In 1787, while delegates to the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia were hammering out a democratic government for these United States, Catherine II, Empress of Russia, was taking a tour of her regime’s colonizing efforts in the Ukraine. She had advanced lavish sums to her lover, Prince Grigory Potemkin, to finance this ambitious undertaking.

Potemkin was renowned for his extravagance, and he spared neither manpower nor materials to turn the scheme he had promoted to the empress into a reality. Yet he had greatly underestimated the cost of this huge enterprise; and when Catherine wanted to see the progress for herself, the story is told that Potemkin had his men build artificial villages along the route to convince her that her money hadn’t been wasted. To this day, the term "Potemkin village" is used to refer to "any pretentious façade designed to cover up a shabby or undesirable condition."

Now that the US presidential campaign is finally underway, after a seemingly eternal preliminary buildup, it’s hard to escape the impression that what we have witnessed in the early contests in Iowa and New Hampshire is merely an exercise in "Potemkin democracy." All the media hyperbole about "retail politics" and "grassroots democracy," set against a nostalgic backdrop of rural simplicity and quaint town meetings and artfully orchestrated TV images of salt-of-the-earth millionaire candidates hobnobbing with just plain folks, is meant to evoke a romantic sense of America’s wholesome political traditions. But it’s actually nothing more than an effort to disguise the shabby truth that the democracy of "we the people" has become the victim of a hostile corporate takeover.

The Buying of the President 2000, the latest publication of the watchdog group, Center for Public Integrity, is a devastating in-depth study of exactly who has inherited American democracy—and it’s not the meek. It is, with a disturbing modern intensity, the rich and powerful. The book gives a listing of who is contributing to whom, and is filled with accounts of what they are getting in return. And what it calls "the dirty secret of American presidential politics" is that "before the first vote is cast in a presidential primary, a private referendum has already been conducted among the nation’s financial elites as to which candidate shall earn his party’s nomination."

Of course this isn’t news to the majority of the American public, who have become largely disillusioned with the political process. Participation in elections and other forms of democratic action has steadily declined, to the point where actual voters are now a minority. (And that minority, like the electorates of Iowa and New Hampshire, is both whiter and more conservative than the general population.)

A recent bipartisan study found that 54 percent of Americans no longer believe that "this is a government of, by and for the people." About three-quarters of people surveyed regularly tell pollsters that corporations and special interests have too much power. How is it then that an increasing number of Americans also say that they are satisfied with the direction in which the country is moving?

Any political scientist can tell you that the system the nation’s founders devised is not a democracy, per se, but a republic. In fact, the system of checks and balances James Madison designed was intended above all to protect private property and keep the democratic impulses of the mob under control.

During the constitutional deliberations, wealthy merchants and landowners—former revolutionaries who had primarily pledged their sacred fortunes to be liberated from British tax and trade laws impinging on their profit margins—outmaneuvered radical populists like Ben Franklin. The Federalists, including Washington, Hamilton and closet monarchist John Adams, were the ideological ancestors of today’s Republicans—a thoroughly pro-business party.

The majority whose tyranny they feared so much was all the people who weren’t as rich as they were. Their fear was not baseless. Because, as Alexis de Tocqueville so cogently observed, the "classless" nature of early American society was based on the widely-held presumption that a democratic system would eventually lead to an equal distribution of wealth.

Under the circumstances, where 90 percent of enfranchised voters—white male property owners—were economically independent farmers, merchants and craftsmen, that presumption didn’t seem as ridiculous as it does today in our age of corporate serfdom. But it points to an important fact: our political democracy was based on a foundation of economic democracy that we have subsequently lost.

How far we have strayed from that original egalitarian vision becomes obvious when you look at the simple fact that the US now has the greatest disparity between rich and poor in the industrialized world. The richest one percent of Americans, who have doubled their share of the national wealth in the last two decades, now own more wealth than the poorest 95 percent of their fellow citizens. Significantly, they also contribute 80 percent of all political campaign funds.

While it is true that the idea of a classless American society has always been a myth, an honest assessment of the preamble to the US Constitution reveals the stark failure of the nation to live up to another of its founding ideals. Can we say we have established justice when one of every five children in the world’s wealthiest nation lives in desperate poverty, and a quarter of all the world’s prisoners are in the American penal system? Can a nation with the highest murder rate in the developed world claim to have insured domestic tranquility? Does the US military really provide for the common defense? Or are taxpayers protecting the interests and investments of multinational corporations?

When soil, water and air are everywhere pumped full of poisons, and plant and animal species are disappearing at a faster rate than during the dinosaur extinction, and every American carries residues of hundreds of synthetic chemicals in their blood, can we truly say we’ve been successful at promoting the general welfare? And after family farmers have been driven off their land, and mom and pop store owners have been driven out of business, and American workers have found themselves working longer hours than the workers of every other industrial nation for a smaller real wage than they made a quarter-century ago, how can they still believe that their government secures for them the blessings of liberty?

Two of the most canny analysts of totalitarianism, authors George Orwell (1984) and Aldous Huxley (Brave New World), both recognized that the totalitarian state of the future would not depend on crude force to keep its citizens in line. "In an age of advanced technology," Huxley wrote, "a really efficient totalitarian state would be one in which the all-powerful executive of political bosses and their army of managers control a population of slaves who do not have to be coerced, because they love their servitude."

No system of government, democratic or totalitarian, is in practice a perfectly realized form of its ideal. But certain general characteristics may serve to define that system. So if a "democracy" is defined as a "government by the people" characterized by "equality of rights and privileges," yet a majority of its citizens no longer believe either that the government represents their interests or that they have an equal voice in its politics, is it still a democracy?

On the other hand, if the interests of government and corporations are united in a virtual "corporate state," which draws its support primarily from economic classes "seeking to maintain the economic and social status quo," and uses "aggressive nationalism" and "racism" and, when necessary, "violence" to keep "order," does that meet the definition of "fascism?"

The turning point for American democracy came relatively early in its history, and was also, ironically enough, "a new birth of freedom." Although economic elites dominated politics from the beginning of the nation’s history, prior to the Civil War their power was mostly local and decentralized. Corporations were strictly limited to public works projects and to specific time frames. But the victory of the industrial northern states coincided with an international industrial revolution, and antebellum local allegiances were replaced in the postwar era by a new sense of national identity. The resulting national mood of unlimited opportunity and "manifest destiny" led to a period of optimistically unrestrained capitalism. Fortunes were made; a business-friendly Supreme Court gave corporations the same rights as "persons;" wealth and power became more concentrated.

Naturally this produced a backlash among the farmers and laborers who were feeling squeezed in this new economic game. But they too were influenced by the "bigger-is-better" spirit of the times, and the turn-of-the-century progressive reformers who represented their interests made a deal with the devil: instead of limiting the growth of corporations, they expanded the power of "the people’s" government to keep corporate power in check. Obviously, it didn’t work.

As American power expanded internationally over the course of the twentieth century, the increasingly concentrated power and wealth of the nation’s ruling elites grew along with it. On the international scene, it became more difficult to make the distinction between national security and business interests. Corresponding developments aided the concentration of corporate power: explosive growth in the national population created new markets; and advances in transportation and technology, especially communications technology, gave rise to mass media and popular culture.

By mid-century, sociologist C. Wright Mills had detected a shift in the fundamental nature of American democracy, wherein a "power elite" make decisions they pass along to politicians at "the middle level of power." Mills called politics "a semi-organized stalemate," and described the "bottom level" of the societal pyramid as "a mass-like society which has little resemblance to the image of a society in which voluntary associations and classic publics hold the keys to power." This level is "fragmented, and in truth, impotent."

Mills’ book was widely admired and influential—to little effect.

Given this decades-old awareness of the rot at the core of American democracy, it makes sense to wonder how it is that an outraged public has not arisen to throw off the chains of oligarchy. The answer is another important twentieth-century development, perhaps the greatest influence of the century on media, commerce and politics: the twin sciences of psychology and public relations.

The pioneer of public relations was (not by coincidence) the nephew of Sigmund Freud, a pioneer of psychology. His name was Edward Bernays, and he used his uncle’s insights into the human mind to design advertising campaigns to sell commercial products for major corporations, and to pitch both US government policies and politicians. In his book Propaganda, Bernays wrote that "if we understand the mechanisms and motives of the group mind, it is now possible to control and regiment the masses according to our will without their knowing it." He called this "engineering of consent."

Bernays also maintained that "the conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. In almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind."

A patriotic American, Bernays was horrified when he learned that his theories had been adopted wholesale by Hitler’s Third Reich.

In ancient legends, to know someone’s name is to have a certain power over that person. Perhaps the reason that American democracy has slipped out of our grasp is that we can’t bring ourselves to name what our system of government has really become. Perhaps we activists don’t wish to wake from our dream of democracy, because so many of our activities depend on convincing people that their votes do make a difference. Perhaps we worry that years ago we were too easily caricatured because we spelled Amerika with a "k."

But is this a political system where the interests of government and corporations are virtually inseparable? Yes. Is this system primarily supported by a class of people who want to maintain the social and economic status quo? Yes. Is this a system that demonstrates aggressive nationalism? Yes. Do our politicians play the race card to keep the working class divided? Yes. Do our police use unnecessary violence to keep order? Ask any black inner city resident. Or remember Seattle.

Is this fascism?

Yes.

In recent weeks I’ve read quotes from leading progressives like Ralph Nader and William Greider, speculating on the possibility that only some kind of political or economic or environmental crisis will be able to penetrate the profound apathy of the American people and spur them to action. Indeed, many of us are waiting to be rescued by apocalypse.

But maybe we can be that crisis, we dedicated few, by naming the name of the demon who has captured our democracy, and speaking truth to power. And maybe if we’re loud and convincing enough, our voices will ring like a clarion call through the white noise of the information blizzard, and remind Americans once again that there’s more to self-government than endless circus and daily bread.

And if we’re really lucky, maybe we can get enough of our fellow citizens to join us, and together we can tear down the artificial walls of this archaic Potemkin democracy, and build ourselves a real one.