America is no ‘beacon of democracy’. But it could be.

I have to imagine that almost anyone reading this would scoff if I were to take the position that America is currently anything other than a beacon of inequality and injustice; a playground of powerful men with no regard for the citizens who keep their empires growing.

I was born in a time of hope, at the end of the Bush era and the beginning of Obama’s. It was a moment that many perceived as a new, positive chapter in our history (which it was). Only what came after was not a continuation of that promise.

America the entity is an entirely different beast than America the idea. I know that the United States has failed, over and over and over again to live up to those founding principles. We were never a country that offered liberty to all who inhabited it. The same men who wrote those words owned human beings. We were never a country that acted with justice, not when the original inhabitants of the land they claimed ‘for all’ were subject to genocide. In the scant centuries since, we have not acted with more honour than the oppressive empire we rejected.

The narrative we told the world about our democracy was rarely based on truth. Our propaganda may have been effective, but even then that wasn’t why people immigrated in the millions. The American dream has never been about living in a pluralistic, just, and equal society – it was about money and capital. America, they said, with ‘streets of gold’: where anyone could make a profit. From the inside, our democracy has always lived in the shadow of what the powerful projected it to be.

And while I can’t speak for those who are not American citizens, I can say wholeheartedly that my country doesn’t look any more democratic from this side of the Atlantic. The constant stream of panic and chaos coming from home is a sharp contrast to the stagnant but stable performance of Irish politics. Proportional representation is a wonder that most Americans have never heard of. I have affordable access to healthcare for the first time in my life. And my education is not under siege by my own government.

America is no beacon of democracy.

And yet, the mythology persists. And yet, the dream of what America could be hides in the hearts of so many, despite the despair. We may have immediately lost our way upon setting out on this path, but that doesn’t make the ideal we’ve projected to the rest of the world any less of a worthy goal.
Plenty of other places are doing democracy, and doing it better than we ever have. History is repeating as the United States faces another onslaught of populism, oligarchs, and autocratic leaders. We are divided, our institutions are failing us, and the electoral system is broken.

I know my obsession with the idea of America – present since my political awakening at age nine, speaker playing Hamilton in one hand and pussy hat in the other – may lend me to a different disposition than many of my peers at home and abroad. But if we push through this – if we resist, organize and work for the ideas we hold so dear – ours could be a real story of redemption. It would take time, concerted effort, and a real reckoning with what America is, not just what it could be. It would require radical reform of education and politics. It would mean we find a way to hold the most powerful people on the planet to account.

If we achieve even part of that, perhaps one day we could again be a beacon to the rest of the
world.

Perhaps one day Lady Liberty’s light will burn with real fire for the very first time.