Many Americans worry whether the Republic with its 230-year old Constitution will survive the electronic and information revolutions. I share those concerns and am increasing pessimistic particularly given the increasing influence of the internet on our lives, consequences of which we are only beginning to understand much less to control. I wonder, however, if the more fundamental question is whether the Republic has survived the Industrial Revolution which has fundamentally changed our lives over the past two centuries.
In its original wording, the Constitution did not specify who had the right to vote, leaving that decision to individual states, most of which limited suffrage to adult white male property owners, which was less than ten percent of the adult population. Fortunately, the right to vote has been expanded since, particularly with the 14th, 19th, and 24th Amendments.
Although only a small fraction of the adult population had suffrage when the Constitution was ratified in 1789, those with the right to vote had a measure of independence. What I mean by independence is that for the most part, they primarily were farmers, autonomous tradesmen, and small-scale merchants rather than employees. They had a direct relationship with the government—a partnership between the state and its citizens.
The situation is different today. Although a much larger percent of the population has the right to vote, the relationship of voters to the government has fundamentally changed due in large part to the Industrial Revolution. Small-scale farmers have been largely replaced by commodity-producing agribusinesses, autonomous tradesmen by factories, and small merchants by box stores, corporate-owned national franchises, and Amazon. We have become employees.
The significance of this distinction is that the greatest influence on the welfare of a modern day citizen is not the state but rather his or her employer. Employment is a structure of rules and control that provides money in exchange for a skill or labor. Employers determine when and where employees work, what they do on the job, and what they are paid. Employers can dismiss employees at any time, often with little recourse, and the loss of a job puts a person’s basic welfare at great risk. Further, employees lack basic rights that are supposedly guaranteed to us as citizens. They have little or no right of free speech or assembly at the workplace. Their behavior is strictly controlled by the time clock, company policies, or their boss. Their ability to change jobs is often limited due to the need for healthcare. The list goes on. The Constitution has been replaced by the personnel manual.
Because of this subservient relationship, the loyalty of many people to their employer is greater than that to the state, either by necessity or choice. Being conscious of their immediate welfare, employees naturally are tempted to vote their paycheck, supporting issues that benefit their corporate masters often to their own personal detriment. The situation is exacerbated by a government whose primary mission has become support of this large-scale corporate capitalist structure, by a legal system that regards the corporation as a citizen, and by a financing tradition for political campaigns that is little more than semi-criminal bribery on the part of large private organizations.
The Republic as envisioned and created by its founders has been perverted into a farce of servitude, quasi-corruption, and hypocrisy.