Alvan Quamina

The United States and Its Democracy Alvan Quamina

Successive United States governments, leaders and champions have touted its commitment to freedom and democracy. This has echoed like a hollow mantra throughout the Western Hemisphere where historically, consistently and persistently the United States has initiated, supported, and preferred repressive, determinedly undemocratic, military dictatorships so long as they acquiesced to United States policies and submitted to its overlord-ship. The peoples of the hemisphere did not need outside coaches to shape their antipathy and antagonism to a system which had so consistently imposed upon them wholly undemocratic systems. Now, the curse of truncated or abbreviated democracy has so thoroughly embedded itself, and so completely entwined itself in the fabric of United States culture and life, that now in the twenty-first century the battle continues to intensify, and seems incapable of maintaining the discretion under which it attempted to masquerade in the twentieth century. The United States and its Democracy provides a sweeping overview of the history of Western democracy in the United States as context for understanding its current struggles with universal adult suffrage.