We’ve all heard it said by our teachers when we were in school, we’ve all heard it said by politicians, including presidents: “Democracies don’t start wars.”

And yet we have had the decades-long American war on Vietnam, the Reagan invasion of Grenada, the LBJ invasion of the Dominican Republic, the George H.W. Bush invasion of Panama, the G.W. Bush back-to-back invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, and now we have President Obama talking about launching an unprovoked war on Iran.

Is the much touted axiom wrong?

I don’t think so. I believe that in a democracy, where the will of the people is paramount, it would be very unlikely to have a country start a war. People generally don’t like war. They need to feel truly threatened or even under attack before they will accept the idea of their or anyone’s fathers, husbands, brothers and sons (and now mothers, wives, daughters and sisters) being marched off to face the horrors of war.

Clearly the reason we have seen the US starting so many wars is that the US is and has not for a very long time been anything approaching a democracy.

Democracy in the US is a purely formalistic thing. People get to vote once every two and four years to chose from a narrow list of pre-selected candidates approved by the real rulers of the country, who are the wealthy owners of the large business interests, many of which prosper when there’s a war on, and many more of which are happy to have periodic wars, or the threat of wars, to keep people in line and willing to tolerate the kind of abuse that is typically heaped on the average working person: financially starved school districts, starvation-level welfare grants, no public health system, rusting bridges, pot-holed roads, almost no public transit, and falling real wages, etc.

I think it’s largely true that real democracies do not ...

Marx famously said that the bourgeoisie unwittingly produces its own gravediggers. Marx was convinced that capitalism inexorably gives rise to an elite social class whose members create an economy that contains the seeds of its own destruction. The prime movers in Marx's theory of history – a.k.a., dialectical materialism – assumed the form of a rising middle class of merchants who, in Marx's time, were emerging as the industrial giants he called "monopoly capitalists". Capitalism in its advanced stages produced a few big winners and multitudes of losers, the latter constituting a vast underclass of exploited workers who were increasingly impoverished, alienated, and dehumanized.

The super-capitalists who emerge as the champions of the new economic order soon come to abhor the very system that creates them. Once ensconced at the commanding heights of the economy they naturally want to eliminate competitors.  They want control.  To protect their wealth, they need power. Power to minimize risks and flatten out the business cycle. They understand all too well that the power to tax is the power to destroy (or to create tax loopholes). They want the state to stay out of the economy, but protect business from "unfair" competition and encroachments of all kinds.  And from the workers.      

But that was then and this is now. Today, Communism and Marx are equally discredited. Right?   

The failure of Communism according to Wall Street's grand princes, corporate raiders, the conservative press, the elite business-school professoriate, and a host of other apologists for Capitalism proved that Marx was wrong – about everything. But clearly Marx's critics protest too much.

In fact, the failure of Communism proved nothing of the kind. Communism as it was radically reinterpreted and applied by Lenin ...

Every morning at the start of the school day when I was a boy, we would stand next to our desks facing the flag with our hands over our hearts and say these words:
 

"I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the republic for which it stands; one nation indivisible with liberty and justice for all."   

Of course, I never questioned whether the republic to which I was pledging allegiance did provide "liberty and justice for all".  As an adult with the benefit of 20-20 hindsight, I can clearly see now that it did not – certainly not then.  Not before the passage of the Civil Rights Acts in the 1960s, at a time when so-called Jim Crow laws in the South still deprived blacks of the right to vote.  When "working women" were teachers, nurses, or secretaries, full stop.

Then for one shining moment the ideal of "liberty and justice for all" appeared to take wing.  From voting rights to equal employment opportunity, the scent of social progress was in the air.  That was from mid-1960s to the late '70s and it was the stepchild of the Vietnam War, which traumatized and galvanized millions of hitherto apathetic Americans.  Think of it as a collective case of PTSD, a nation at once dazed, depressed, and outraged by the stupidity of fighting a war we couldn't win in a faraway place against a people who posed no threat to us.
 

Unfortunately, it was a fleeting moment.  The 1970s gave way to the Reagan era and ushered in the "greed is good" ethic that dominates our political culture, drives the supercharged K Street lobby machine, and stalks the halls of Congress. 

In his new book entitled Fairness and Freedom, David Hackett Fischer compares the history and political culture of New Zealand and the United States ...

Part I - Flawed Systems

Winston Churchill once said that "No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except for all the others that have been tried from time to time." He was right. Democracy in its various manifestations is a flawed system, flawed by virtue of its roots. By definition it is the system where power flows from the people (or at least a supposed majority of the people), and as there are no perfect people, then.... Well, the logic speaks for itself.

Many of democracy’s problems are common to all forms of governance. For instance, (a) the tendency of a political leader to mistake his or her own interests or that of his party, for the nation’s or community’s interests and (b) the corruptive influence of powerful subgroups or lobbies usually coming through the manipulation of money and other resources. The ubiquitous nature of these problems suggest that they are structural. That is they are built into the system no matter what form a government takes. That does not mean such flaws cannot be held in check or minimized. As James Madison, the father of the U.S. Constitution believed, they might be subject to control by a well crafted constitution. However, it is unlikely that they can be eliminated.

Part II - Today In The USA

Today, we are presented with a stark example of U.S. democracy’s systemic flaws. Again, these bring together the influence of small but powerful and wealthy subgroups with the tendency of national leaders to define interests in personal ways. The trigger for the present structural malfunction is a foreign policy issue. It is the issue of Iran (which, alas, is a reworking of the recent issue of Iraq).

As the Consortium News website