Of the People, By the People, and For the People* (as long as they're upper class)

From its conception to the present day, America has been a nation geared toward the wealthy—or more correctly—the bourgeois capitalist. The amount of historical narratives and evidence to support this claim is enormous to the point that there is no denying that an advantage has been given to the rich all throughout our nation’s history.

This began with the very birth of our modern government. The Constitutional Congress that composed our governing document was completely comprised of men belonging to the upper middle class or higher. As a result, they felt that the average American, most likely to be a poor farmer, was incapable of making an informed decision on who to vote for. Thus senators and presidents were not directly elected (direct election of senators was awarded in the early part of the twentieth century and our president is still elected by the Electoral College). As a result of this structure, the political voice was taken away from the poor, who could not afford a private education.

This continued into the Gilded Age of the late nineteenth century. Government was corrupted by corporate interest (although one could still reasonably make this claim), and America was literally run by the capitalist class. The poor worker and farmer had no voice in government policy, resulting in the top one percent of society owning ninety percent of the overall wealth. Because the capitalist got whatever he (every business tycoon was male) wanted, the workers suffered unbearable conditions, terrible hours, disfigurations, loss of appendages and limbs, and in a fair amount of cases—death.

It continued into the mid-1900s. America became extremely paranoid regarding communism, because it threatened to eliminate the bourgeois class. It was a proposed attack on the wealthy. In this manner the United States desperately fought and competed with the USSR and communism for nearly fifty years, leading to unfathomable amounts of defense spending.

The America of the rich is still in tact today. Why is the United States virtually the only post-industrialized nation without socialized medicine? Simple. If America had universal government-provided health care, the corporate interest of large-scale insurance companies would be ignored. We can’t let that happen. The result is a nation that spends more per capita on health care than any other country in the world but ranks 39th in infant mortality and 36th in life expectancy (New England Journal of Medicine). It’s quite obvious that we would rather see the wealthy become wealthier than see the poor continue to live.