a bonobo humanity?

If you don’t want kings, limit the power of your Prez, or better still, change your system

I’ve written about how the US political system seems much more susceptible to demagoguery than, say, Australia’s version of the Westminster system, not to mention that of Canada, or Britain, or the governments of the Scandinavian countries – a fact that, it seems, many US pundits haven’t recognised, though some may just be recognising it now.

However, I might be focussing too much on problems instead of considering solutions. This is important as no democratic country is immune from the sort of government over-reach (to put it mildly) that the US is currently dealing with. I’ve recently had Mallen Baker’s ‘dangerously reasonable’ videos recommended to me, and his review of the book How democracies die, by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, has convinced me to get a copy, as I’m getting the impression that conservative intolerance seems to be sweeping through the WEIRD world at the moment – in spite of Australia having decisively voted to re-elect its centre-left government recently, something which took many by surprise. The mess in the USA seems to have been a central factor. That way lies horror. But just a few days ago the major capitals of Australia held well-attended anti-immigration rallies, in which neo-nazis were apparently involved, which surprised many of my friends and myself, living as we do in a bubble of moderation, as well as satisfaction and pleasure regarding the multicultural environment we’re now living in. We’re all old enough to remember how different it was some fifty years ago.

So Baker reflects on the aforementioned book, and the state of democracy, 80 years after the fall of nazism in Europe. Perhaps the first feature of democracy maintenance is civility, and mutual recognition that a free and fair system of elected government needs to be maintained, and sometimes reformed in line with a society that itself is never static. Lapses in civility and fairness are warning signs that need to be heeded. Spurious attacks on opposition politicians, unsupported claims about election rigging, partisan manipulation of electoral boundaries, violent and inflammatory rhetoric, attacks on civil liberties and the so-called ‘fourth estate’, manipulation of the law to silence critics, these are the most salient issues – but they are most concerning, as I’ve often said, when a great deal of power is given to too few, or even to one ‘I alone can fix it’ individual. This is the massive weakness of the US political system, which shrieks at democrats outside of that country but is hardly noticed by those within it. This is the USA’s tragedy, not Trump’s advent.

The principal problem, of course, is the Presidential system itself, and as long as it is retained, with all its powers, privileges and immunities, the USA will be vulnerable to the kind of takeover that’s currently occurring – a takeover that seems to be only temporarily blocked by the courts, a blockage that I’m sure the current administration is trying to overcome. And of course the courts too – especially the Supreme Court, which clearly has been given too much power – are systems that can be and will be politicised, as this downhill spiral continues. To my amusement/bemusement, AI offers solutions:

The US finds reform difficult due to ingrained structural issues like the Electoral College, and the difficulty of passing constitutional amendments, which are exacerbated by a lack of collective imagination for what comprehensive reform looks like. Additionally, some voters believe the system is inherently “rigged,” making them skeptical that procedural fixes can work, while others feel that small procedural changes are inadequate for addressing deep-seated problems and building social cohesion.

I note that this AI guy makes no mention of the presidential system – clearly he was born and bred in the USA. So, if they won’t jettison this disastrous system in favour of something more collaborative and issues and policy-based, rather than personality-based, we’re left largely with tinkering, but important tinkering. So, what of this Electoral College? It’s a system of 538 ‘electors’ whose role is supposed to be quite minimal, in that they simply represent the winner of the vote count in their electorate. There are 538 electorates, and the winner of the overall vote count (of electorates, not voters) wins the Presidency. Thus it’s possible, and has often happened in recent times, that the winner of the Electoral College is not the winner of the popular vote. Strangely, but not at all strangely, every time this has happened, the less than 50% popular winner has been a Republican.

So the Electoral College system is clearly not a fair system, it has a Republican bias which appears to be increasing. This means, in effect, that the national vote, and so the nation itself, is becoming increasingly less democratic. This isn’t partisan bluster, it is fact. The Electoral College problem should be able to be fixed in a non-partisan way, as it should be the case that an overwhelming number of the electorate would want elections to be fair. However, when a nation is fundamentally divided into ‘two tribes’, each fuelled by contempt for the other, and one of those tribes has gotten the upper hand vis-a-vis rigging, democracy has clearly failed. And this Electoral College problem is exacerbated by gerrymandering at the state level, always carried out by Republican-held states.

There’s also the effect of party discipline and solidarity upon its members, the expectation that people in government will be team players. In Trump’s case he was supposedly a Democrat in earlier times, though never active, never having to display loyalty or team discipline. In the run-up to the 2016 federal election he was at first ridiculed or dismissed by most leading Republicans, but the populist rhetoric of his speeches, violent and abusive though they often were, gained him a strong following among the ‘left behind’, or the deplorables, as Hilary Clinton termed them. So gradually the Republican Party as a whole got behind him, because, it seems, winning was more important to them than policy coherence or party discipline.
So Trump became President in 2016 despite losing the popular vote, and the nation survived, despite a less than effective handling of the Covid crisis, and two impeachment inquiries based on solid grounds. His obvious fomenting of an uprising and a violent attack on Congress after his 2020 election loss, resulting in the arrest and criminal conviction of almost 1300 people, would have prevented him for standing for office in any other democratic country, surely. Instead he received no punishment whatever, and was able to pardon virtually all the other offenders, a disgraceful situation that seems to have been ‘swept under the rug’. Could any other western democracy have stood for this? And allowed the principal perpetrator to recover ‘supreme power’?

Anyway I’m having technical problems with my blog or browser or something at present so I’ll send this off and try to continue with it next time.