The preamble to the U.S. Constitution written in 1787 includes the words “all men are created equal.” It says nothing about women, who did have the same rights as men but could not vote until 1920, after passage of the 19th Amendment to the Constitution 133 years later. Some 21 percent of the population then, about 2.5 million, were enslaved Africans, who were not regarded as human beings also until they were officially deemed three-fifths of a person also in 1787. About two percent of the population were free Africans, who had some rights, including the right to vote. But the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in the 1857 Dred Scott case that African Americans were not citizens.

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 affirmed the right to vote for African Americans but, now, 60 years later, they still face considerable hurdles to voting enacted by some states.

The Indigenous population numbered variously between eight million and 110 million living in more than 80 nations prior to the arrival of the European settlers but their number dwindled to about four million by 1776. They were granted full citizenship 100 years ago, on June 2, 1924.

There have been substantial advances towards equality, especially under President Franklin D. Roosevelt and. now, President Joe Biden. But, again, entrenched obstacles still remain.

The United States now comprises 333 million people representing nearly 1,500 races and ethnicity groups, along with Indigenous peoples. They include more than 41 million African Americans and 65 million Latino Americans, totaling more than 100 million non-European Americans. The nation is multi-racial, multi-ethnic and multi-cultural but one ongoing debate is whether one culture – the European American – should specifically dominate. Christian Nationalists, comprising 30 percent of the population, want exactly that, to impose their religious beliefs on all aspects of American life, which would, of course, severely compromise the rights of others.

Also, millions of former President Donald Trump’s Make America Great Again movement that now controls the Republican Party belong to the “aggrieved” segment of the population who insist that their culture faces an existential “replacement” threat. Trump began exploiting that grievance even before he formally entered party politics. He declared his 2016 candidacy by demonizing refugees and other migrants. But, even before then, he helped spread the falsehood that Barack Obama was born in Kenya, instead of in Hawaii to a Kenyan father and a European American mother.

Trump popularized that “birtherism” which grew out of a 2004 claim by an Illinois pollical candidate that Obama was a closet Muslim – though he is a Christian. In the current presidential election campaign, he is trying the same tactic against Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic presidential candidate, who was born in the U.S. to an Indian American mother and a Jamaican American father.

In addition, the nation has been functioning under two patently undemocratic institutions.

One is the U.S. Supreme Court, which former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi told Joy Reid on her MSNBC show “The Reid Out” has now “gone rogue.”

The court, whose members are appointed for life, has allowed states to make it difficult to vote and permitted unlimited campaign contributions; provided immunity to members of the police force and reinstated the death penalty in a racially biased criminal justice system; removed legal obstacles to owning guns, which now total nearly 400 million; eliminated the federal right to abortions; severely curtailed the rulemaking authority of federal agencies; and granted the president almost blanket immunity from prosecution. Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito shrug off accusations of unethical behavior.

A Gallup poll last year found that 58 percent of Americans disapprove of the court but such criticism is not new. “That is the fate of the Supreme Court as both a legal and a political institution. It does not exist outside of American politics,” Boston College professor Ken L. Kersch said in an interview with the New Jersey Bar Association Foundation in April last year. Abraham Lincoln, he noted, campaigned for the U.S. Senate and the presidency by attacking the court’s Dred Scott ruling in 1857 that also said it was unconstitutional for any state or territory to ban slavery.

“The candid citizen must confess that if the policy of the government upon vital questions affecting the whole people is to be irrevocably fixed by the Supreme Court, the people will have ceased to be their own rulers, having to that extent practically resigned their government into the hands of that eminent tribunal,” Lincoln argued.

Critics of the court are now demanding that the number of justices be increased and that term limits and an enforceable code of ethics be imposed. Biden, who stayed away from court reform during his 36 years in Congress, recently created a bipartisan Presidential Commission on the Supreme Court of the United States to study that question. The commission endorsed the idea of a code of ethics and a term limit but not boosting the number of justices.

Biden took two and a half years before he acted on the report. In July, he called on Congress to enact reform legislation setting out a term limit and a binding code of conduct, along with reversing the immunity recently granted to the president.

“What is happening now is not normal and it undermines the public’s confidence in the court’s decisions, including those impacting personal freedoms,” Biden wrote in a Washington Post editorial – more than 160 years after Lincoln. Meanwhile, five House Democrats launched an initiative to generate support for a series of reform bills. Reforming the court requires congressional approval and not a constitutional amendment, the Center for American Progress has pointed out.

The court recently adopted its own code of ethics but without any enforceable requirement.

The Electoral College, meanwhile, allows for the election of the president not by popular vote but by a majority of 538 Electoral College votes. That happened, for example, in 2000 when Al Gore won the popular vote but George W. Bush won the Electoral College vote and also in the 2016 race between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump.

“Electoral votes are allocated among the States based on the Census. Every State is allocated a number of votes equal to the number of Senators and Representatives in its U.S. Congressional delegation–two votes for its Senators in the U.S. Senate plus a number of votes equal to the number of its Congressional districts,” the National Archives explains on its website.

The undemocratic nature of this system is obvious. It not only ignores the will of the people as a whole but it also puts larger states at a disadvantage. For example, Wyoming, the least populated state, with 586,500 people, has the same number of Electoral College votes as California, which has the largest population, 39 million: two.

Also, gerrymandering of voting boundaries and enactment of voter suppression laws have allowed some states to garner partisan Electoral votes by boosting the number of their Representatives.

As a result, just a handful of “battleground” or “swing” states can determine the outcome of presidential elections. Time magazine, on Aug. 8, projected that the 2024 presidential race will be determined by the outcome in seven states with a total population of just 85 million but with 169 Electoral College votes: Pennsylvania (population: 13 million, electoral votes: 19), North Carolina (11 million, 16); Georgia (four million, 16; Michigan (10 million, 15); Arizona (seven million, 11), Wisconsin (six million, 10), Nevada (three million, six).

The Electoral College was created as a compromise between the Founding Fathers who wanted Congress to elect the president and those pushing to let the people choose. The American Bar Association (ABA), citing the National Archives, reported in October 2019 that, over the past 200 years, critics have introduced more than 700 bills to reform or eliminate it but none became law: Any proposed change must first pass Congress and then be put to the states.

All of that having been said, it is important to note that the United States, with all its flaws, remains the destination of choice for millions of refugees and other migrants seeking a country with plentiful opportunities to improve their lives.