Anglo-Saxon Supremacy vs Democracy

A Huguenot father urges his son to be quiet during the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre of 1572.* In 1685, 200,000 French Huguenots fled France, with at least 15,000 immigrating to the colonies. George Washington was the grandson of Huguenots, but practiced the Anglican religion.

In 1776, Americans decided to rebel against King George III because they no longer wanted to be second class citizens in their own land.
As British-imprinted colonialists (not Spanish or French), they had experience in governing themselves.
They wanted to continue being British, but discontinue being saddled with unfair taxes, erase the possibility that the Brits would end slavery, plus stop assimilating 1,000’s of Anglo-Saxon convicts every year.

It's difficult to find details on the fact that between 1615 and 1775, at least 55,000 convicts were transported to the thirteen colonies (mainly to Maryland and Virginia).
Back story: by 1718, felons were overrunning London.
Rather than execute (or imprison) these men and women, the Transportation Act of 1718 was devised to send more criminals to the thirteen colonies.
In 1774, more than 60% of those found guilty at the Old Bailey were transported to America.

A hand brand for British criminals that’s on display in the Newark Museum, Notts, United Kingdom (used 1642-49). Felons found guilty at the Old Bailey (in London) were branded on their hands during the mid 1600’s. During other periods, thieves were branded on their cheeks or thumbs.

British forces were sure that the rebellion would fail, because they knew that the thirteen colonies weren’t particularly homogenous.
Pathogenesis: A History of the World in Eight Plagues, by Jonathan Kennedy, explains how disease killed more British soldiers than bullets.
The Brits lost the war.

Clusters of settlers had immigrated to the colonies, to practice their own specific versions of Protestantism.
There were many distinct sects of Protestants in the New World (French Huguenots, Puritans, Anglicans, Quakers, Calvinists, Episcopalians, Congregationalists, Baptists, Methodists, Unitarians, Mennonites, Presbyterians, etc.)
European countries had driven many of these sects out—sometimes from country to country—before they finally settled down.
No European nation had ever contended with this much religious diversity, and that was the reason behind the separation of church and state in the US Constitution.

Mary Dyer (shown above) was one of four Quakers hanged (in 1660) for defying Massachusetts Puritan laws, and practicing her religious beliefs.

By 1776, the thirteen colonies made one big dysfunctional family.
There were roughly 2.5 million people, only one-third of whom were of English descent.
(Native Americans weren’t counted, but slaves were.)
Many English families had migrated back to England, rather than endure the many hardships of life in America.
Yet, every generation from the year 1696 (when the population was a mere 250,000 individuals), the population had still doubled.

Between 1700-1775, over 400,000 immigrants arrived in the colonies, mostly from Northern Europe (countries like Germany, the Netherlands, Scotland, and Ireland).
At least 200,000 unwilling immigrants also arrived, destined to become slaves in the Southern colonies.
Eventually, despite having such diverse backgrounds, European immigrants adopted the English language, and became devoted anglophiles.
Some exceptions, like Martin Van Buren (the 8th president), grew up speaking Dutch.

Another curve ball thrown at the new country was that despite Europe moving on from slavery during the Middle Ages, the Southern colonies were still stuck in the ancient system of slavery.
The plantation owners used people with darker complexions (sometimes, their own near relatives) as slaves.
Southern men boosted profits by raping their female slaves to create more slaves.
Thomas Jefferson shocked George Washington by telling him that Monticello earned an excellent 4% a year, exclusively through the births of Black infants.

Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America

In 1831, French political scientist Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-1859), traveled to the US, ostensively to research American prisons.
He traveled throughout the country, and his writings discussed the “cost of living in a materialistic society.”
According to Tocqueville, Americans were so focused on obtaining “the petty and paltry pleasures with which they glut their lives” that they neglected their responsibilities as citizens.
Sound familiar?

One way of thinking about US history is that it’s a series of battles between elites who want to cling to power because of their ethnicity, and people who don’t want to remain in the underclass.
In 1776, independent Americans decided to break with Great Britain, but there was only one pathway to that goal.
That pathway was to make concessions to rich plantation owners, and maintain a social system based on slavery.

For nearly 90 years, the nation endured half slave and half free, but then it all blew up (in 1861), with the Civil War.
15 years later, historians agree that Democrat Samuel J. Tilden won the popular vote, and the electoral college by one vote.
However, a Congressional Electoral Commission still made Republican Rutherford B. Hayes the nation’s 19th president.
Democrats agreed to trade Tilden’s victory for ending the empowerment of Black citizens in the South (Reconstruction).
Tilden became the first of many politicians to win the popular vote, but not become the nation’s president.

Culturally overwhelmed by the influx of non-Northern European immigrants (during the 1890’s-1920’s), Anglo-Saxon elites, and their sympathizers, resolved to isolate the US from the “horrors” of internationalism.
The nativist movement grew in power during the 1930’s.
(Read all about this era in Rachel Maddow’s Prequel: An American Fight Against Fascism.)

Beaver (Jerry Mathers), and his mother (Barbara Billingsley), in 1957-1963’s Leave It to Beaver. In shows of this period, women were always shown in shirt-waisted dresses, in their kitchens, and seldom worked outside the home.

Americans gained democratic rights in the 1960’s and 70’s, for example the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, Roe vs Wade in 1973, and the Pregnancy Discrimination Act of 1978.
Now, Project 2025 is trying to erase various rights, and restore the 1950’s WASP class structure.

Over the years, Republicans and Democrats have switched sides in their roles as Conservatives versus Liberals, and each side talks about despising elites.
Some elites (especially those in the news media and academia) are idealists about democracy, and not particularly materialistic.
They have few beliefs in common with the elites of the 30’s.
Both sides claim to advocate for blue collar workers, but MAGA policies are based on favoring Big Business over the working class.
Donald J. Trump (the leader of the movement), was despised by Anglo-Saxon “old money,” has no English ancestors, his mother was an immigrant servant girl, and he’s married two immigrants.
The lines drawn in the 2024 battle between Conservatism and Liberalism, and elites versus non-elites, has become very confusing.

*Photo: Prima/UIG/Rex Features.

Prepared for Democracy on the Anniversary of January 6th?

In Frank Capra’s Meet John Doe (1941) Gary Cooper plays a homeless man who’s used by corrupt forces to control a budding populist movement.

Capra kept the plot secret until the film's release for fear of American fascists utilizing it for propaganda purposes, and filmed five different endings.

Liz Cheney has spent years learning how the Federal Government works.*
That’s why I take it seriously when Cheney says, in her book Oath and Honor, that the U.S. is “on the precipice of losing” its’ system of government because “a free society that abandons the truth—that abandons the rule of law—cannot remain free.”

On the other hand, most U.S. citizens are fairly ignorant on how Government runs.
Despite this, they seem to have great faith in the overall stability of the checks and balances system.
We seem to believe that the political system will continue ( as if on autopilot), without everyone needing to vote. 

As Rachel Maddow reveals in Prequel: An American Fight Against Fascism, the late 1930’s was also a time when the U.S. political system was tested.
During that period, admired hero and aviator Charles Lindbergh (1902-1974), said that Americans should “guard their heritage” from the “Mongol and Persian and Moor, before we become engulfed in a limitless foreign sea.”
Popular Catholic radio broadcaster, Father Charles Coughlin (1891-1979), called for a General Franco-style armed revolt against “invaders of our spiritual and national rights.”
(Tens of millions listened to his sermons, and some set up arsenals!)

Some artists, and thinkers, saw the danger in the 1930’s.
Little-known British author Katharine Burdekin wrote Swastika Night (1937).
This is an alternative history science fiction story in which Adolf Hitler, and the Nazis, won.
(It’s spooky that this work was written just as WWII was beginning!)
In this prescient novel, a male character muses about Democracy (italics and bold face mine):

In a democracy no man of character is willing to give up his right of private judgment. . . there is also the large mass of weaker men, who must be told always what to do . . . I still do not see how democracy can be made to last long enough to develop character in a sufficient number of people. . . And there is another thing. Has a democracy ever started in a community, a nation, where the men all really considered themselves equal, no one fundamentally and unalterably superior to any other?

In 1940, First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt expressed similar (if more optimistic) thoughts in her article “The Moral Basis of Democracy” (italics and bold face mine):

If human beings can be changed to fit a Nazi or Fascist pattern or a Communist pattern, certainly we should not lose heart at the thought of changing human nature to fit a Democratic way of life. . . Real Democracy cannot be stable and it cannot go forward to its fullest development and growth if this type of individual responsibility does not exist, not only in the leaders but in the people as a whole.

Katharine Burdekin and Eleanor Roosevelt reached similar conclusions—that a Democracy was only possible if everyone (people of whatever social class and skin tone) was equal, and if everyone was willing to compromise.
(The other choice is first chaos, and then Authoritarianism.)

Italian poster for 1956’s Alexander the Great, in which Richard Burton played Alexander—the Macedonian ruler who conquered all the Greek tribes and most of western Asia.

Alexander inherited power over Macedonia from his father Philip (Fredric March).

Maintaining a Democracy isn’t easy.

It’s not even natural.
For a very long time, “might makes right” seemed to be the rule, and people are mainly concerned about their own needs.
Eventually, humankind developed “the Divine Right of Kings,” and “royal blood,” myths (so sons could succeed fathers).
(This made the passing down of power slightly less contentious.)

Servilius Casca (Edmund O’Brien) struck the first blow against Julius Caesar (Louis Calhern) in 1953’s Julius Caesar.

(Roman senators feared that Julius Caesar would make himself monarch of Rome, but actually, his fall led to a string of emperors.)

Beginning in the 6th century BC, the Greeks, and later the Romans, experimented with people ruling themselves.

In the Greek city-state of Athens, however, slaves and women were excluded from voting.
In Roman society—during the periods when people were allowed to vote—only aristocratic men could vote.
Roman society still maintained the fiction that rule was “with the consent of the governed.”

Europe began to flirt with democratic concepts in the late 1600s.
In 1689, the British Parliament established a Bill of Rights (used as a model for the U.S. 1789 Bill of Rights).

Workers riot in the 1927 science-fiction classic Metropolis.

Critics have called the politics of the film “incoherent”, since both communists and fascists believe that the movie validates their respective philosophies.

One hundred years later, in 1789, the French people rose up against aristocratic rule.
Ten years later Napoleon Bonaparte gained control of France, however, and he eventually crowned himself Emperor.
Today, the British don’t vote directly for their Prime Minister.
Presidents of France are elected by voters—usually, in a two-round system—because there are several political parties.

The U.S. was the first “modern” experiment in Democracy.
However, the U.S. was handicapped with confusion over who was in charge.
In a perfect world, the Declaration of Independence should have read “all humankind is created equal.”
Instead, Black enslaved people, Native Americans, and women were all left out.
Were some Founders really thinking “white Anglo-Saxon Protestant wealthy men,” when they proclaimed “all men are created equal?”
Have Americans always lived in a Democracy in which one group is more equal than others?

Two factors have helped to keep Democracy stable: the U.S. had a large middle class, plus plenty of room to “spread out.”
(Was it “from sea to shining sea,” and Manifest Destiny, that kept Democracy alive?)
However, the size, and prosperity, of the middle class has shrunk since the 1970s.
Today, 66.6% of the total wealth in the U.S. is owned by 10% of the earners and the lowest 50% of earners only hold 2.6% of the total wealth.
(The balance tilts further every year.)

Why are schools so relentless positive about the strength of American “checks and balances” system?
Why are the times—when the rules were bent by people in high places—discussed in academia, but not in textbooks?
We should know more about the occasions when mistakes were made, so we can prevent errors in the future.

There are many examples when “the system” failed.
In the little-discussed 1876 election, Democrat Samuel J. Tilden won the popular vote, and would also have won the electoral college vote.
However, Republican Rutherford B. Hayes still became the nation’s 19th president, in a “smoke-filled room,” allowing both parties to end Reconstruction!
In Prequel, Rachel Maddow reveals how powerful Senator Burton K. Wheeler (1882-1975) engineered the firings of two Department of Justice employees, so as not to further publicize his pro-fascist deeds.

Unless we own up to the fragility of our system, we may lose it altogether.
It seems that our schools, textbooks, religions and parents haven’t done an adequate job of building character in the American voter, or changing human nature so it fits a Democratic (rather than an Authoritarian) model.
Why are so few of us prepared for living in a Democratic system?
Why do so few people vote?

*Liz Cheney represented Wyoming in the U.S. House from 2017-23. Before that, she was Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs, and worked for the U.S. Agency for International Development. In Oath and Honor, Cheney explains how her parents taught her American history, and about being a citizen.