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What Democracy Means Upton Sinclair march 25, 1939 Our fathers understood democracy as something applying to government; they never dreamed that it might someday have application to industry. But in the century and a half which has passed since our American revolution, new inventions have revolutionized industry; the village blacksmithy has been replaced by the steel trust, the village candlemaker by the power trust, and the family stocking by the Wall Street credit monopoly. The system of autocracy which prevails in American industry today is in all essentials the same as that which drove our forefathers to revolt. In the automobile industry , Mr. Henry Ford is “the state” just as much as King Louis ever was in France—and just as fully convinced of his divine right. So long as human beings have to have food, clothing, and shelter in order to live, just so long will freedom and democracy be incompatible with the private ownership and autocratic control of the instruments and means of production. A nation which has democracy in its political a¤airs and autocracy in its industrial and Wnancial a¤airs is a house divided against itself, a house built upon sand, a pyramid resting upon its apex. The two systems by their very nature are driven to war upon the other; and there will never again be peace in America, or anywhere else in the world, until the right to Wx the wages of labor and the prices of products has been taken over by the people, and is administered under a system of industrial government by popular consent. The Erosion of Liberty Neil Sheehan july 1972 The constitutional system of checks and balances in government envisioned by the Founding Fathers of our country no longer exists in fact. This is one of two central lessons to be drawn from the Pentagon Papers, which provide us with a vast body of facts through which we can see how our government really functions, in contrast to how we imagine it to function. What we have learned from this archive of American involvement in Indochina over the last three decades is that the American Presidency—and the state machinery that has grown up under it in the Executive branch since World War II—now far outweighs in power and inXuence the other two, supposedly counterbalancing , branches of government. The Executive branch of our government has 324 part 16 democratizing democracy become a centralized state in the European sense of the word. The Executive branch has become the state in America, to all intents and purposes. The second lesson to be drawn from the Pentagon Papers is that the requirements of the Executive branch to maintain and enlarge our overseas empire have become incompatible with the preservation of our domestic liberties. And I do not use the word empire here in a pejorative sense, but rather in its simplest meaning—to describe the system of overseas dependencies and interests we have acquired in the course of the Cold War. What is emerging from the current structure of our government and its constant struggle to maintain this empire is the working concept that the citizen exists to serve the needs of the state. This concept is directly contradictory to the idea that was central to the thinking of the Founding Fathers—that government exists to preserve the liberties of the citizen. Unless we can Wnd some way to bring the American Presidency and the state machinery of the Executive branch under control, unless we can Wnd some means to restore a system of checks and balances to our government, unless we can somehow dismantle our overseas empire, we are, I believe, going to see this centralized state turn into an authoritarian state. Unless we can reverse the historical trend that has us in its grip, we are in danger of losing the domestic liberties that have made this country, in the words of Abraham Lincoln, “the last, best hope on earth.” Through these decisions taken in secret the Executive branch has made war in Indochina , either indirectly through French or indigenous forces or directly with American troops, for most of the past twenty-three years. The conXict has cost the lives of 95,000 members of the French expeditionary forces, some 55,000 American servicemen so far, and no one knows how many Indochinese—the estimates run from a million to two million men, women, and children. A hundred billion to a hundred and Wfty billion dollars of the...

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