Posts Tagged ‘democracy’
The USA has the worst political system in the democratic world, but they don’t think so
full democracies in v dark green
Okay, so I’ve written along these lines before but I need to double down. The USA has a problem with its history, as well as its national ego. The obvious needs to be pointed out to United Staters – that no other democratic country has ‘no kings’ rallies, because no other democratic country has what is in effect an elected monarchy, with massive pardoning powers, massive immunity, and power to appoint never-elected individuals to positions of great power and impact on the welfare of the state. And he gets to live in a massive white palace surrounded by courtiers for the four or eight years of his reign (and it looks like this king will always be male). Even the judiciary is overly politicised. And there seems to be no limit to the amount of money that can flow to favoured candidates. And yet, ask more or less randomly any bunch of United Staters to name the world’s greatest democracy, and we all know what the answer will be.
Here in Australia, voting is mandatory for citizens of 18 or over. Of course such compulsion is out of the question for ‘the land of the free’, but I do think that mandatory voting does remind us that we’re all in it together, that we’re fundamentally social creatures, and that we would do well to consider seriously the kind of society we want. It is a kind of participation in the broader society, which hopefully should bring us together. But when Australians vote, we vote for a local candidate as well as a set of policies. We don’t vote for anything like a king, or an ‘I alone can fix it’ superhero. As in the USA there are two major parties, but the parties decide on their leader, and they can dump that leader by a simple vote of no confidence if they feel she’s ineffective, or if they feel it’s time for a change, or whatever. She’s like the captain of a soccer team, she’ll be dumped if the team is performing poorly, or if they lose confidence in her leadership and so on. It’s all about collaboration, and the success of the team.
Of course, there is no perfect political system, and reform needs to be ongoing as societies evolve. The White Australia policy, which existed in my lifetime, now strikes us as an embarrassment, and it’s possible that much that seems normal now will strike others as an embarrassment in 60 years time. Maybe by that time the USA will have dumped its monarchy – but probably not.
Change often occurs when a crisis reveals serious problems with a system, and Trump, who is essentially a crime machine, as many have pointed out, has certainly shown how bad a so-called democratic state can get, but there seems to be something in the US psyche, something profoundly insular, and blindly nationalistic, that prevents it from engaging in the kind of root-and-branch reform that outsiders see as necessary.
The Trump saga continues because he hasn’t suffered a moment’s harm from the criminal convictions against him, in a nation that has the highest per capita incarceration rate of any democracy, by a very large margin. The only other countries with a higher rate are El Salvador, Cuba, Rwanda and Turkmenistan, but it’s unlikely that most United Staters are aware of this revealing fact. It seems clear that those being incarcerated are not the ultra-wealthy, a tiny minority that wields a highly disproportionate degree of power. The vast rich-poor gap and the high incarceration rate are clearly related.
This is a nation that really struggles to be clear-sighted about itself. Its influence on South Korea’s type of democratic system – an imperialistic Presidency, rather than the more party-based, team-focussed system more or less successfully used in Australia and other Westminster-style democracies, has been disastrous, as it would be anywhere else. It’s my own view that even many of these variants of democracy are too individually-focussed. We need governments to be as collaboratively and inclusively based as it is possible to be. We need to reduce, as far as is humanly possible, the old left-right divide, in which one government dismantles the policies of its predecessors, only to have its policies dismantled in turn, often at great cost to the public at large. A more inclusive and collaborative system, devoid of ‘I alone can fix it’ hubris, must surely be the politics of the future, but that future, I admit, seems distant. There are few nations following this model, and if they are, they’re largely being ignored by the rest. I can’t pretend to be an expert on global political systems, but I suspect that some Scandinavian systems are heading in the right direction. I shall look at some of those systems in future posts.
I’ve referenced below an interesting 2020 survey by Wurzburg University, ‘Ranking of Countries by Quality of Democracy’, which tends to confirm those suspicions. The top 5 countries, in order, are Denmark, Norway, Finland, Sweden and Germany (perhaps a bit of local bias for number five!). These countries, along with the next 30, are classified as ‘working democracies’. The next country, number 36, the USA, is the first of the ‘deficient democracies’. Few people in the USA would agree, of course.
References
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_incarceration_rate
the worst of the English-speaking democracies – 2
I’ve written briefly about Australian and New Zealand politics, now to Canada, which suffers from sharing a long border with the USA, and also some of its history with regard to Britain. However it couldn’t have been too much of a head-butting experience (with Britain) as it’s still a constitutional monarchy with King Chaz as ceremonial head of state (though a recent poll showed that only about a quarter of Canadians are actually aware of this), and they have a Governor-General, like we in Australia do. They even have a House of Commons, but thankfully not of Lords (the Brits should get rid of that thing, tradition be damned). Their Upper House is the Senate, as in Australia. The head of the elected government is the Prime Minister, primus inter pares, as in Australia and New Zealand. The two dominant parties are the Conservatives and the Liberals. So the Liberals are the left party in Canada, but the right party in Australia, and ‘liberalism’, especially neoliberalism, is a right-wing ideology in Britain and Australia, though it is seen as left-wing in the US. Other confusions include ‘blue’ states being left-wing in the US but right-wing in Australia, and vice versa for ‘red’ states. Canada also has its ‘minor’ parties like Australia.
According to Wikipedia, party discipline is much stronger in Canada than in either the USA or Britain, which is probably why their political dynamics aren’t internationally newsworthy. The country’s culture is also far more liberal (in the left-wing sense) than the US. I’ll quote this lengthy piece (references removed) from Wikipedia, which captures better than I could that vas deferens:
Canada’s egalitarian approach to governance has emphasised social welfare, economic freedom, and multiculturalism, which is based on selective economic migrants, social integration, and suppression of far-right politics, that has wide public and political support. Its broad range of constituent nationalities and policies that promote a “just society” are constitutionally protected. Individual rights, equality and inclusiveness (social equality) have risen to the forefront of political and legal importance for most Canadians, as demonstrated through support for the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, a relatively free economy, and social liberal attitudes toward women’s rights (like pregnancy termination), divorce, homosexuality, same-sex marriage, birth control, euthanasia or cannabis use. There is also a sense of collective responsibility in Canadian political culture, as is demonstrated in general support for universal health care, multiculturalism, evolution, gun control, foreign aid, and other social programs.
Sounds almost too good to be true – is it propaganda? No wonder the USA avoids mentioning its goody two shoes neighbour – though of course Trump is intent on annexing the place, sort of (then, everything he says is ‘sort of’).
My source goes on to say it’s all pretty centrist in Canada – the Libs being centre-left and the Conservatives being centre-right, and often the twain shall meet. Members of the Cabinet, with various portfolios, are usually, but not always, members of the elected party. All very collaborative and humanistic. It almost seems as if they’ve learned from United Staters how not to run governments.
Canada has a Supreme Court, with 9 Justices, and a Constitution, initiated in 1867. Its decisions are presented bilingually – an important point to remember, Canada being effectively a bilingual nation, though its political system is largely based on that of Britain. Again, nothing controversial to see here.
In trying to comprehend the horror of the US political system in comparison to Canada, Australia and New Zealand, I’ve not yet mentioned one factor – Christianity. I’ve written elsewhere about how rapidly Christianity has been abandoned in Australia, especially over the past 60 years or so. There has been a similar abandonment in Canada, though it has been slower. In Canada’s 2021 census, 53.3% reported being Christian, and 34.6% claimed no religion. Australia’s last census was also in 2021, with Christianity at 43.9% and no religion at 38.9%, and it looks certain that the 2026 census will show ‘no religion’ getting the most ‘votes’. In the USA, where it seems they don’t conduct censuses, we have to rely on private companies such as Gallup Inc., whose polling over 2020-2024 has Christian belief at around 69% and ‘religiously unaffiliated’ at 21.4%. One might imagine that Christian religiosity might result in more ‘gentle Jesus meek and mild’ loving-kindness, but, whodathunkit, the USA has the highest per capita incarceration rate in the democratic world, as well as the largest rich-poor divide, and the lowest per capita spending on public health, education and welfare. Jesus wept.
So how does the USA’s political system compare with the Westminster-based systems of Canada, New Zealand and Australia? In their 2018 book How democracies die, Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, two Harvard-based political scientists, don’t make such comparisons – instead they compare the USA’s problems with those of Venezuela, Turkey, Argentina, Chile, Cuba, Hungary and other despotisms. This, I think, is a typically American bias and failure, especially when you consider how often that country’s CIA has deliberately destabilised other polities, mostly in favour of right-wing alternatives. Had they simply looked over the border in Canada, they would have found plenty of material to shame the USA by comparison.
There are so many problems with the USA’s political system that it’s hard to know where to start. But probably the best place to start is at the top. They need to scrap their Presidential system. None of the other democratic systems detailed here – in Australia, New Zealand and Canada – have ever, and will ever feel the need to have ‘no kings’ rallies (fingers crossed). They each have Prime Ministers, primus inter pares again, who can be dismissed by a no-confidence motion from their cabinet, or by a leadership ballot against a contestant, e.g when Paul Keating challenged Bob Hawke’s leadership and won in 1991 – and this has occurred from time to time, in Australia, Britain and elsewhere. There is no national vote for one person – the Prime Minister has to win her own electorate like everyone else. The USA has an impeachment process but it has proved grossly ineffective in recent times.
Prime ministers, unlike US Presidents, have no pardoning powers, no immunity from prosecution and no ‘running mate’, who can, completely unelected, become President if the incumbent dies, is incapacitated or forced to resign. They have no power to select unelected people to high office, in Treasury, Justice, Health, Foreign Affairs or any other capacity. They do not personally select members of the judiciary, and they must attend parliament to explain, along with other front-benchers, their legislative program and respond to criticism from the opposition. Governing Canada, and Australia, and New Zealand, is a collective responsibility, and hopefully always will be.
There are many other problems with the US system that are screamingly obvious to outsiders. The pardoning powers, the immunity, the gerrymandering (which happens elsewhere but to nowhere near the degree that it happens in the US), the voter suppression, the huge amounts of vote-buying money swirling around at election time, the ‘executive powers’, the politicisation of the judiciary, and so much more. The USA’s political system is, by any reasonable standards, the worst in the democratic world. But another problem which makes these major deficiencies so intractable is the myopic jingoism that has for so long been a part of the American psyche. Why do so many Americans believe, as if they’ve been hypnotised to believe, that they have the world’s greatest democracy? Is it perhaps because it has been pummelled into them from their first schooldays? I’ve heard from Americans that this is so.
So, who knows how this mess will end? I can’t see anything to hope for in the immediate future.
References
how are things in Guatemala? Trump wants to know, and learn…
Politically, there are two kinds, or wings, of extremism, left and right, or communist and fascist, though they both trend toward dictatorship. It’s always been obvious to me that the USA, if it ever went awry, would do it on the right side of that see-saw. Remember that McCarthy bloke and the anti-Red witch-hunts of the 50s? Remember the Vietnam war with its half-million civilian death toll, all about halting the ‘red menace’? Today it isn’t communism, it’s wokeism, feminism and even liberalism that have become terms of abuse in that faraway land.
I love its faraway-ness, from my more or less impoverished Australian perspective. It allows me to indulge in oodles of schadenfreude. After all, don’t United Staters deserve everything they’re now experiencing, having elected Old Shitmouth for a second time? And I’m actually grateful for their mess, as it was likely the principal reason for Australia’s centre-left government being returned with a much-increased majority in recent elections.
I have to say, I feel cynical about everything USA these days. Did Old Shitmouth really win that last election? Could any other democratic country allow someone who fomented a bloody insurrection after losing an election escape imprisonment, let alone regain the kind of absolute power afforded US Presidents, a power that no other democratic country on the planet bestows upon its leaders? I recently heard – I don’t always follow the US scene closely – that Old Shitmouth was allowed to pardon all those insurrectionists on returning to power. What kind of unutterably worthless and shit system this is, and the worst thing about it is that United-Staters don’t even seem to notice!
And so far, this term, only a few months in, looks far worse than the last, and my worry is more about the global consequences of this race to the bottom – though of course there are plenty of good people in the USA who don’t deserve this.
It’s typical of the USA that the thing that’s hurting Trump most is his associating with a very dodgy character who spent years sexually exploiting under-age girls. This doesn’t sit well with a country that has a greater percentage of Christian puritanical sects and obsessives than any other WEIRD nation. Never mind the travesty of putting RFK in charge of the nation’s health system, and so many other deplorable hacks in charge of the various agencies that should never be allowed to be politicised, but obviously can be under the US system. No wonder they have ‘no kings’ marches – it’s because they do have an elected monarchy – and dodgy, wealth-dominated elections for their monarch to boot.
Where will it end? We’ve all become pretty certain it’s going to get worse before it gets better. I’m kind of fascinated – schadenfreude again – but also disturbed and angered. At how Putin is taking advantage of all this. At how many overseas politicians are still kowtowing to this absurd US leader. At how good people are losing their jobs or being thrown out of the country. At the speed of this race to the bottom.
The overseas repercussions, though, are of great concern. Putin, who I suspect is getting desperate over this endless war he started, and its domestic effects, seems to be attacking NATO nations, hoping that Trumps’s lust for dictators like himself will keep him sidelined. Or maybe he, Putin, just wants to go out in a blaze of glory. However, it may be that the recent Putinland drone incursion into Poland will meet with virtually no NATO response, or more likely an inadequate one. It does seem, however, that Trump has begun to see that his support of Putin has been bad for his own business, and he has recently acknowledged that Putin is ‘the aggressor’ in the European situation. Hopefully he, and NATO generally, will become more aggressive in combatting him in the future.
But on the US domestic front, the cruelty and inhumanity of the Trump administration has been horrific.
So, how are things in Guatemala, as the song almost goes? While the liberal media in the US have been incensed by the treatment of some 500 Guatemalan children being rounded up and put on planes to be sent back to their country and an uncertain future, precious little has been said about the mind-boggling fact that these children were sent to the hellhole that is the USA – by their own families – in the first place. What could they have been thinking – or, to repeat myself, how are things in Guatemala?
It will come as no surprise to find that the country or region’s recent history, really since Spanish colonisation, has been tragically brutal, and successive US governments have contributed to that brutality, being behind a number of coup d’états and political killings. In 1931 Jorge Ubico was swept into power by the land-owning elites keen to maintain dominance in a region devastated by the Great Depression. Wikipedia gives a taste of Ubico’s version of fascism:
He replaced the system of debt peonage with a brutally enforced vagrancy law, requiring all men of working age who did not own land to work a minimum of 100 days of hard labor.[84] His government used unpaid Indian labor to build roads and railways. Ubico also froze wages at very low levels, and passed a law allowing land-owners complete immunity from prosecution for any action they took to defend their property,[84] an action described by historians as legalizing murder.[85] He greatly strengthened the police force, turning it into one of the most efficient and ruthless in Latin America.[86] He gave them greater authority to shoot and imprison people suspected of breaking the labor laws.
Thought I should leave the links intact.
All very unwell, but what does it have to do with the USA? After all, FDR’s response to the Great Depression was quite different, to put it mildly. However, though Ubico was certainly an admirer of European fascism, he was well aware of the need for US support in his region, and was happy to round up any Guatemalans of German descent, and to provide land for a US base there when the USA entered WW2.
And then there’s the interesting story of the United Fruit Company (UFCO), a benign-sounding name for a US multinational company which became infamous in the early 20th century for monopolising trade, transportation and labour in the so-called banana republics of Central America – Honduras, Costa Rica and Guatemala among them. Exploitative neocolonialism, as earlier practiced in sub-Saharan Africa and elsewhere, was the term used by its critics. These profiteering ventures and tactics, often barely distinguishable from slavery, left much of Central America almost as devastated as the ‘Belgian Congo’ after Leo Victor’s depredations.
And US interference and culpability continued. As usual it was about the exaggerated, indeed ridiculous threat of ‘commies’. Guatemala held its first fully democratic election in 1945, and successive governments instituted land, labour, health and education reforms, during a period thereafter known as the ‘Guatemalan Revolution’. It was all too much for profoundly anti-communist US governments under both Truman and Eisenhower. Truman tried to organise a coup in 1952, much influenced by the afore-mentioned UFCO, whose massive profits had been cut by the Guatemalan government’s actions, and supported by the Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza Garcia, one of several brutal scumbags that dominated Nicaraguan politics for decades, fully supported and promoted by the USA in its delusory battle against ‘communism’. Presumably it’s much better, according to US leadership, to have by far the biggest rich-poor gap in the WEIRD world, than to have any kind of state support for the less well-off. And they won’t even allow neighbouring governments to express this kind of humanity!
Excuse my indignation.
Truman’s attempted coup was aborted, but his successor, Eisenhower, was, of course, even more anti-commie, and some of his team had financial interests in the corrupt UFCO, so the Guatemalan government of Jacobo Arbenz just had to go. Good old Wikipedia describes the outcome:
Eisenhower authorized the CIA to carry out Operation PBSuccess in August 1953. The CIA armed, funded, and trained a force of 480 men led by Carlos Castillo Armas.[120][121] The force invaded Guatemala on 18 June 1954, backed by a heavy campaign of psychological warfare, including bombings of Guatemala City and an anti-Árbenz radio station claiming to be genuine news.[120] The invasion force fared poorly militarily, but the psychological warfare and the possibility of a US invasion intimidated the Guatemalan army, which refused to fight. Árbenz resigned on 27 June.[122][123]
So US-fuelled corruption had become the new order. Armas, mentioned above, a militant right-wing extremist, became the next President, fully backed by the Eisenhower regime. He was murdered in 1957, and of course the CIA was heavily involved in deciding his successor, Miguel Ydígoras Fuentes, a somewhat unstable figure who was finally toppled in 1963, after another coup d’état organised by his defence minister. His excuse was predictable – the regime was becoming ‘overrun by communists’ – always an essential line for keeping the Yanks onside. This was a very unstable time for the struggling nation – in fact the period between 1960 and 1966 has been described, perhaps retrospectively, as the Guatemalan Civil War. Ydigoras’ successor, Enrique Peralta Azurdia, funded death squads to deal with leftist unrest, and Wikipedia describes one of many low points:
Another notable event occurred on March 3 and 5, 1966, when the G-2 (military intelligence) and the Judicial Police raided three houses in Guatemala City, capturing twenty-eight trade unionists and members of the PGT [the Communist Party]. The twenty-eight “disappeared” while in the custody of the security force, marking it one of the largest forced disappearances in Latin American history.[7]
In 1966, the country elected it first ever civilian President, against all odds. However, backed financially and militarily by the US, extreme anti-communist repression continued. The new President, Julio César Méndez Montenegro, is described by Wikipedia as ‘left-of-centre’, but its description of events during his tenure hardly supports this. Civil war, of course, had hardened positions on both sides, with the left always suffering most. Wikipedia makes it clear:
the United States expanded training within Guatemala’s 5,000-man army and outfitted the Guatemalan security forces with the most modern counterinsurgency equipment available.[3] The United States also assisted the Guatemalan security forces in the implementation and use of counter-terrorism, and the establishment of counter-terror units under the supervision of U.S. police advisors.[4] With increased US military support, the Guatemalan Army launched a counter-insurgency campaign that successfully combated and dispersed the left-wing guerrilla organizations fighting in the mountains and country.
Clearly both sides were now engaging in all-or-nothing fighting, bent on revenge for the suffering the other side was causing, but with US-subsidised might always on the side of the right. The story of militias and atrocities continued through the 70s and 80s. During the early years of the Reagan Administration, Guatemala was regarded as a pariah state, ruled by a murderous military junta, but Reagan was fully supportive. The ruthlessness of the Right led, unsurprisingly, to a greater integration of leftist resistance, with growing support from Mexico and other neighbours. The indigenous population was also under threat throughout these decades. In 1992 Rigoberta Menchú, a Mayan Kʼicheʼ human rights activist, was awarded the Nobel Peace prize ‘for her efforts to bring international attention to the government-sponsored genocide against the indigenous population‘, described as ‘a longstanding policy of the U.S.-backed military regimes’.
In 1996 the Guatemalan civil war, or series of civil wars, supposedly came to an end. Again, from Wikipedia,
According to the U.N.-sponsored truth commission (the Commission for Historical Clarification), government forces and state-sponsored, CIA-trained paramilitaries were responsible for over 93% of the human rights violations during the war.
More than 450 Mayan villages were destroyed, and over a million Guatemalans displaced.
I would hope, of course, that things are much better now in Guatemala, but the fact that parents are sending their own children off to the USA, of all places, unaccompanied, surely suggests otherwise. So, what’s the story? I’ve been trying to research this but it’s difficult – all I’m getting is the fulsome coverage of the Trump administration’s treatment of these kids. I have learned that the country has one of the highest violent crime rates in Central America, and that, since 2017, there has been ‘democratic backsliding’. So perhaps parents are imagining that, on balance, their children would have a better chance in the USA. Of course, few people there or elsewhere would have imagined that United Staters would’ve been so imbecilic as to re-elect Trump, if that’s what they did…
So, I’ve found a Washington Post piece, from July 2018, entitled ‘Why are so many children coming to the U.S. from Central America in the first place?’ Its author, Rachel Schwartz, reports:
Experts tend to divide the things driving Central Americans to flee into two groups: economic factors and violence and insecurity. The first group includes the lack of economic opportunity, including a lack of jobs or inadequate opportunities for education. The second group includes violence and victimization, not just by gangs, other criminal groups and state security forces but at home as well.
It seems that targeted victims of crime are mostly wanting to migrate, but these motives aren’t easy to separate from seeking greater economic opportunity. Also gang violence is hard to separate from gang recruitment. However, Guatemala’s flights to the US seem to be differently motivated than those from the two other affected Central American nations, Honduras and El Salvador. People/children from these two nations are around 4 times more likely to cite gang violence as the reason for their flight, compared to Guatemalans. This aligns with Guatemala’s significantly lower homicide rate, which has been trending downward now since 2009. Almost 25% of Guatemalans claimed domestic abuse as a reason, a similar percentage to that of the other two nations.
But that was a summary of a 2018 essay. A 2024 Human Rights Watch report begins thus:
Guatemala’s democratic backsliding accelerated during 2023 with corruption weakening the country’s democracy and justice system. Authorities undermined institutional checks on the abuse of power to prevent accountability. Independent journalists, prosecutors, and judges who had investigated and exposed corruption, human rights violations, and abuse of power faced increased harassment and criminal prosecution.
The rest of the report makes for extremely depressing reading. Clearly today’s Guatemala is a disaster zone. And the Trump administration is clearly doing its best to send children back there, while perhaps learning a few lessons about how to increase corruption and create a more permanent neo-fascist state domestically.
References
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guatemala
https://www.hrw.org/world-report/2024/country-chapters/guatemala
The USA’s political system is not normal
Andrew Weissmann, the well-known US lawyer, legal expert and, I believe, MSNBC politico-legal commentator, has presented a talk from his home called ‘Reality Check’. My purpose here isn’t to respond in detail to his critique of the current US situation, but to return to and elaborate upon some of my own critiques of the USA’s social and political systems.
First, the Presidential system, which is way too much like a monarchical system, albeit elected. Weissmann has emphasised, as I have, channelling Benjamin Franklin, that politicians are our servants. If Trump had ever been made to accept that this really was the case, he would never have run for President, or for any political office. When Trump first started making noises about running for President, about a decade ago, many prominent Republicans spoke out strongly against him, knowing not only of his ignorance, but his passion for self-aggrandisement – effectively his only real passion. So Trump quickly realised that he needed to get ‘the people’ behind him, and was successful enough to ‘win’ the 2016 election, though Hilary Clinton was the actual winner (yes gerrymandering and Electoral College-type systems plague many countries, including my own, and constant reform needs to be advocated). Why did this happen?
It’s complex, but has largely to do with a huge rich-poor divide, much larger than any other WEIRD nation. The poor, many of whom would never bother to vote, in a system they don’t much understand, are generally under-educated, and easily manipulated. The rich, on the other hand, in a system which is all abut money, are happy to donate to a fellow flouter of the tax system. Most WEIRD nations have strict rules about campaign contributions, even the USA, but compliance with those rules is another thing, and while there might be a few law-abiding super-rich people…. haha, I’m joking. Huge amounts of money are shifted during US elections, and money is still flowing swiftly today, into Trump’s coffers.
So that’s how an obvious grifter and ignoramus can get into office today in the US, in a way that couldn’t happen in Australia – to focus on the country I obviously know best, but which I think is similar enough to other English-speaking Westminster-based nations (Britain, Canada and New Zealand) to be representative. It couldn’t happen here because we don’t have a Presidential system. We have a party-based system in which the Prime Minister (primus inter pares) is voted to that position by the elected members of her or his own party, and can be voted out at any time by same. This doesn’t have to be disastrous because we vote for parties and policies, not individuals. Nor do we give our Prime Minister any pardoning powers, or any immunity. We do have a pardoning system, rarely used, which is ultimately in the hands of the federal Attorney-General, usually on the advice of the High Court, the highest court in the land. The monarch in Britain has a similar rarely-used pardoning power, which is only granted on the advice of the government of the day. The contrast with the US President’s freewheeling powers is too horrendous to dwell upon. To mention some others – the Presidential candidate gets to choose her or his running mate, who, if she becomes Vice President, will become the leader of the nation if the Prez becomes incapacitated, or is bumped off, without ever having been personally elected to the position.
And that’s just the beginning. The President gets to select a whole squadron of unelected people to positions of great power and responsibility – positions that, under a party-based system, would be taken up by individuals elected by their local constituents. And this same President gets to stay far from the madding crowd in a White Palace surrounded by courtiers, while our Prime Minister sits in the parliament with her fellow ministers and MPs, defending their government’s policies against the opposition’s jibes and critiques. Moreover, most WEIRD countries have a multi-party system, in which a variety of views and approaches to government can be aired and debated. This can make decision-making more cumbersome, but also more nuanced, as a wider variety of the people’s views are taken into account. Government can be a little more participatory, whereas I would argue that there is no government less participatory, in the WEIRD world, than that of the USA.
Moreover the USA is the most divided nation in the WEIRD world. It may be united in its jingoism, but that’s about it. I’ve mentioned the huge rich-poor divide, and this is exacerbated by that nation’s having, by a long, long way, the highest per capita incarceration rate of any WEIRD nation, and the lowest minimum wage, federally. It also has the lowest federal spending on education, health and welfare. All of this hurts people, especially the poor. You could say that the country is united by all these failings. I certainly can’t think of any other way that it is united.
So Weissmann is worried about the current US political situation becoming normalised, but my view, on learning about the US socio-political system, in place more or less since its inception, is that Trump’s accession to the ‘throne’ is largely the result of the normalisation of that seriously, almost fatally flawed system. In other words the problem is much deeper than Weissmann realises, or seems prepared to admit.
Jingoism, as mentioned, is a big problem in the USA. One can be nationalistic, or patriotic, to use the term preferred by Timothy Snyder, while recognising that all political systems need to be open to reform, as society evolves. But the USA’s system has congealed into a highly combative two-party contest, as if they’re rival football players and their fans. One gets the impression that most of the ‘fans’ have little idea of their party’s policies, as long as they win the game. And any criticism from outside, I’ve learned to my bemusement, meets with a torrent of invective and jingoistic claptrap – and it’s really hard to know whether this is a superiority complex or the opposite.
The advent of Trump, however, and the lack of proper checks and balances within the US federal system, has raised serious international concerns. Trump is an extremely lazy, ignorant and noisy man who is drawn to other big boss figures on the world stage. He’s keen on making big, momentous, much talked-about decisions in which he’s seen as a winner, and damn the details (and the effect upon the losers). I can’t help but feel that Tom Phillips had Trump in mind, when, in his 2017 book Humans: a brief history of how we fucked it all up, he described the attitude toward leadership, and work, of the world’s most notorious mass-murderer:
… it’s worth remembering that Hitler was actually an incompetent, lazy egomaniac and his government was an absolute clown show. In fact, this may have helped his rise to power, as he was consistently underestimated by the German elite. Before he became chancellor, many of his opponents had dismissed him as a joke for his crude speeches and tacky rallies…
Why did the elites of Germany so consistently underestimate Hitler? Possibly because they weren’t actually wrong in their assessment of his competency – they just failed to realise that this wasn’t enough to stand in the way of his ambition. As it would turn out, Hitler was really bad at running a government. As his own press chief Otto Dietrich wrote later in his memoir The Hitler I Knew, ‘In the 12 years of his rule in Germany Hitler produced the biggest confusion in government that has ever existed in a civilised state’.
His government was constantly in chaos, with officials having no idea of what he wanted them to do, and nobody was entirely clear who was in charge of what. He procrastinated wildly when asked to make difficult decisions, and would end up relying on gut feeling, leaving even close allies in the dark about his plans.
There’s a bit of an argument among historians about whether this was a deliberate ploy on Hitler’s part to get his own way, or whether he was just really really bad at being in charge of stuff… But when you look at Hitler’s personal habits, it’s hard to shake the feeling that it was just a natural result of putting a work-shy narcissist in charge of a country.
Tom Phillips, Humans… pp 129 -132
This is Trump to a T – (okay, replacing the obsessive anti-semitism with a more generalised bigotry). In his previous outing as Prez there was much bemused reporting about his ‘down-time’ and his ‘passion’ for playing golf… You just don’t get that kind of ‘leadership’ from someone who has come up through the party ranks via a proven ability to work for her constituents, to bring people together, to effectively articulate and institute policies. As I’ve written before, if there was an effective vetting system for candidates, a system Trump has never been subjected to, he would never have been hired to manage a public toilet, never mind a nation. Nevertheless the US system allows this. They even boast that any of their citizens can become President. But that’s definitely not what you want, and it’s nothing to boast about.
References
Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny, 2017
Tom Phillips, Humans: a brief history of how we fucked it all up, 2017
They’re our servants, remember
Onya, Ben!
Having just read the US Special Counsel’s indictment against that thing wot once was Prez, or 165 pages of it at least (I keep hearing that it’s 180-odd pages, so where’s the rest?), I must say I’m not at all surprised. I mean I keep hearing the media using phrases like ‘bombshell after bombshell’, as if old Drivelmouth has changed a jot since he was Young Drivelmouth (and before that Baby Dribblemouth). So all the lies and threats and pathetic bluster catalogued in the indictment just reinforced my disgust and astonishment that this lump of faeces was allowed to become the leader of the world’s most powerful, and therefore potentially dangerous, nation on Earth.
I was, however, very much heartened by a quote that Jack Smith took from one of the USA’s most enlightened 18th century figures. But before presenting it here, some background.
I’ve written before about how politicians are public servants, not our bosses, and that they shouldn’t be put up on pedestals, and be given special powers – massive immunity, massive pardoning powers, power to shut down the government, power to keep themselves separate from the elected body (the Parliament or the Congress), power to surround themselves with their own unelected courtiers, shut up in a White Palace, power to select Judges and Justices, and Secretary of This or That, at their own whim. And this strong feeling I had about an ‘I alone can fix it’ four-year-dictatorship, and the danger it entailed, not least because of the effect such massive power has upon weak minds such as that of Old Drivelmouth, this strong feeling came rushing back to me a few years ago when I heard about France’s President Macron’s retort to a teenager who was presumably criticising some policy or other to Macron’s face – ‘call me Mr President’. Of course, this was an improvement on having the lad hung drawn and quartered in public, which would once have been the case (and that’s no joke), but still, I was white with rage at Macron’s effrontery – and immediately had him skinned alive in my mind, such is my own anti-authoritarianism.
And so, I come to the finest line in Jack Smith’s indictment, which had nothing to do with Old Drivelmouth’s specific crimes.
“In free Governments,” Benjamin Franklin explained, “the rulers are the servants, and the people their superiors [and] sovereigns.”
GOVERNMENT’S MOTION FOR IMMUNITY DETERMINATIONS, p92
Thank you thank you thank you Ben. My sentiments exactly!
Lies, lies, lies and democracy
what the….?
Imagine a political situation in which only women are allowed to vie for elected positions in government, whether local, state or federal. Further than that, only females over the age of eighteen are permitted to vote for these women. Certainly a delightful futuristic dream, IMHO. Surely the best form of democracy ever developed.
Some would say, however, that such a system is not democratic. And yet, I regularly read about the ancient Athenians as the ‘inventors of democracy’, and US political pundits and historians continually claim that the USA is the first modern democracy. These porkies are so unpalatable, I really should turn vegetarian.
So let’s face the facts (once again, for I’ve been here more than once before). In ancient Athens, only a small percentage of the male population had any say in the city-state’s government, as was also the case during the Roman republic, as Livy’s History of Rome relates.
The word demos means people, or the commonalty of a state. Let there be no mistake. And women are also people, if I’m not mistaken. It therefore follows, as night follows day, that no political system is democratic that does not permit women to be candidates for elected office, or to vote for candidates. Personally, though, I’d accept a political system that prohibits men from participating, as a very worthwhile experiment.
But let’s look at some facts. The USA held its first national election from December 1788 to January 1789. At the time, the new nation consisted of only 13 states, mostly hugging the Atlantic coast. I won’t get into the complex issue of state laws here, I’ll just focus on the federal scene. Only a small proportion of the adult male population was eligible to vote in 1788-9, and of course voting has never been mandatory in the US, so the number of votes counted amounted to a few tens of thousands out of a population of some three million (over half a million of whom were slaves).
But even without considering the missing female vote (which completely disqualifies the vote as democratic), the US claims about being the first modern democratic nation are complete bullshit. Modern democracy has proceeded in a series of baby steps, a step-wise widening of the franchise since Magna Carta in 1215, and did not become complete – if it ever really has – with the vote for women, native populations and ethnic minorities in the 20th century. Also, every vote must have an equal value – no gerrymandering, no ‘electoral colleges’ or any other processes which devalue the vote for some compared to others.
So, just on the women’s vote alone, leaving all the other vital issues aside, New Zealand was the first in 1893, but perversely, that nation didn’t allow women to become candidates until 1919. South Australia, where I live, was the first state anywhere in the world to give women the vote and the right to stand for election, in 1895. Australia changed its laws to allow women to vote and to stand for election in 1902, the first nation in the world to do so. However, not all women were included – indigenous women (and of course men) did not have that right until the 1960s. In fact the more we look at the history of women’s suffrage (and suffrage in general), the more complicated it becomes. The word ‘suffrage’ itself sounds odd, but etymologically it has nothing to do with suffering (never mind Olympe de Gouges). It goes back to Latin, suffragium, meaning something like a voting tablet but also the right to use it. Wikipedia is again magnificently comprehensive on the topic, letting us know that universal suffrage was experimented with in the Corsican Republic of 1755-69 and the Paris Commune of 1871. The French Jacobin constitution of 1793 sought to enact universal male suffrage (never mind Olympe de Gouges, encore) but it was scuttled in all the turbulence.
But let me return to the USA and its hollow claims. Women were given the vote there in 1920, two years after its neighbour, Canada. Voting rights for native Americans have been complexified by, for example, claims that they have their own ‘nations’ and governing systems, and by claims that their rights should be determined on a state-by-state basis, but the landmark federal legislation known as the 1965 Voting Rights Act sought to ‘prohibit racial discrimination in voting’, theoretically clearing the way for native and African Americans to vote. Of course, such racial discrimination has continued, as well as attempts, some successful, to water down the Act’s provisions, but generally it is regarded as the most successful piece of anti-discrimination legislation in US history. Even so, conservative states have constantly battled to restrict voting by minorities. So democracy in the USA has long been tenuous and incomplete, as it still is, with gerrymandering, suppression and the infamous electoral college.
Another bugbear I have with the good ole USA though, and I’ve written about it before, is their breast-beating about being the first modern democracy and their lies about gaining their freedom from ‘the British king’, as if poor sickly old George III was ruling the Old Dart and its colonies with an iron fist. In fact he was non compos mentis during the American Revolutionary War and in any case Britain was then governed by the Tory Party under Lord North, their Prime Minister, and had been a constitutional monarchy, with a Bill of Rights and a parliament, since 1689. Of course the franchise was minuscule, much like that at the ascension of George Washington a century later. Baby steps.
And then there is the lie at the very beginning of their revered Constitution. ‘We the People’ was patently dishonest – they should have written ‘We the Men’…
Democracy – a much abused term. And then came Trump…
References
https://academic.oup.com/book/6972/chapter-abstract/151255043?redirectedFrom=fulltext
https://www.senate.gov/about/origins-foundations/senate-and-constitution/constitution.htm
Olympe de Gouges, The declaration of the rights of woman, 1791
It’s not just about female leadership – Sheikh Hasina’s downward spiral
Muhammad Yunus
Bangladesh is in a mesh at the moment, and it’s no joke. The Prime Minister, Sheikh Hasina Wazed, resigned today (August 5 2024) after 15.5 years in office. She’d previously been in office from 1996 to 2001, so, more than 20 years as Prime Minister. Now, the term Prime Minister has a very Westminster-type resonance, and sounds very ‘first among equals’-like, but having heard some quite disturbing things about this leader in the past, and having heard about the recent events leading up to her resignation, I’m minded to take a closer look.
Bangladesh has been an independent nation since 1971, before which it was known as East Pakistan. This wasn’t a peaceful transition, and of course the region has a history going back thousands of years, long before the present, hopefully passing, obsession with nationhood and sovereignty became a thing. That region, above the Bay of Bengal, was itself known as Bengal, or Bangla, and is covered essentially by Bangladesh and the Indian Province of West Bengal.
So, as I write Sheikh Hasina has, it seems, fled to India, and large numbers of young Bangladeshis (commentators are saying they are students) are in the streets of Dhaka, apparently carrying away loot from the Prime Ministerial residence. It seems that we’re witnessing the end of a very long dictatorship. Hasina is the daughter of the first Bangladeshi Prime Minister, which gives it all a bit of a North Korean feel (oh but I’ve just learned he was assassinated in a military coup, along with other members of Hasina’s family). So, like her father, Hasina doesn’t seem to have managed to keep control at the end, as apparently the police have chosen not to take action against the present student protesters (though many have been killed in recent times). So, given the family history, she’s chosen to decamp to India.
So of course there are now some big questions due to the power vacuum. What will be the role of the military, and can all this be succeeded by something more seriously democratic?
So, okay things are happening quickly… the nations’s military has promised to form an interim government and has promised to fulfil student demands and ‘bring peace back to the country’. Reporters are saying that over 90 people were killed the day before Hasina’s departure. The word autocracy is being used – Hasina ‘won’ an election earlier this year, after a boycott by opposition parties.
Protestors, on being interviewed, are inveighing against military rule and demanding civilian-style government. An articulate student protestor has expressed concern about the ongoing treatment of minorities in the country, and has severe reservations about an interim military government, though I suppose there has to be some peace-keeping force to fill the vacuum, at least for a short while. An important point, raised by the DW reporter, and further commented on by the student, is that Hasina fled on a military aircraft, which raises questions about the military’s neutrality. However, there are obvious questions about what would have happened if the students and protesters (hundreds of whom have been killed in recent weeks, according to reports) had gotten their hands on this former Prime Minister.
And the fact is that, despite the perhaps well-meaning promises currently being made by the military, these student-type revolutions rarely turn out well in the end. Democracy is, of course, a Euro-American import to this region, as is the concept of nationhood itself. There is so much religious and ethnic conflict – an online Indian report on the upheaval comes with a baggage of commentary, Indians (especially Hindus) worrying about an influx of refugees (especially non-Hindus), as well as weird commentary about a perfectly functioning democratic state being over-run by the military… You get the impression that the situation is being deliberately misunderstood.
So the latest news is that Muhammed Yunus, apparently a very important figure in Bangladeshi politics and winner of the Nobel Peace Prize (I’m on a steep learning curve here!), has returned to the country from Paris and has been sworn in as the interim leader, much to the relief and jubilation of student protestors. Considering that hundreds of students have been killed recently, Yunus, who’s 84 years old, and has no political experience, has his work cut out for him, and the obvious key to his success will be his connections with the right people, those who are invested in democracy, human rights and poverty alleviation. He was awarded the Peace Prize for his highly successful micro-financing systems designed to help the country’s poorest. Hasina’s regime rewarded him by charging him with a vast list of crimes, presumably because he was highly critical of the government’s behaviour.
So, just listening to a student activist being interviewed about Younis and the general political situation – and she points out that the two main political parties, that of Hasina and the main opposition, have great credibility problems, being based on dynastic families who have served themselves rather than the nation, so it may be that, with popular support, Younis will be encouraged to remain until the political corruption is dealt with. At his age, that would be a big ask. The country is very polarised, with no doubt religious as well as political divisions.
So, just gathering more info – students, and the public generally, have been incensed by the former government’s quota system for jobs and benefits. They were particularly outraged by Hasina’s apparently sarcastic comments some time ago about extending the quota to the pro-Pakistan families – that’s to say those who fought against and killed Bangladeshi freedom fighters in large numbers. Protesters had also been activated by the military’s shoot-to-kill behaviour recently, which killed more than 100 students in one day.
So, peace has been restored for the time being, and the arrival of Younis will presumably mean that the Hindus of India will be less concerned about a huge refugee influx (the Indian government has sent a large military force to the border). As to Sheikh Hasina, she has sought asylum in the UK (her niece is a British Labour politician). Her US visa has been revoked, a turnaround from previous friendly relations due to her crackdown on religious extremism and her welcoming of Rohingya refugees into the country in 2007. Hasina’s family background is Moslem – and no matter what her personal beliefs, she would probably have to be seen to be practising in order to retain any credibility in the region. Anyway, it seems that Hasina is currently holed up in India, and Bangladeshi authorities (whoever they may be?) are demanding that she be handed over to them. Interestingly, she has younger relatives in relatively high places in the US, India and Finland as well as in the UK. To quote other commentators, asylum in India (a country that has refused asylum for Afghani and Sri Lankan leaders in recent times) would compromise India’s relationship with a new Bangladeshi government (there have already been requests from the Supreme Court Bar Association in Bangladesh to have Hasina sent back).
So – many issues facing a new administration. How to deal with the massive destruction of buildings and other infrastructure. How to deal with agitprop coming out of Pakistan and India. How to deal with what appears to be the collapse of the banking system, with the mass resignation of high-level staff of the Bangladesh bank, the country’s biggest bank, after protestors stormed their offices. Unsurprisingly there has been a run on bank withdrawals throughout the country.
And Sheikh Hasina has very recently stated that she wishes to return to Bangladesh ‘once democracy has returned’! Her son, who lives in the US, is blaming the Pakistani government and its spy agencies for the unrest, and he too identifies his mother as the person to restore democracy in the country. That’s family for you.
Needless to say, there wouldn’t have been many other women in Hasina’s government, if any. When I talk about ‘a world turned upside-down’ in terms of gender relations I must admit I’m talking about the world I know, the so-called ‘WEIRD world’. There are so many other factors, ethnic, religious, dynastic and so on, that make female dominance unlikely in so many parts of the world at this juncture. Even in Thatcher’s government, in the heart of the WEIRD world, there were no other women in her cabinet. Too much power in the hands of too few, that’s always a bad sign, regardless of gender. As primatologists have pointed out, the most successful alpha males/females are generally those that build alliances and trust – to keep everyone in the same tent, so to speak. Females are better at it, I think, but plenty of males are good at it too. So it isn’t just a matter of gender, it’s about how best to benefit the whole community, to recognise their rights and needs, and to always consider government in terms of help. I’ll be watching this space.
vive les bonobos – monitory democracy
I’ve been reading John Keane’s very lively and up-to-date The shortest history of democracy with great pleasure, and especially his final chapter, ‘Monitory Democracy’, which has really spurred my thinking on contemporary politics, and ‘how we are to live’, from a personal as well as a more ‘rise above yourself and grasp the world’ perspective.
First, the personal. I’ve been more or less obsessively anti-authoritarian since my youth. I recall even in primary school staring out the window as the teacher droned on, watching a tiny bird flapping its wings in a blur just above a hibiscus bush, and wondering what law of nature forced me to be cooped up there among strangers, learning stuff which I could just as well learn at home, when the fancy took me. Some of the first of my anti-authoritarian thoughts. I was nevertheless a more or less ‘straight A student’ through primary and the first year or so of high school, and then things went downhill fast, as relations with my authoritarian mother, the head of our household, became extremely frosty, and I became passively resistant to my teachers, who seemed to me either brutes or bores, and sometimes both. My greatest loathing was reserved for the headmaster, nicknamed Batler – a combination of Batman and Hitler – due to to his predilection for haunting the corridors in a flowing black academic gown, hoping to pounce on miscreant victims. He caned me once for not doing my homework. It took another 20 years for caning to be banned in schools, but I could’ve told authorities long before that ‘enlightened’ decision that such beatings had zero correctional effects, certainly in my case.
Talking about my case, everyone was on it, parents and teachers, while I derived a strange naughty pleasure in wagging school and reading my brother’s academic textbooks in the green fields close to our house. It was a house full of books, my saving grace, with a library just down the road. I neglected school-work more or less completely, which exacerbated relations at home. My final day at school was quite dramatic. I was lounging in a corridor study area with a friend when Batler descended upon us, his wings like a shield of steel. He started questioning me on my activities, but I didn’t say much in response, and the fact that I was chewing gum at the time seemed to peeve him somewhat, as he decided in his wisdom to try another corrective, slapping my face with full force, and sending my gum across the corridor space. He then ordered me to see him after school for further punitive measures. This was good, as it allowed my last act at that school to be one of disobedience.
So I left school at fifteen, with a chip on my shoulder which somehow only strengthened my love of literature and knowledge. And it also intensified, to an almost pathological degree, my hatred of authoritarianism of all kinds. Ironically, my mother, who, I knew, felt that my father’s relative weakness vis-a-vis herself had rubbed off on me – ‘you’re just like your father’ was her favourite insult – started putting in my way material about the great careers that could be had in the military. It was hard to know whether to laugh or cry.
The point of all these unreliable memories is that I tend to look at the world of politics not so much as the battle between left and right, or socialism and capitalism, but between authoritarianism (often but not always associated with the political right) and its opposite, however defined. Which brings me back to monitory democracy. And feminism. And bonobos.
Keane’s book, as mentioned, was a sparkling and inspiring read, which reminded me of Jess Scully’s Glimpses of Utopia, another road map for the future (though of course more utopian). The only slight disappointment was that feminism barely rated a mention. Of course it hardly needed to be said that the forces that disrupted or militated against electoral democracy in Germany, Italy, Japan, China and South America in the first half of the 20th century were overwhelmingly male, but I think more needs to be said about women as victims of the past and makers of the future.
The term ‘monitory democracy’ was new to me, but the idea is plain enough. Electoral democracy is insufficient protection for ‘the people’, it needs to be monitored and scrutinised – and not just government in the narrow sense, but all the institutions and systems that make for an open and civil society – financial systems, the law, the business community, the police, health and welfare organisations, the military, the lot. We need to guard against control of any of those institutions by a walled-in, self-selected and mostly male ‘elite’. And beware of terms like ‘unelected swill’ – there are plenty of individuals who, like myself, have no inclination to take on the responsibilities of government, but are nonetheless deeply concerned about how others use or abuse the power accorded them. Women, in particular, know what it’s like to find themselves in a toxic work environment, and – like sniffer dogs – would be quicker than most to detect its source.
There are plenty of sectors I know of that are insufficiently monitored, to the detriment of the general public. I myself tried to make a complaint about the police over a very serious matter, but got absolutely nowhere, and was told by a prominent lawyer that their internal complaints system was a joke, and the external Office for Public Integrity not much better. Recently there was a Royal Commission into the Australian banking system, which found plenty of wrong-doing, costing more than $100 million to customers, but apart from a couple of resignations at the head of NAB, no consequences ensued. Of course this was nothing compared to the subprime lending and other dodgy practices that led to the 2007-8 worldwide recession. The lack of accountability for that disaster seems almost as shocking as the disaster itself. Only one banker, an executive of Credit Suisse, experienced jail time. Currently, a Royal Commission into the former Liberal government’s disastrous Robodebt scheme is underway. We can only wait and see, but often the wait is far too long – justice delayed is justice denied.
Monitoring organisations such as Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, the IPCC, GlobalSecurity.org and a variety of fair trade organisations and truth and reconciliation-style commissions have cropped up in recent decades, as well as organisations promoting the more promising half of the world’s human population, such as AWID (The Association for Women’s Rights in Development), ActionAid, the Alliance for Feminist Movements, among others, taking issues beyond the somewhat tired left-right ideological divides, and focussing more on fairness and human rights.
In some ways these non-aligned watchdog and promotional organisations have crept up on us, but they’re evidence of our recognition of the complexity of national and international issues of poverty, identity, freedom and rights. And of the global nature of the problems we face – climate change, habitat loss, over-population, cultural differences, the continued threat and reality of warfare, to name a few.
Many of these watchdog organisations are anathema to states, whether democratic or authoritarian. Here in Australia the UNHCR and other organisations have castigated us for our treatment of ‘boat people’ desperate for a new life in a safe place. Successive governments have tended to blow off these criticisms with unseemly arrogance. The United States and many other powerful nations have high-handedly refused to be signatories to the International Criminal Court, though (or because) they’re often the greatest abusers of International law. The US is also bellicose about any other nations joining the ‘nuclear club’, while ceaselessly adding to and rendering more deadly its own nuclear arsenal. The USA’s Pentagon has never passed an audit in its history, but this is symptomatic of highly hierarchical and authoritarian organisations, such as the police and the military, worldwide. They’re also the most male-dominated of course.
In the bonobo world the females are, if only slightly, the smaller sex, but they prove beautifully that size isn’t everything. The size difference between male and female bonobos appears to be reducing, due presumably to social evolution, just as in humans, male testosterone levels are dropping. I see that as a good sign, if it’s not too much of a health hazard (the findings I read about came from one of the Scandinavian countries – I doubt if the same thing is happening in Sudan). Female empowerment has come a little way rather than a long way, but as with monitory democracy, it’s fast given the long timeline of F sapiens. Of course individual timelines – and I’m thinking entirely of myself here – are minuscule in comparison, and time is running out for me. I’m generally an optimist, though sometimes a disappointed one, and I’m optimistic about the human future in spite of all the fuck-ups, the fuckwits, the setbacks and the delusions of grandeur that will inevitably clutter our journey into that unknowable place. Which brings me to another exhilarating book, Gaia Vince’s Adventures in the Anthropocene…
References
John Keane, The shortest history of democracy, 2022
Jess Scully, Glimpses of Utopia, 2020
Gaia Vince, Adventures in the Anthropocene, 2014
on national and other origins, and good leadership
So Mr Pudding was going around saying that Ukraine wasn’t a real country for some time before he decided that he needed to abolish its nationhood once and for all, a decision that he clearly made well before the actual invasion of February 24 2022, as the long build-up on the border told us. The fact that he chose to call it a special operation was also a sign that he’d convinced himself that he was simply clarifying a border or territorial issue.
Well, this issue of real countries and not-so-real countries has exercised me for a while, I suppose ever since I started to read history, which was a long time ago.
How do nations come to be nations? Well, there clearly isn’t any general formula, but it more often than not involves warfare, rape, dispossession, and suppression of militarily weaker language groups and cultures. It rarely makes for fun reading. I could probably close my eyes, spin a globe of the earth around and if my finger stopped it on any piece of land, there would be a tale of horror to tell, in terms of the human history of that land, in, say, the last thousand or two years.
I should also say that nations, or states, have been phenomenally successful in terms of the spread of human nature and human culture. My argument against libertarians who inveigh against their bogeyman, the state, and its taxes and regulations and encroachments on our personal liberties, is to point out that we are the most hypersocial mammalian species on the planet. We didn’t get to be 8 billion people, dominating the biosphere, for better or worse, by virtue of our personal liberties. Those personal liberties didn’t provide us with the language we speak, the basic education we’ve been given, the cities and towns and homes we live in, the roads and the cars and bikes and planes we use to get around, and the jobs we’ve managed to secure over the years. All of us living today have been shaped to a considerable degree by the nation-state we live in, and our place in its various hierarchies.
So you could say that nations have become a necessary evil, what with the crooked timber of humanity and all. But it’s surely an indisputable fact that some nations are better than others. But how do we measure this? And let’s not forget the idea, advanced rather cynically and opportunistically by Mr Pudding, that some nations might be more legitimate than others. Afghanistan, to take an example almost at random, was for centuries a vaguely delineated region of various ethnicities – Pashtuns, Tajiks, Hazaras, Uzbeks and others. Warlords from without and within have brought disintegration upon unification upon disintegration to its ‘nationhood’, while its mostly subsistence-level inhabitants have tried to avoid or ignore the mayhem. It’s likely that most of them don’t consider themselves Afghani at all, but stick to their own ethnicity. The Pashtuns of southern Afghanistan, for example, don’t pay much attention to the border that separates them from their Pashtun neighbours in northern Pakistan, so I’ve heard. And one has to ask oneself – why should they? The Durand line, separating Pakistan and Afghanistan, was created only in the late 19th century – by the British. So, is Afghanistan a real country?
And since I find that Afghanistan has a population of almost 40 million, let me compare it to a nation of similar population. Poland is a north-eastern European nation, inhabiting a region long contested between two expansionist states – Prussia/Germany to the west and Russia to the east. One of the largest countries in Europe, it occupies less than half the area of Afghanistan. It had expansionist ambitions itself a few centuries ago, as the senior partner in the Polish-Lithuanian federation, which dominated the Baltic and often posed a threat to Russia, but in the 20th century it suffered terribly in the second world war, and fell under the domination of the Soviet Union in the aftermath. Of course, if you take the history back to the pre-nation period there were various cultures and tribes, generally warring, with the Polans being the largest. By the Middle Ages, this region had become an established and reasonably sophisticated monarchy, though often struggling to maintain its territory against the Prussians, the Mongols and Kievan Rus. Naturally, its borders expanded and contracted with the fortunes of war. The region, though, reached relative heights of prosperity when, as mentioned, it became the dominant partner of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, for a time the largest state in Europe. Its fortunes ebbed and flowed in the 16th and 17th centuries, but at the end of the 18th it was partitioned between the ascendent powers in the region, Prussia, Russia and Austria-Hungary. Poland was finally reconstituted as a nation after the 1914-18 war, but arguably the worst was yet to come…
So again, one might question – is Poland a real country? As a working-class fellow myself, my sympathies go to the ordinary people who grow up gradually discovering what land they’ve landed up in, and the various vicissitudes that have given it the territory and the borders that it currently has.
This is the central point of this post. People are more important than nations. It’s ridiculous to compare them really. And, without getting too much into the free will issue here, it’s obvious that none of us get to choose our parents, or the place and time of our birth. That old philosophical chestnut of being thrown into this world has always rung true for me, and that’s why I don’t get nationalism, though I understand nations as a social evolutionary development.
I’ve been lucky. I was born in Scotland in the 1950s and was taken, with my siblings, to Australia, on the other side of the world. I’ve never seen warfare. I’ve never lived in a thugocracy, and I don’t know if I’d have been aware of living in a thugocracy, had that been the case – that’s to say, if I’d never experienced an open society, in the Popperian sense. I could’ve been born in the 1950s in Vietnam, In which case I may well have been killed in my village or field during what the locals call the American War, and others call the Indo-Chinese War, in which upwards of 2 million died. Or I could have been born in the Soviet Union, thinking who knows what right now about Putin’s treatment of his own and other countries. And so on. If we could all bear in mind that our circumstances, in large, are not of our own making, we might think in less nationalistic terms and in more humane terms. We might even begin to understand and feel a modicum of sympathy for the hill-top gated-community denizens who have grown up convinced of their natural superiority.
So I think in more personal terms. How well are nations, states, communities, cultures serving their members? Whether we measure this in terms of the human rights universalised after the world wars of the 20th century, or the Aristotelian concept of Eudaimonia as reframed and refined over the centuries, or some other valid criteria, it’s surely obvious that some regions are doing better than others, by all reasonable measures. For the sake of human thriving, we need to sympathetically encourage open societies, as well as to stand up en bloc, against bullying and coercion everywhere. There is, of course, no place – no culture or society – where such behaviour is entirely absent, but it’s worth noting that the world’s most authoritarian states, including all 59 of those classified as such by the Economist Intelligence Unit’s Democracy Index (I prefer the term ‘thugocracy’), are led by men, whereas, of the top ten democracies, as judged by the compilers of that index, more than half are led by women. Now, there’s no doubt a ‘chicken-and-egg’ issue at play here. That’s to say, do inclusive, participatory, diverse and humane democracies encourage female leadership, or vice versa? The effect, I’m sure, is synergistic, and it’s a positive effect that needs to be spruiked around the world by everyone with the power to do so.
US democracy: another problem
Please Be Sensible, and fund public broadcasting properly
Jacinta: So we’ve long been wondering why things are so bad in the USA, why so many people believe such rubbish, and even act on it, to the detriment, it seems, of their democratic system. We’ve talked about their jingoism and their religiosity, but there’s so much more to it. For example, there’s a movement of the religious Right, the supposedly Christian Right, which seems to have nothing whatever to do with the supposed teachings of Jesus…
Canto: Or his example, since he clearly wasn’t much of a family man. Actually much of Jesus’s behaviour and speakings were contradictory, certainly nothing you could build a coherent moral framework from.
Jacinta: Yes the Christian Right is all about ‘old-fashioned family values’, men who are men, women who know their place, the corruption that is homosexuality, feminism and the pro-abortion crowd. And this stuff is prevalent in Australia too, but with nowhere near the force and noise. And the same goes for the conspiracy theories, the misinformation, the libertarian, anti-government breast-beating and so forth. In the USA it has threatened, very seriously, to bring down their democracy, which is clearly still under serious threat. But something I heard today on the SGU podcast (The Skeptics’ Guide to the Universe episode 875) has helped me understand why so many United Staters are so loopy. Their public media outlets – as opposed to private media – have nothing like the presence that Australia’s ABC and Britain’s BBC have. Kara Santamaria, the SGU’s resident (but not token) female, presented research on this. Government-funded media (not of the Putinland or CCP kind of course) can be seen as ‘funding democracy’. The research comes from the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, presented in a paper called ‘Funding Democracy: Public Media and Democratic Health in 33 Countries’. It’s behind a paywall, but the link is below, for anyone who ever reads this, haha. I’m basing my comments on an article about the research, published on the Annenberg website – and on Santamaria’s commentary.
Canto: My turn. From the abstract of the research article we get this conclusion:
Correlations and cluster analyses show that high levels of secure funding for public media systems and strong structural protections for the political and economic independence of those systems are consistently and positively correlated with healthy democracies.
In terms of its public media funding, [the USA] is almost literally off the chart for how little it allocates towards its public media compared to other democracies around the planet. It comes out to .002 percent of Gross Domestic Product (GDP). At $465 million dollars, 2020 federal funding of U.S. public media amounted to just $1.40 per capita. Meanwhile, countries such as the UK, Norway, and Sweden spend close to $100 or more per capita toward their public media.
Since the market is no longer supporting the level of news media — especially local journalism — that democracy requires, there is arguably now an even stronger case to make that public media needs to step into the vacuum to address the widening news gaps as the commercial newspaper industry continues to wither away. News deserts are expanding across the country and around the world. This should be public media’s moment – an opportunity to revisit its core purpose and assess how it should operate within a democratic society and within an increasingly digital media system. Ideally, we would both restructure and democratize our public media system as we expand this critical infrastructure.
References
https://www.theskepticsguide.org/podcasts
https://www.asc.upenn.edu/news-events/news/public-media-can-improve-our-flawed-democracy
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/19401612211060255
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy_Index