“But over time, the executive branch grew exceedingly powerful. Two world wars emphasized the president’s commander in chief role and removed constraints on its power. By the second half of the 20th century, the republic was routinely fighting wars without its legislative branch, Congress, declaring war, as the Constitution required. With Congress often paralyzed by political conflict, presidents increasingly governed by edicts.”
No it was a democracy, but it wasn’t inclusive of everyone. What your argument is describing is a comprise that had to be made so that a new nation would not be divided almost immediately. Women weren’t able to vote either. Only land owning men.
But our democracy had a virtuous circle that expanded who was included in the political process. This expanded who could participate in our economic institutions as well, eventually. This is process also took place in England. And despite such an unequal start in America, it was working for most of our history.
It was with our adoption of neoliberalism in 1980 with Reagan’s election that the virtuous circle became a vicious circle. People were increasing excluded from our economic and political institutions. And our democracy has now fully transformed into a extractive fascist dictatorship.
Our capitalist system was always an extractive economic institution but our democracy had kept it in check. Things like trust busting, monopoly laws, and the New Deal prolonged the growth we were experiencing under the extractive economic institution of capitalism.
Now that our political and economic institutions are fully working in tandem as extractive institutions that growth will soon end. We can already see how Trump’s attacks on universities and scientific research are stifling innovation. Without any innovation fueling creative destruction, growth in our economy will stagnate. The extractive institutions run by the owner class will eventually run out of things to extract.
At this point it becomes a race between the collapse of America and it’s ability to consume neighboring countries in order to keep extracting. Much like Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Unlike Russia, even with fascist incompetence, America has the most powerful military in the world going off budget alone. It’s likely we will conquer quite a few countries before our extractive institutions cannibalize everything.
So no, not oligarchy. Not the same thing as neoliberism either. Your argument is a critique of people from over two hundred years ago from a modern moral perspective. Whether or not that’s fair, it isn’t a useful means of analysis. Even though it was not as inclusive as we would like it to have been American democracy was functionally a democracy from the beginning. And it became more inclusive as it went on. There was nothing stopping us from making different choices at critical junctures along the way that would have resulted in us reaching the kind of democracy that includes all people.
It is important to understand that this outcome was not inevitable. It’s not worth staying in the judging pit arguing who to assign blame to so we can sling mud at them. But we need to acknowledge that we failed so we can learn from this and move on. There’s no shortcut around it. The sooner we learn our lessons the sooner we can build a better world.