By Jim Mamer / Original to ScheerPost
America the Beautiful
O beautiful for spacious skies,
For amber waves of grain,
For purple mountain majesties
Above the fruited plain!
America! America!
God shed His grace on thee
And crown thy good with brotherhood
From sea to shining sea!Katharine Lee Bates
Lyrics from 1911
In thinking about what is often referred to as “American democracy,” I am reminded of childhood car rides — many hours long, hundreds of miles traveled, half-asleep children whining, “Are we there yet?” while the car continues to move forward, assuring all inside that they were, indeed, not there yet.
What does this have to do with the American empire and democracy? Keep reading and we’ll get there.
Until now, I had never actually experienced such a sense of frustrated anticipation. But after learning, as a child, that this country is a democracy, and after years of teaching from textbooks that assured me of the same, I’m beginning to question whether we, as a country, ever arrived at democracy or whether decisions were made to simply say that we did.
In the run-up to the 2024 election, we were repeatedly warned that if former President Trump were re-elected, it would threaten “our democracy.” When Trump won, most of the media forgot that Biden was still president and re-focused their attention on Trump appointments and his rambling, often nonsensical, pronouncements.
Under these circumstances, I find myself mumbling a version of the childrens’ query: Are we there yet? Is democracy over? Did it ever really exist? It all might make for a decent book, perhaps titled, Democracy, We Hardly Knew Ye.
The Complications and Discontents of Empire
Hegel remarks somewhere, that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.
Karl Marx
The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte
1852
At its peak, the Spanish Empire covered more than five million square miles. In the late 1800s, it was greatly diminished and consisted primarily of Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Philippines. By 1898, the United States, looking to expand its territory, was poised to go to war with Spain; the The Spanish-American War was over fairly quickly.
The peace treaty that ended the conflict was signed in December 1898, the same year in which it began. Spain relinquished control of Cuba, Guam, Puerto Rico and the Philippines to the United States, which shockingly paid Spain $20 million for the Philippines, which the U.S. declared to be under military rule. Not a penny was paid to the Filipinos. (The Republic of the Philippines would later gain independence on July 4, 1946.)
When the war ended, Puerto Rico became a U.S. territory. In 1917, Puerto Ricans were declared U.S. citizens, but reflecting the dilemma of being part of an empire, residents of Puerto Rico, although American citizens, lack full political representation.
As in other U.S. territories, Puerto Ricans do not have voting representation in the United States Congress and are not entitled to electoral votes for president, though they send one nonvoting “resident commissioner” to Congress. The Council on Foreign Relations puts it like this, “Puerto Rico is legally part of the United States but distinct from it.”
Unsurprisingly, our education system, and our textbooks, pay little attention to the fate of those living in U.S. territories. As a result, a recent New York Times poll found that nearly half of American citizens do not know that Puerto Ricans are U.S. citizens.
Donald Trump, Apprentice Emperor (The First Time as Tragedy)
In September of 2017, Hurricane Maria hit Puerto Rico devastating the island and causing 2,975 deaths. President Trump visited and was filmed throwing rolls of paper towels into a crowd of local residents. San Juan Mayor Carmen Yulín Cruz called for increased federal aid and criticized Trump for throwing towels. “The terrible and abominable view of him throwing paper towels and throwing provisions at people, it does not embody the spirit of the American nation.” Trump defended himself saying, “I was having fun, they were having fun. They said, ‘Throw ’em to me! Throw ’em to me, Mr. President!’”
Donald Trump, The Sequel (The Second Time as Farce)
After four years out of office, and before his second inauguration, Trump complained that the U.S. is being “ripped off” at the Panama Canal because it continues to charge “excessive” fees. He then threatened to reassert U.S. control of the canal and posted an image on his social media platform, Truth Social, of an American flag flying over a narrow body of water, with the comment: “Welcome to the United States Canal!”
He made additional pronouncements concerning Greenland and Canada. First, he announced that he intended to buy Greenland from Denmark. Greenland is the world’s largest island and home to a large U.S. military base, but Denmark insists the island is not for sale. On Jan. 7, 2025, Trump said that he wouldn’t rule out exercising military or economic coercion to further his goals. He even expressed doubt about Denmark’s claim to Greenland saying, “Nobody even knows if they have any right, title or interest.”
Second, he suggested that “Canadians want Canada to become the 51st State” and then explained how happy the Canadians would be.
Democracy or not, few things remain more fundamental than understanding what kind of government we live with. In what follows, I will examine many of the labels used to describe the nature of the American system in order to determine to what extent they are genuinely descriptive or to what extent they are vague and misleading.
Troublesome Illusions
Arriving at honest descriptions and real understanding is not as easy as it should be. One reason for this is that we are faced with comforting and sometimes untestable labels to describe the government. Among these are: representative republic (descriptive and neutral), democracy (descriptive and likely to be positive) or perhaps, as Ronald Reagan repeatedly suggested, a City on a Hill (vague and meant to suggest that we are exceptional). Obviously, I have guessed at the intentions attached to these terms, so argument is encouraged.
There are, of course, other terms, both ambiguous and grand, meant to characterize this country and its government. Here are a few that are vague, but usually meant to be positive: The Land of the Free, Home of the Brave, the exceptional nation, or even, a land destined by God to extend from sea to shining sea.
I have avoided listing newer terms like “woke” which is not very descriptive and usually meant to be negative or a disapproving way of saying “extremely liberal.”
One of the more commonly used terms used to describe the United States is “exceptional” as in “American Exceptionalism” or, as former U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright put it, “The United States is the indispensable nation.”
According to the Antonin Scalia Law School, the notion of American Exceptionalism holds that this is the “freest country in the world” largely due to the extraordinary freedoms in the original Constitution. In terms of influence on policy, American Exceptionalism has been linked to such things as the Monroe Doctrine and Manifest Destiny, both providing support for territorial expansion.
As it happens, American political leaders are generally expected to offer occasional tribute to American Exceptionalism. When such tribute is not forthcoming, there are questions raised. President Barack Obama provides an example of someone who was criticized for not supporting the exceptional nature of the U.S.
In 2009 he tried to silence the criticism by saying that he did believe in American exceptionalism, “… just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism.” That effort was mostly unsuccessful.
Donald Trump got on the bandwagon fast. In his 2025 inaugural address he promised that,
“America will soon be greater, stronger, and far more exceptional than ever before.”
A Republic or a Democracy
On Sept. 17, 1787, as delegates were leaving the final session of the Constitutional Convention, Elizabeth Willing Powel, asked 81-year-old Benjamin Franklin, “Well, Doctor, what have we got, a republic or a monarchy?” Franklin famously answered, “A republic, if you can keep it.”
After more than 230 years do we remain defined by Franklin’s republic? Since a republic is defined as a government in which power is held by elected representatives, then it would seem to be at least one aspect of American government.
The term “democracy” was occasionally used around the beginning of Andrew Jackson’s presidency in 1828, but at the time, democracy was “redefined” to mean a more representative version of popular rule as well as referring to the expanded (to more white men) but still-limited franchise. At best, the result should still have been labeled as a “limited representative republic.”
Despite all of this, democracy has become the most popular media label for the American government. Taken literally it suggests rule by the people, but if Americans are asked to define its characteristics, what do they say? Among the most common responses are: Equal voting rights for all citizens and fair elections free of interference by privileged interests.
The problem is neither of these things is accurate. The right to vote is constitutionally limited and often challenged. In some states, it has been common practice to make felons ineligible to vote.
And elections “free of interference by privileged interests” is clearly not what we have. The role of wealth in American elections is extraordinary and seemingly without limit.
Democracy or Oligarchy?
Jane Mayer began “Dark Money,” her study of wealth in American politics, with a quote attributed to Justice Louis Brandeis: “We must make our choice. We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both.”
According to Mayer, the 2010 Supreme Court decision Citizens United, “shifted the balance of power from parties, built on broad consensus to individuals who are wealthy and zealous enough to spend millions of dollars from their own funds.”
The U.S. is now a country in which a relatively small group of wealthy people have increased control of election outcomes. The inescapable fact that the U.S. is an oligarchy is exemplified by the list of top donors to political parties in the 2024 elections.
The incoming Trump administration will be the wealthiest presidential administration in history, with at least 13 billionaires set to take on government posts. Elon Musk alone donated more than a quarter billion dollars to the campaign of the President-elect Donald Trump.
In light of the Citizens United decision, no less an authority than former President Jimmy Carter said on the Thom Hartmann Program on July 28, 2015 that the American government had become an oligarchy:
“It [Citizens United] violates the essence of what made America a great country in its political system. Now it’s just an oligarchy, with unlimited political bribery being the essence of getting the nominations for president or to elect the president. And the same thing applies to governors and U.S. senators and Congress members. So now we’ve just seen a complete subversion of our political system as a payoff to major contributors, who want and expect and sometimes get favors for themselves after the election’s over.”
Despite all of this, the term “oligarchy” is not mentioned in either of the high school textbooks I have. In fact, I have never seen it mentioned in any high school American history text. Unfortunately, when it is used on nightly news broadcasts “oligarchy” seems limited to negative descriptions of the influence possessed by the richest Russians.
But it is not simply the fact that high school textbooks neglect to mention oligarchy. In every text I’ve seen there is very little effort even to examine the nature of American government. In “The Americans,” “democracy” is mentioned only twice with no attempt to develop understanding, and “republic” only once.
In “History Alive!,” “democracy” is identified, bizarrely, as “The fifth founding ideal” without much explanation. It simply states that democracy is founded on the simple principle that “the power to rule derives from the consent of the governed.”
Is Theocracy Possible?
A theocracy is a government in which authority is thought to be divinely guided. I include it here because it has significant support in this country. For example, according to a survey conducted in 2023 by the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) and the Brookings Institution, more than half of current Republicans now believe the country should be a strictly Christian nation.
While it is true that many of those who wrote the Constitution were Christians, they were also determined not to create a state religion or to allow a combination of religious and secular authority. The Establishment Clause of First Amendment clearly prohibits the government from “establishing” a religion.
As a result, theocracy is likely to be unconstitutional. To avoid confusion, that fact should be made very clear in every high school history and government text.
Despite this, after the 2025 re-election of Mike Johnson as Speaker of the House, he read a prayer in his acceptance address. Speaker Johnson then attributed that prayer to Thomas Jefferson who, according to the Speaker, wrote the prayer and then read it every day until his death. According to the Jefferson/Monticello website, it is unlikely that Jefferson would have composed or delivered a public prayer of this sort.
The Empire Endures
The terms “imperialism,” meaning the process of acquiring an empire, and “empire” are mentioned in every high school American history textbook, but almost exclusively in relation to the American policies of overseas expansion between 1898 and WWI. In “The Americans,” the chapter focused on this period is actually titled “America Claims an Empire.”
Political scientist Rein Taagepera published a series of academic articles about the extents of historical empires. In those articles he defined an empire as “any relatively large sovereign political entity whose components are not sovereign.”
It should be recognized that the United States has been in the process of building an empire from its inception. In the early years this was carried out by eliminating traditional controls over North American territory by the Indigenous peoples. This was accomplished by killing or moving them to reservations. In other words, it meant seizing land “from sea to shining sea.”
After 1845, empire building was justified by proponents of Manifest Destiny. I have written more about this here.
In 1890, after the massacre at Wounded Knee, it was officially declared by the Bureau of the Census that the frontier was closed. At the same time, according to Howard Zinn, “The profit system, with its natural tendency for expansion, had already begun to look overseas.”
In 1897, Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, a strong advocate for American imperialism, urged President William McKinley to appoint Theodore Roosevelt as Assistant Secretary of the Navy. And in that same year, Roosevelt wrote to a friend, “In strict confidence… I should welcome almost any war, for I think this country needs one.”
And the wars came, one after another. Eventually, an ideology of overseas expansion gained widespread support among “the upper circles of military men, politicians, businessmen — and even some of the leaders of the farmers’ movements who thought foreign markets would help them.” It is significant that after WWI, any discussion of an American Empire disappears from the history textbooks and is replaced with the phrase “global power.”
In 2025, the United States fits Professor Taagepera’s definition of an empire because it controls territories in most areas of the world and maintains about 800 global military bases. This should be difficult to ignore, but it is ignored in high school textbooks and in the mass media. In fact, when mass media reports on the machinations of the American Empire, it usually refers to the U.S. “as a global power.” I have written more extensively on aspects of the American empire here, here and here.
No matter what label is applied, being an empire alters the responsibilities and functions of a government. Textbook avoidance of examining the degree to which that is true is, at a minimum, irresponsible. At the very least, the textbooks and teachers should examine how the demands of empire contradict the fundamental demands of domestic policy.
Professor Chalmers Johnson makes this point in The Sorrows of Empire:
“… maintaining our empire abroad required resources and commitments that would inevitably undercut, or simply skirt, what was left of our domestic democracy and that might, in the end, produce a military dictatorship or, far more likely, its civilian equivalent.”
It is not as if students would have a difficult time understanding the term “empire.” After all they have studied empires before, sometimes even before entering high school, and those experiences should be built upon.
As far back as grade school there was probably mention of the Mongol Empire, at least in the sense that there were stories of Genghis Khan, Kublai Khan and Marco Polo. And, if my memory is accurate, the textbooks had simple, but colorful, maps of China, Mongolia and Tibet.
Were we not all taught something about the Egyptian Empire and the Roman Empire even if those discussions centered on pictures of the pyramids and questions about who actually built them? It is impossible to study world history without coming across the Roman Empire and that is true even if it was represented solely by a couple of Caesars: Julius and Augustus.
At a minimum, American students all learn something about the British Empire in studying the colonies in North America. They also study WWI, which requires learning about the Ottoman (Turkish) Empire, and the Russian Empire.
Obviously, the existence of empires is not ignored in precollegiate education. Admittedly the essential nature of empires could have been better described. At the most basic level, in grade school perhaps, it might have helped if we had been taught to consider how an empire differed from a city or a state or a country. And it might have been especially useful to have been asked, even as kids, what it might feel like to be invaded and conquered.
Hiding the American Empire: The Power of an Image
If you close your eyes and imagine a map of the United States, what do you see? Chances are it would be that familiar outline that stretches from “sea to shining sea” with the Atlantic Ocean on the right and the Pacific on the left?
If you are good at visualizing, the southern tip of Florida and the southern tip of Texas extend south from the basic rectangle. Perhaps the northern tip of Maine extends into the Atlantic. Perhaps you might even feel an urge to add Alaska and Hawaii in separate boxes floating somewhere off the coast of Mexico.
But regardless of whether Alaska and Hawai’i are included in those ubiquitous boxes, it is that basic rectangle that most often represents the United States. It is what most Americans learned to imagine in school. It is, according to historians Benedict Anderson and Daniel Immerwahr, “The Logo Map.”
Significantly this Logo Map was mostly an illusion because it never really matched the country’s legal borders. Nevertheless, I remember that when I was very young, I recognized its basic logo shape, but I’m not sure why. Perhaps it was in a children’s book. And since children’s books love to use color, perhaps every state was a different color.
A few years after learning about such things as Thanksgiving myths, I was taught about the British colonies. But when 5th grade textbooks presented a map of those colonies, I instinctively felt something was missing. After all, I was in California. Where was California?
The biggest thing I remembered about the changing U.S. borders was that in 1803 the country doubled in size when Napoleon sold the Louisiana territory to the United States. Obviously, I could see on the maps that “the purchase” expanded the country westward to the other side of the Mississippi River.
I’m pretty sure that, at the time, I thought it had been a pretty good deal, not realizing that Napoleon never legitimately owned that land. Thinking back, I realize that my textbooks and teachers both had a moral obligation to explain that.
It was never emphasized that, after 1803, thousands of additional Indigenous peoples, from dozens of tribes, still lived in the “new territories” and still rightfully claimed the land that was theirs. But what I remember was being told about Lewis, Clark and Sacagawea, the young Shoshone woman who contributed to their survival.
Another thing I never learned is that the “Louisiana Purchase” was quickly divided into two official territories: the Territory of Orleans and the District of Louisiana. I did not realize then that because these new territories were not states, their acquisition should have been seen as changing the nature of the country away from a republic and toward an empire.
Most of the specific border changes that I was taught about were lost in emotionless history lessons. But if I had been taught specifically, and graphically, about the nature of settler colonialism, or if I had paid more attention, perhaps then I would have been better prepared to understand the human cost of territorial expansion.
“I didn’t cross the border, the border crossed me.”
In the real world, the legal borders of the United States have changed decade by decade. Labor leader and civil rights activist Dolores Huerta often used the phrase quoted above in advocating for the rights of farm workers. I was undoubtedly taught, more than once, about the shifting borders, but I’m not sure how well I grasped what was being described.
I don’t think I ever really accepted the outline of those east coast colonies as the United States, but I also didn’t care enough to ask any questions. What I do remember is that ever-present Logo Map. Somehow it had been imprinted in my memory as the “legitimate shape” of the United States. Somehow, I had come to believe that the U.S. was “destined” to stretch from the Atlantic to the Pacific and that belief probably prepared me to accept (temporarily) the absurd logic of Manifest Destiny.
Lost Opportunities
We should have learned about all of this. We could have debated the contradictions between an empire and any other kind of government. We could have explored issues of justice and ethics.
Opportunities were lost to pose questions, at all levels of schooling, about whether the newly independent U.S. was ever, in any real sense, a democracy, or a republic, or simply on the way to becoming a continental empire and later a global empire.
If I were teaching, I would work with students to develop useful definitions of terms like republic, democracy, theocracy and oligarchy. I would suggest the possibility that the American government is now an oligarchy governing a large empire. That, I would hope, would invite debate and argument which I know is an effective way to learn.
Where can we go from here?
In the end, I suppose it is obvious that the questions I brought up at the beginning of this piece remain unanswered. Is democracy over? Are we there yet? These questions are not likely to be answered definitively. At least not right now.
While I have no doubt that the United States has become both an oligarchy and an empire, I still hold that a democracy is worth working for. We might start by recognizing that no one can create democracy by failing to define the term or by simply stating that we already live in one.
If we want a democracy, we need to reduce, and hopefully eliminate, the role of money in elections. The Supreme Court got it wrong when, in Citizens United, it held that corporations had the same rights as individual people to spend in elections.
We need to find ways to make sure that no person, no organization, no corporation, and no government is able to spend massive amounts of money to influence elections. We need to set strict limits and enforce them, even if that requires a constitutional amendment. If such limits turn out to be impossible, then the oligarchy will undoubtedly continue its dominance.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union and its empire, the American empire was the last standing. We should struggle to dismantle it, if for no other reason than running an empire contradicts the functioning of democracy. We must start by making people (starting with students) aware of its existence.
Consider for a moment the degree to which we, as a population, have become accustomed to hearing that we, again, have found it necessary to invade another country, the location of which most Americans have to look up. Take, for example, Grenada in 1983, Panama in 1989, or Iraq in 1990 or 2003. Imagine the shock of hearing that any of those countries had just been invaded by Canada, or Mexico, or Peru.
The multiple consequences of empire can be abstract, so I will quote from Professor Chalmers Johnson, who wrote his “Blowback Trilogy” on the cost of American empire and its effects on domestic democracy. He summarized some of his conclusions in Democracy vs. Empire:
“We now station over half a million U.S. troops, spies, contractors, dependents, and others on military bases located in more than 130 countries, many of them presided over by dictatorial regimes that have given their citizens no say in the decision to let us in … The combination of huge standing armies, almost continuous wars, an ever-growing economic dependence on the military-industrial complex and the making of weaponry, and ruinous military expenses as well as a vast, bloated ‘defense’ budget … has been destroying our republican structure of governing in favor of an imperial presidency.”
So no, it can be said that America is not yet fully a democracy. We are not there yet.
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Jim Mamer
Jim Mamer is a retired high school teacher. He was a William Robertson Coe Fellow for the Study of American History at Stanford University in 1984. He served as chair of the History and Social Sciences department for 20 years (first at Irvine High and then at Northwood High). He was a mentor teacher in both Modern American History and Student Assessment. In 1992 he was named History and Social Sciences Teacher of the Year by the National Council for the Social Studies (NCSS).