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Tawiscara: The Hijacking of Democracy
What if modern democracy had not been born in Athens, but in the Americas? What if capitalism’s greatest triumph had not been defeating its adversaries, but appropriating their ideas?
For centuries, official history presented democracy, freedom, and federalism as European creations. In Tawiscara. The Hijacking of Democracy, the author proposes a different Native American societies, especially the Iroquois Confederacy, played a decisive role in the birth of modern democratic thought, with their concepts of equality, fraternity, solidarity, rationality, secularism, and tolerance. However, that legacy was stripped of its egalitarian foundations to adapt it to liberal capitalism and its historical the obsession with privatizing everything and the fanatical and fanciful ideology that “my selfishness is good for the rest of the world.” Drawing on extensive historical research, the author traces the trajectory of these ideas from Indigenous nations through the European Enlightenment to the founding of the United States, showing how they were transformed to legitimize a new political, economic, and imperial order that differed little from the Middle Ages or the Roman Empire. More than a review of the past, this book is a reflection on the present. In an era marked by financial power, tech corporations, and the crisis of liberal democracies, Tawiscara invites us to rethink the true origin of democracy and to ask ourselves whether it is still possible to rescue it from those who turned it into the primary instrument of their own power.
For centuries, official history presented democracy, freedom, and federalism as European creations. In Tawiscara. The Hijacking of Democracy, the author proposes a different Native American societies, especially the Iroquois Confederacy, played a decisive role in the birth of modern democratic thought, with their concepts of equality, fraternity, solidarity, rationality, secularism, and tolerance. However, that legacy was stripped of its egalitarian foundations to adapt it to liberal capitalism and its historical the obsession with privatizing everything and the fanatical and fanciful ideology that “my selfishness is good for the rest of the world.” Drawing on extensive historical research, the author traces the trajectory of these ideas from Indigenous nations through the European Enlightenment to the founding of the United States, showing how they were transformed to legitimize a new political, economic, and imperial order that differed little from the Middle Ages or the Roman Empire. More than a review of the past, this book is a reflection on the present. In an era marked by financial power, tech corporations, and the crisis of liberal democracies, Tawiscara invites us to rethink the true origin of democracy and to ask ourselves whether it is still possible to rescue it from those who turned it into the primary instrument of their own power.
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Published July 7, 2026
About the author
Jorge Majfud
165 books15 followersJorge Antonio Majfud Albernaz (1969, Uruguay) es un escritor y traductor uruguayo radicado en Estados Unidos.
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