first hurdle for a third electoral party.
Again, it is impossible to stress strongly enough that these petitions are examined and often thrown out by party incumbents from one of the existing parties — parties that have automatic ballot access, and are integrated at every level with the state government and, in many places, with the state election machinery. Of late, Democrats have been suing to remove ballot access from third parties on various manufactured grounds: misleading petition-gatherers, voters who asked for their signatures to be removed, unverified signatures, etc. Anything to keep the monopoly of power concentrated in as few hands as possible.
The Electoral College and Delegate Apportionment
Should one, fighting off both the Democratic and Republican party machines, manage to appear on a ballot or become a potential write-in candidate, and should one win a portion of votes in any given state that would permit one to have presidential delegates sent to the so-called Electoral College, the electoral process presents itself as the next gatekeeper. Each state determines how the delegates it sends to the Electoral College (a meeting of “electors”) are required to vote.
In most states, the political parties each create a slate of electors. Thus, there is a Democratic elector list and a Republican elector list. The U.S. presidential election is actually to pick which party will send electors to the vote for president. Some states have laws requiring the electors to vote for the party candidate that wins the state’s popular vote. 21 states have no laws preventing electors from voting for whoever they want to. Of the 30 states that have laws governing electors’ votes, many of them are non-binding and have no sanctions attached, relying on the elector’s pledged word.
In 48 states and Washington D.C., the winner of the state’s popular vote takes all the electors to the Electoral College. That means it is not enough for a third party candidate to build up a broad base of diffuse support; to win electors they must win states outright. The votes of these electors are then tallied and read into a joint session of the Federal Congress and the President of the Senate declares the winner of the election. At each step of the way, candidates may be disqualified by the hurdles they face, all of which are administered by partisan members of an existing bourgeois party.
The Cost
The biggest prohibiting factor is the cost of running an election. In 2016, Hilary Clinton’s presidential campaign spent $768 million and Trump’s campaign spent $398 million. The analysts at MediaQuant estimated that Trump received approximately $5 billion in free media coverage through news and other sources while Clinton received around $3.24 billion. In 2020, the total amount of political spending rose to $14 billion by all parties. This money is spent on paid advertising, consultants, and travel, but it is also used to establish on-the-ground operations and campaign centers.
Who supplies the money for these campaigns? How is it possible to compete? The capitalist class overwhelmingly pays for presidential campaigns. Hilary Clinton’s 2016 run was financed by Facebook founder Dustin Moskovitz ($35 million), hedge fund president Donald Sussman ($21 million), the Pritzkers ($12.6 million), the Saban Capital Group ($10 million), George Soros ($9.5 million), Slim-Fast owner Daniel Abraham ($9 million), Newsweb founder Fred Eychaner ($8 million), Euclidean Capital manager James Simons ($7 million), Henry Laufer of investment firm Renaissance Technologies ($5.5 million), Laure Woods ($5 million), etc.
The existing capitalist parties themselves devote resources to these campaigns. They are legal entities with a legal corporate existence under U.S. law. The Democratic Party, for instance, during the 2022 midterm elections, spent $200 million on administrative staff, nearly $100 million on campaigns, $200 million on fundraising efforts, $750 million on media purchases, $100 million on strategy, and $300 million on party salaries. Between Democrats and Republicans, nearly $4 billion dollars was spent during that election cycle.
It is impossible for a campaign to succeed without the backing of the moneyed interests of the capitalist class. There is simply no way to assemble enough resources in a single place to challenge this behemoth system — and this is on top of the other hurdles that the campaign faces above.
The Final Line of Defense: The Constitution
“Even if the capitalist class were law-abiding enough, or had miscalculated public opinion enough, to wait until the socialists had got a majority at the ballot box in some presidential election, they would then refuse to vacate their offices, or to recognise the election, and with the Senate and the military in their hands would calmly proceed to seat those candidates for President, etc., who had received the highest votes from the capitalist electorate…. We have often seen the capitalist class invoke the aid of the Supreme Court in order to save it some petty annoyance by declaring unconstitutional some so-called labour or other legislation. Now I can conceive of no reason why this same Supreme Court cannot be invoked to declare unconstitutional any or all electoral victories of the socialist party.
James Connolly, Ballots, Bullets, or –, The International Socialist Review (Oct. 1909)
… I consider that if the capitalist class appealed to the Supreme Court and interrogated it to declare whether a political party which aimed at overthrowing the constitution of the United States could legally operate to that end within the constitution of the United States the answer in the negative which that Court would undoubtedly give would not only be entirely logical, but would also be extremely likely to satisfy every shallow thinker and fanatical ancestor-worshipper in the country.”
As we have outlined in other articles, the capitalist class has now, and has always had, complete capture of the United States Supreme Court. In addition, it has the loyalty of the highly reactionary caste of career members of the Armed Services and, as James Connolly noted as long as a century ago, it commands the allegiance of the entire legislative branch of the U.S. state. Further, it has control of an impressive apparatus of intelligence services created in the wake of World War II, which it, as we have covered, has parlayed into an all-pervasive system of repression.
The argument here risks expanding into other parts of the system of state control; the judicial and legislative branches are beyond the scope of the current work. The executive branch alone, however, commands sufficient power in the form of the police (which are part of the state-level executive apparatus), the armed forces (federal-level executive), and the intelligence agencies (federal-level executive as well) to act as a final backstop.
Should anyone ever manage to weather the storms listed above and, against the will of the moneyed owners of property, accede to the presidency, they would also be forced to face those three mighty arms of capitalist class-power. This is entirely discounting the possibility of what the kids are calling “ratfucking” — outright stealing an election for the chosen representative of capital.
Remember the limits, the horizon set by the owners of the real power in this country, when it comes to “elections.” Free and fair — but free and fair for which class?
