In a class society, the dominant economic class makes and enforces the rules. We see that the so-called democracy in the U.S. is a bourgeois democracy, a democracy constructed to ensure the actual rule of those who own and control the means of production. These owners and controllers, the monopoly capitalist class, also own and control the media and the other means by which both political parties elect office holders. These office holders use their power to serve those whose power put them in their lucrative positions. The police apparatus (FBI, CIA, etc.) is also part of the structure built and controlled by the monopoly capitalist class to ensure the safety of their ruling position and to deny and suppress at the will of the monopoly capitalist, the democratic rights of the vast majority of people who oppose this rule. The judicial system applies and interprets the laws for the benefit of the monopoly capitalists. The laws that protect the working class are few in number and infrequently enforced, while those protecting the property and rights of the monopoly capitalist are many in number and selectively enforced whenever it benefits the ruling class to do so. Evidence of this type of unequal justice can be seen in the population of our prisons, inhabited by working and minority people, while the bourgeoisie, when rarely caught for their crimes, are given a light slap on the wrist or sent to their own country-club prisons. The military is the arm of the bourgeois state structure that oppresses working people both at home and overseas. This can be seen by the imperialist war in Vietnam and the use of the army and national guard units at home as strikebreakers, scabs and suppressors of democratic rights. During times of relative prosperity, the bourgeois state apparatus rules under the veil of benevolent freedom and justice for all. But when an economic crisis begins to threaten the ruling class position, the state moves to more open methods of suppression and denial of democratic rights in order to protect themselves.
At the workplace, it is clear that democracy in the U.S. does not exist. Working people in this country exist under a system of wage slavery. In order to survive workers have no choice but to sell their labor power at a price determined by the capitalists. As long as monopoly capitalists exist on the profits from the sale of this labor power by vast numbers of working people, these working people will have no freedom. The appropriation, by a small minority to be used for personal gain and profit, of the wealth produced by labor power must be stopped and replaced by new relations to production where the workers own and control the means of production, and their labor is for the good of the vast majority.
People in the U.S. today have won democratic rights only by fiercely struggling for them. The capitalist system can only survive by enslaving and exploiting the vast majority of people. We must change the material basis upon which the exploitation and enslavement of people exists by destroying the monopoly capitalist system in order to truly enjoy our democratic rights.