Tennessee WordSmith: A Liberal Dose, June 13, 2025 "A Brief History of Democracy, Part 2"

A Liberal Dose

A Brief History of Democracy part 2

Troy D. Smith

Last week I wrote a little about how the Revolutionary generation viewed the word “democracy.” They equated it with “mob rule,” such as ran rampant in the French Revolution, and so worked to keep the common people from having too much power -primarily by having property requirements to vote. This meant that even free white men aged twenty-one or over could not vote unless they were worth a certain amount of money. That was the norm at the time, and is no doubt what the Framers had in mind when they drafted the Constitution. Of course, they also had in mind women and people of color not voting.

A handful of states removed property requirements in the 1790s and early 1800s. Vermont, at #14 the first new state, gave the vote to all adult males regardless of wealth or race. The majority, though, still had those requirements in place by 1820. But when the Panic of 1819 collapsed the economy, working class men started agitating for their voting rights. By the end of the 1820s, almost all states had removed wealth as a qualification to vote… which led to the election of Andrew Jackson, a populist who had grown up poor and presented as a man of the people. It also led to a reconfiguring of the word “democracy”, which started to carry a positive connotation, associated with social equality of the working class. In fact, by the 1820s the Federalist Party had collapsed, leaving the Democratic-Republican party of Jefferson and Madison as the only remaining political party… and during the Jackson era, they started being called simply “Democrats,” which they made official by changing their name in 1844.

In the 1830s, a French traveler named Alexis de Tocqueville wrote a book (originally in French) called Democracy in America, which examined the character of Americans and sought to determine why their experiment with democracy had gone so much better than that of France. One thing he noted was that Americans love money, and generally hope to make more of it; that they don’t mind when an individual gets rich, but that they hate the idea of a handful of families, via generational wealth, becoming an aristocracy. He also noted that, unlike in Europe, you could not determine someone’s social status by how they dressed -in America poor people often dress well, so as not to appear poor, and rich people often dress like slobs so as not to be viewed as hoity-toity (not his exact words, of course). In other words, a social expectation of equality.

He did warn of two dangers to American democracy. First, the “tyranny of the majority” in which a majority group, having the most votes, can impinge on the rights of minorities. This danger was countermanded by things like the Bill of Rights, which protect individual liberties. Second, he warned of “soft despotism”, in which the government finagles a series of regulations to make voters FEEL LIKE they are participating, but which actually blind them to how they are being controlled and led to authoritarianism.

And that brings us to today, June 13. Tomorrow is Flag Day… and it is also Trump’s birthday, and the day of his massive military parade in his honor… and the date of over 1,800 planned “No King” demonstrations around the country. It also happens to be my wife’s and my anniversary (married on Flag Day!). There could be no better events to demonstrate the dangers facing democracy in America today from a militaristic authoritarian bully, and the American tradition -going back to the Boston Tea Party -of massive protest against tyranny. We are also seeing how, by ignoring the Constitution (and being allowed to get away with it), the current administration is imposing the tyranny of the majority -many of whom they have taken control of via soft despotism (which seems to be getting harder by the day).

The Constitution and its Bill of Rights. Those are our defense against tyranny. That is why military personnel and politicians pledge an oath to defend the Constitution, not to obey a president (or a king). The whole of U.S. history has revolved around trying “to make a more perfect union” by expanding rights, especially voting rights, to more and more people, not fewer and fewer.

This weekend, let our mantra be -not MAGA -but TAFA: Take American Forward Again.

--Troy D. Smith, a White County native, is a novelist and a history professor at Tennessee Tech and serves on the executive committee of the Tennessee Democratic Party. His words do not necessarily represent TTU.

Buy the book A Liberal Dose: Communiques from the Holler by Troy D. Smith HERE