We hear a lot from the news about the tyranny of dictatorships, which seems to make sense since many dictators have little reason to heed the wishes of the citizens. But we also hear a lot about the tyranny of voters having too much control, such as in stories about:
1. The Electoral College - how it's supposed to act as a stop against the raw will of the people
2. Socialism or Communism - How it empowers the poor (which is bad?) and removes "freedom"
3. Whether poor people even deserve to vote - Voter ID laws, polling station availability, etc.
This seems a little odd at first glance. If freedom from dictatorships is good, isn't it even better to move the slider of self-governance farther and farther towards direct rule by citizens? This is the lonely mountain that "Liberalism" wants to sit on - a balance between tyranny of the very few on one side and tyranny of the mob on the other side.
Get those bibs on because it's time to start chewing on the history of Liberalism!
We're not talking about "liberals vs. conservatives" here, but rather Liberalism in the sense of "protecting the freedom of the individual". This idea was growing due to increasing European wealth alongside the increasingly ineffective rule by Monarchy in the 1700-1800 period. There were a lot of educated elites who were sick of having to bow down to kings - they wanted a much bigger say in how things worked, especially in the freedom to keep and use their wealth.
(Side note: This is where the origin of the modern-day phrase “liberal elite” is inspired. Republican messaging uses this to pit socially conservative working-class folks against the image of rich, educated city folks. The phrase “liberal elite” historically means “the wealthy who desire political autonomy” which is who both the Democrats and Republicans serve. Consider the Democrat’s version of the phrase “corporate interests”. It’s the same thing.)
From the beginning, Liberalism was focused on freedoms for the wealthy, especially where the wealthy felt like they weren't consulted by the government. This is what gave rise to "No taxation without representation." It was not the common people who were stoked for this revolution, but rather the big shot capitalists who felt held back by imperial authorities.
Just like today, though, they still had to win the support of the common people. In that respect, the fancy talk about freedom and liberty went down smooth. Right away, this discussion took on a hypocritical tone. USA's elites were publishing books about the noble nature of a free man -- it was wrong to enslave such a man by taxing him without giving him a say in government. At the same time, they were also piling up wealth directly from slaves. When challenged by English writers and local abolitionists, USA was quick to evolve the message - adding nuances about people who deserved to be free versus those people who were deemed destined to be slaves.
(Side note: It is true that not every founder was wholly comfortable with slavery. A few of them wrote about their personal distaste for slavery but nearly all of them still owned slaves and still chose the viability of the new nation above their concerns about slavery. The northern states had less economic dependence on slavery, so abolitionist movements gained a lot of momentum among those people who were free to make the ethical choice without it impacting their personal wealth. As you can see in the run-up to the Civil War, there was a continuous balance point in legislation around slavery to keep the slavers comfortable while tossing a few bones of incremental progress to the abolitionists. There are details I am glossing over, but the point is that Liberalism is about the wealthy, at the expense of the poor, and always has been.)
Initially, the great freedoms of Liberalism were given only to white business owners. This is sometimes phrased as "landowners" but we aren't talking about people who owned their own house but rather owned a means of producing wealth such as a plantation or factory. As to why they had to be white, freedoms could only be applied to the non-slave peoples, or else the support for revolution could never have come! Most of the wealth in the country was being generated by slaves, so a revolution into a non-slave state would have been economically impossible (for the wealthy) and the state would have failed (for the wealthy). Slavery could not have been abolished at the founding of the USA or the USA would not have survived in a form that served the wealthy.
(Side note: Slavery *was* abolished in 1791 in a revolution on the island of Haiti, and a small independent and slave-free nation was created. It was then endlessly attacked by Liberal and Imperial powers. So that was sort of like… you know, an alternative to keeping millions of people in slavery. However, there was far less profit in such an enterprise.)
That political reality is proven by the early elections in 1789 where the voter turnout was 1-5% of adult population - those were the only people who were allowed to vote! The American revolution took us from a monarchy across the sea to rule by the wealthy at home.
(Side note: Today, the USA allows a lot more people to vote and turnout gets as high as 60%. Of course, lots of people are still unable to vote and there's no urgency to fix that, as it’s generally seen as a feature and not a bug by the wealthy. Even if they do vote, they are choosing between stooges carefully selected and propped up by the wealthy.)
In that sense, the Revolutionary War certainly was not rugged individuals fighting for their personal freedoms but rather just like any other war - poor laborers being smashed against each other so that wealthy masters could increase their stake on the global stage.
Within this frame, it is clear why we see so much hand-wringing and bullshitting about the perils of socialism or anything that grants more power the average person. In the very same way that the wealthy did not want to share power with a king, they also did not want to share power with their laborers. The people producing the wealth of the nation were either literally or figuratively enslaved by the wealthy. Giving them a say in government would only erode the FREEDOM of the wealthy! (*eagle screech here*)
But didn't the Civil War lead to the abolition of slavery? Yes, but the living arrangement for nearly all former slaves after abolition hardly changed. The local governments still enforced laws treating black people as an underclass, and black people still worked for subsistence for the local wealthy. In fact, several writers (including pro-slavery and anti-slavery) commented that abolishing slavery would make the slaves worse off, because they were better cared for by a master who had to protect his slave’s lifetime productivity, rather than just from paycheck to paycheck!
Certainly, the wage-slavery of the working class (including most white people btw) remained merciless up until the socialist/communist ideologies started to form as a reaction to the massive production gains of the industrial revolution. Ironic, that a change in global economy that led to the fall of Monarchy was now leading to the instability of Liberalism.
Around 1880-1930 class warfare erupted between the working class and the wealthy, just as had happened 150 years prior with the wealthy pitted against the monarchies.
The racial divide that founded the USA continued to haunt the Unions, which struggled to bring together people from different nations and ethnicities. This cultural weak point was amplified and exploited by the wealthy, who were desperate to divide their enemy into manageable factions.
The world outside the USA in 1915 was much the same. Exploitation of labor was the name of the game, and it was achieved globally through nationalism, racism, slavery, indentured servitude, debtor/vagrant "work houses", and genocide. Most European nations were running these wealth-extracting empires, and less developed nations around the world were looted and crushed into slaving away for various Imperial interests.
It's perhaps a little disappointing that the enlightened age failed to treat fellow humans any better than how it has pretty much always been - a cycle of conquest and enslavement.
World War 2 was no exception. USA likes to pretend it was "the last just war" where good triumphed over evil in a head-to-head struggle of Captain America vs. Hitler Nazis.
The reality is that every Imperial power was committing genocide on a regular basis leading up to and during the war – politically, there were no good guys. The slave states controlled by the Imperial nations were the ones who fought the worst of the war, just as it has always been in war. For example, the military and civilian death toll on bystander Asian nations (like China and The Philippines) was higher than the total of all other WW2 casualties combined.
The USA's involvement in WW2 consisted primarily of selling stuff to everyone, especially Nazis, and then rebuilding the world afterwards. The compelling storyline about the evils of the Nazis and the virtuous fight of the USA against the tyranny of dictators was post-war propaganda to enshrine WW2 as a golden age for the USA, and wow did it ever work. The USA doesn’t have any particular problem with dictators and never has – they either praise or vilify any national leader only as it suits their interests, not by some conformity to democratic principles.
(Side note – Yes, the USA did more than sell stuff in WW2, but remember that their military engagements were targeted more at protecting their economic interests than defeating some global bogeyman. Some may be thinking “maybe the USA was selling stuff in Europe but what about in the Pacific, that was all the USA, wasn’t it?” Sorry, but it was actually India, China, the Philippines, and other Asian countries that bore the human toll of that conflict, not the USA. USA's share of *military* casualties was about 1.5% of the total of the allied forces in the Pacific! I was shocked to see this stat, because US history tells it like the Pacific Theater was a 1v1 between USA and Japan.)
The aftermath of WW2 created a unique situation in the USA where there was money to be made around every corner, and a worker could walk down the street and get a high-paying job on the spot. In these conditions, what mattered was increasing productivity because there was so much demand it couldn't possibly all be met, so worker salaries and benefits skyrocketed. It was the age of the pension - a never-before-seen golden age of the "American Middle Class". Ultimately, we were left with our heads full of a misleading history of what it was that had made America great. As we saw in 2016, the Republican party capitalized on this cultural blind spot with the slogan “Make America Great Again” – a term which was never well-defined, and never needed to be well-defined. People could latch onto that slogan as the rallying cry of whatever they personally wished for from the rose-tinted past.
(Side note: That golden age was mainly golden for white people, and the Civil Rights Movement was still pushing hard to move people of color out of lawfully enforced 2nd class status through the 1950s and 60s. So, as the most prosperous era of the American laborer went down in history, it was far and away white people who took the profits, and the legacy of those profits are still with us today.)
The easy money could not last. The gradual reconstruction of the rest of the world economy caught up with the USA, and the corporations went fully global. There's no such thing anymore as "buy American" since the interest of the wealthy is now multi-national, there’s no sense in focusing on nationally produced goods. The wealthy moved the class war from national boundaries to a global offensive. I think this is a very important point, because it meant that the ingrained nationalism from decades of war propaganda became a political crank that could be abused by the wealthy with ease.
The Cold War that followed vs. the Communist ideology of the Soviet Union was frequently advertised as "protecting our way of life" and that Communism was coming to "enslave America". That wording seems in bad taste, given the history of America, but in the view of Liberalism we see that anything that prevents the wealthy (the chosen people) from doing whatever they want is considered slavery. It's not about the situation of the common person, and so in a sense when Liberalism won the Cold War it was also a regression that consolidated the power of Liberalism - the rule of a wealthy, “worthy” few.
The USA has fought and funded wars for the benefit of Liberalism dozens of times all over the world and created rebellions in stable countries (dictatorships, democracies, and communist states) time and again, just so they could get a better trade deal or control the Panama Canal. Millions of people have died from USA-directed destabilization - including subverting local democracies into dictatorships, funding genocide, and assassinations. Ultra-rich Americans have an untouchable track record as the worst villains the world has ever seen. About 800 million people right now do not have enough food to live a normal life, because it is not profitable to feed them. 36 million people will die this year because it is not profitable to feed them. This is what the world looks like, leeched at the global level by the tyranny of the wealthy.
(Side note: Republican messaging has also used the phrase “globalists” as a bogeyman. This is intended to tap into that constructed nationalism from decades of wars and is also meant to appeal to the more libertarian leaning folks who generally want small local governments less involved in international affairs. Republicans, of course, never intend to fight globalists because Republicans *are* globalists.)
Now, we're seeing a new pressure, just as the global exploitation of human labor led to the fall of Monarchy, and the industrial revolution very nearly led to the fall of Liberalism – I suppose it still may. Automation is on the rise, gradually overtaking productive jobs and leaving less for human labor to accomplish every year. This is the next ideological battle to follow the chain:
Monarchy vs. Wealthy People ->
Wealthy People vs. Laborers ->
Wealth vs. The End of Manual Production.
Liberalism raised America to believe that only the 1% deserved to be free, and that it was their destiny to enslave the rest of the world, for profits. And while that might sound bad for the average person, America gives anyone a shot at becoming a billionaire and thus joining the ruling class regardless of bloodline. It’s a system that has clear improvements over Monarchy but seems unable to address the challenges of the modern day.