Declining US democracy is no model for the world
- The American system of electoral democracy, in which voters and a free press have important roles to play, has declined in recent years
- Given how the last US presidential election went, the country is hardly in a position to preach the value of democracy to the world
It should be a long time before the United States can again strut the world stage and lecture us all about the values of democracy and human rights, poking its finger in the eye of every authoritarian or dictatorial government it has the desire to show up. A former president, no less, has used every occasion to tell the world that the election of 2020 was hijacked.
In the present Senate, the Democrats have an advantage of only one vote. On rare occasions, the Democrats have dominated the upper house of Congress, but after most elections we find that the smaller and rural states have tipped the scales. Wyoming gets two senators, as does the state of New York. As for the lower house, 90 per cent of congressmen are re-elected. Over the years, congressional boundaries have been jiggled so that it is difficult for incumbents to lose.
Is this US system better or worse than that of other Western and many developing countries? The United Kingdom, France, Germany, Brazil, India, Nigeria, South Africa and Canada, to mention some, are better and fairer by a long shot.
But surely, you say, this is countered to some extent by a free press. Indeed, there are good news outlets like The New York Times and the Public Broadcasting Service. But even then, on key occasions, such as during the Vietnam war and at the onset of the Iraq war, there have been lapses.
With Iraq, the Times did not give much space to either its own reporters or its editorial contributors to question the paper’s pro-war line. During the Vietnam war, the Times in an editorial attacked Martin Luther King Jnr for his opposition to it.
Reporters Without Borders publishes an annual press freedom index. The US ranks 45th.
Freedom House, a conservative-leaning organisation I’ve long respected for its honesty, once ranked the US, with 94 out of 100 points, almost the most democratic in the world. Over the years of Donald Trump’s presidency, its score fell to 83.
US president Bill Clinton’s secretary of state Madeleine Albright once said “the United States is the indispensable nation”. But as James Traub has written in Foreign Policy, “The United States remains indispensable because it is the world’s greatest military power – but not because other nations look to it for guidance.”
All this should prompt us to think about how important democracy is. The 20th century saw all sorts of experiments, including fascism, socialism (not to be confused with social democracy), anarchism, monarchism, Marxism and theocracy. Out of the ferocious competition of rival ideas, democracy came out on top.
Professor John Dunn of Cambridge University in his magisterial study of democracy writes that “the term democracy has become (as the Freudians put it) too highly cathected: saturated with emotion, irradiated by passion, tugged to and fro and ever more overwhelmed by accumulated confusion. To rescue it as an aid in understanding politics, we need to think our way past a mass of history and block our ears to many pressing importunities”.
03:32
One year after US Capitol attack, Biden addresses the state of American democracy
We need to know far more about democracy than we do. US president George W. Bush declared that “the reason why I’m so strong on democracy is democracies don’t go to war with each other”. Indeed, much academic research has proved his point.
But democracies have a terrible record of going to war against non-democracies, often on the flimsiest excuse. Look at the US’ war against Spain in the 19th century or against Nicaragua in the last century.
Perhaps we should not be surprised that Plato was against the democracy of his home city, Athens. Plato believed that in the best form of government, philosophers should rule. He saw democracy as the rule of the foolish, vicious and always potentially brutal.
As senator, Biden voted into being a law that judges must incarcerate the convicted for long terms, even for minor offences, if it was their third conviction. The result is the US has 2 million people in jail, and holds 25 per cent of the world’s prisoners.
Athenian democracy flourished but then the idea faded away for the best part of 2,000 years. The Romans had little time for it. It returned in the struggle for American independence.
A few years later, it became the rallying cry of the French Revolution. We must never forget that democracy would never have achieved the promise it did without the vision of Maximilien Robespierre, who organised the mass executions of those thought to oppose the path of the revolution.
Over the next 150 years, the cause of democracy edged forward gradually, but it only triumphed after 1945. In the last few years, democracy has slipped. If the head boy sets a bad example, we shouldn’t be surprised.
The US has moved from being democracy’s modern-day founder to being its saboteur. Why should the authoritarians seek to emulate it when it is making such a mess of the concept?
Jonathan Power is a foreign affairs columnist and commentator
