American Anarchism Prologue
When it comes to the United States of America, the country has seen better days when it comes to freedom and democracy. The United States was founded as a representative democracy where representatives were supposedly supposed to speak for the people as the new nation slowly transitioned from being under the rule of Britain. Why? Because it was incredibly difficult for people to have any form of representation in the United Kingdom during the seventeen hundreds, even with a series of reforms that stopped Britain from being an absolute monarchy. In the late seventeen hundreds and early eighteen hundreds, very few people in Britain had any real say in how their government was run. According to a survey that was conducted back in 1780, the electorate in England and Wales only had about two hundred fourteen thousand people - or less than three percent of the total population that the electorate & British parliament was supposed to represent. In Scotland, the electorate was much smaller. In the year 1831, only four thousand five hundred men out of a population of two million six hundred thousand had the ability to vote in parliamentary elections. Basically, very few citizens of the United Kingdom had any kind of voting rights or freedoms, making Britain more of a oligarchy of the few pushing around the many than a genuine democracy. All of this started back in 1430 in Britain, where legislation was passed that limited voting on parliamentary representatives to those who owned land for an annual charge of at least forty shillings. Since then, voting rights required white men - the only demographic that was really allowed to have a say - to have some degree of wealth and ownership of property to really have any influence on government. The United States and other British colonies eventually rebelled against these unfair rules, but it was not as if the government of the United States embraced what most would consider true freedom. Similar restrictions were established in the United States which kept people from having true democracy or say in how their society works.