To describe the Six Nations as “a democracy,” as Burns does, is also wrong on two counts — the “a” and the “democracy.” In many ways, the Six Nations functioned more like the European Union, NATO, or the United Nations than like the United States, especially the U.S. after 1787. It was a confederacy of five previously warring nations (later expanded to include the Tuscarora around 1720) who had reached an agreement aimed at keeping the peace among them and conducting some degree of common foreign policy, rather than a comprehensive system of internal government. The cohesion of that union was insufficient to prevent the Oneida and Tuscarora from supporting the Americans in the Revolution, while the other four backed England. But even when it functioned more smoothly, the member nations still saw themselves as separate nations with their own governments.
The Iroquois system, while sophisticated and forward-thinking for its day, was also nothing that would be recognizable to Westerners as a democracy, let alone some sort of precursor to our constitutional system. Chiefs had hereditary titles tied to their family lineage, although the individual holder was selected by a consensus of elites — not by any sort of popular vote. This was a hereditary oligarchy, not relying on any species of majoritarian or representative system of government (even by 18th-century standards). Its consensus-based decision-making methods were nothing like how Americans have ever operated, although it more nearly resembles some oligarchic European republics. The outsize role of women in the Iroquois system of longhouses and matrilineal cultures also rather obviously did not influence Americans or others in the West during the Founding era.
None of this has stopped there from being a movement among activists and a few fringe scholars to try to confect a theory that the Iroquois system had a major influence on the development of the American system of government and the ultimate structure of the U.S. Constitution. But this is agitprop masquerading as scholarship, in the same way that the 1619 Project relied upon cherry-picking scraps of the historical record and hoping nobody noticed the rest of the facts.
Where We Came From
Overemphasizing the Iroquois influence on American political thought might be forgivable if Burns were offering his audience a menu of those influences for context and just got excessively enthusiastic in boosting one of them. But he does nothing of the sort. Instead, his presentation strips the revolutionary generation of nearly all of their other influences, aiming instead to shear them from their cultural and intellectual heritage. He brings out a historian to argue specifically that the universalist language of the revolution about the rights of man severed its connection to their English roots — roots that Burns seems very eager to downplay. That gives the audience no context in which to evaluate his ode to the Iroquois example.