Those of us who grew up in the South America of the 1950s, ‘60s and ‘70s
know all too well about how fragile democracy is. The maximum outward
manifestation of the death of a democracy is that culminating moment when tanks
roll out of the military bases and onto the streets, elected leaders are exiled
or jailed, constitutional guarantees are suspended, and repression of the
citizenry is installed as the governing norm.
But this is seldom a surprise first sign of the collapse of freedom and
democracy. Quite often democratic institutions are in such a debilitated state
that a dictatorial takeover is almost a foregone conclusion. Other times these
institutions have been so infiltrated by populist and/or other autocratic
elements that a coup per se is
rendered completely unnecessary and redundant. In these cases, democracy merely
whimpers and dies in the chokehold of a political elite or dictator, with no
one mounting any sort of vigorous defense until it’s too late. And many times, those
brought up passively believing that constitutional democracy is a “guaranteed
and permanent institution” stand idly by, watching it expire, almost wilfully
failing to comprehend what they are witnessing.
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| Cristina Kirchner and Hugo Chávez: a political "love affair" |
In numerous places around the world this past year, democracy was in
crisis. And it seemed as if many an autocrat was taking the opportunity to
strike while the iron was hot and while the US, once the guiding light of
democratic principles, entered democratic meltdown mode itself.
Venezuela’s late president Hugo Chávez might have been freely elected,
but like many populist autocrats before him, he used his widespread popularity
coupled with distribution of the wealth his country had derived from oil as a
means of expanding his personal power. Once ensconced as a populist autocrat,
he was able to freely persecute his political opponents, bias the courts in his
favor, silence or bully the independent media and eventually eliminate the limit
on the number of terms a president could serve. This was a pattern emulated by
several other South American leaders, perhaps most notably by former president
Cristina Kirchner in Argentina. But there, democracy prevailed and she was
eventually voted out of office in a relatively smooth democratic transition.
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| Maduro, taking the hard line |
In Venezuela, however, the populist authoritarian model was much more
highly entrenched. But Chávez’s successor, Nicolás Maduro, doesn’t possess
Chávez’s charisma and when international oil prices plummeted, he no longer had
the means to buy popular loyalty either. The past year has seen a deepening of the
Venezuelan crisis to such an extent that the supposedly “socialist” government
of Maduro has resorted to the iron-fisted tactics usually associated with far right-wing
military dictatorships, even to the extent of dissolving the already largely
rubber-stamp legislative branch and of unleashing extremely harsh repression on
popular dissent.
Democracy is being similarly undermined—if under varying circumstances
and to distinct degrees—in very different corners of the world: among others, from
Hungary to Poland, from Russia to Turkey, from the Philippines to Sri Lanka,
and from Cameroon to Zimbabwe (in this last case, where elections are to be
held but where, as in Russia, those who have taken charge have no intention of
being losers). And speaking of Russia, for anyone who had any doubts about perennial
strongman Vladimir Putin’s autocratic designs, in the run-up to the latest
elections—which he will clearly win—his only serious rival, anti-corruption
activist Alexei Navalny, has been banned from running, based on trumped-up
charges that cast him as a convicted felon.
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| Putin...following in Stalin's footsteps |
Once the elections are over, Putin will be set to rule Russia for another
six-year term until 2024. This will make him the longest-governing Russian
leader since totalitarian dictator Joseph Stalin.
In most cases, these autocratic regimes maintain a semblance of
constitutionality, a parody of democratic rule, even if their constitutions are
modified or completely re-written to accommodate their current leaders, and
people still vote (although to what effect is, more often than not, less than
transparent). But in all such cases, the tenets of democratic life, from individual
rights and liberties to free expression and judicial security, are the first
victims of encroaching authoritarianism.
In 2017, the United States of America, once the measuring stick by which
democratic life was judged, provided the world with a less than stellar example
to follow. The president, who took office in the first month of last year,
managed to attract the ballots of only 26 percent of eligible voters. This gave
him 46 percent of the votes cast for the two main candidates. His opponent, former
Senator and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, won 48 percent of the
votes cast for the two main candidates, and, in the popular ballot,
outdistanced him by nearly 2.9 million votes. And yet, in a controversial quirk
of “representative US democracy”, she lost the election because of a highly
controversial result in the Electoral College. Although this has happened four
other times in US history, the popular voting results in these other cases have
always been much closer. This was, by far, the largest margin—more votes than
the entire number of inhabitants in the city of Chicago—by which a US
presidential candidate had ever won the popular vote and still lost the
election.
Noam Chomsky—the virtual dean of American liberal thinkers and a tenacious
watchdog for democratic principles—has pointed out on more than one occasion
that the Electoral College, far from being a guarantor for US democracy, is,
indeed, a limiting factor. He has opined that the Electoral College should be
eliminated, but has added that this is unlikely to happen because it forms part
of the originally constituted US political system. In an interview, Chomsky
once said that while the founding fathers of the United States wanted a broadly
democratic system, they also wanted to ensure that there would never be “too much democracy”. And the Electoral
College was an insurance policy against just that.
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| Chomsky...regressive democracy |
According to Chomsky, “The Electoral College was originally supposed to
be a deliberative body drawn from educated and privileged elites. It would not
necessarily respond to public opinion, which was not highly regarded by the
founders, to put it mildly. ‘The mass of people … seldom judge or determine
right,’ as Alexander Hamilton put it during the framing of the Constitution, expressing
a common elite view.” Chomsky adds that “It is only one of many factors that
contribute to the regressive character of the [US] political system,
which...would not pass muster by European [democratic] standards.”
There can be little doubt that the original framers of the US
Constitution saw the idea of an Electoral College as a means of protecting
“national interests” should a candidate be elected by popular vote whom they
considered unsuitable for office. But some analysts have argued recently that
the current president is precisely the type of candidate against whom such a
tool was created to protect US democracy. And instead, it ended up being a tool
that ensured that he did take office.
This notwithstanding, it’s worthwhile asking just how independent from
popular sentiment the electors in the Electoral College are. The answer is a matter
of states’ rights: Certain states have rules that bind their electors to the
will of the people’s majority in their state. But in other states, Electoral
College members are basically free agents who can vote for whomever strikes
their fancy. And when they do, breaking ranks with the popular trend, they are
considered “faithless electors”.
Herewith, a few examples: In Washington State, four electors in the last
presidential election, who were originally expected to vote for Hillary Clinton
defected—but not to Donald Trump. Three voted for former Bush Administration
Secretary of State, General Colin Powell. The other one put in a vote for Faith
Spotted Eagle, a Native American political activist who opposed the Dakota
Access Pipeline. A Hawaii elector, who was also thought likely to vote for
Hillary, voted instead for independent Senator Bernie Sanders, even though
Sanders was no longer in the running for president and had asked his followers
to vote for Clinton and deny Trump the election. And these were not the only
cases of electors who simply ignored the popular voting trends in their states,
and many of those who did, ultimately cast their votes for Trump.
This should not be taken as a critical statement against the US system
as a whole, which I have long admired. But it does serve as an at least surface
explanation for how someone so unpopular with the majority of Americans, and whose
political and social philosophy is so apparently divorced from the democratic principles
of that system can find his way into the White House.
In their new book entitled How
Democracies Die, Harvard University professors Steven Levitsky and Daniel
Ziblatt ask a compelling question: Considering the political direction taken by
the Trump Era, how vulnerable is US democracy to such a fate? Bottom line, the
authors indicate, “Extremist demagogues emerge from time to time in all
societies, even in healthy democracies. An essential test of this kind of
vulnerability isn’t whether such figures emerge but whether political leaders,
and especially political parties, work to prevent them from gaining power. When
established parties opportunistically invite extremists into their ranks, they
imperil democracy.”
And there’s the rub: In the preliminary campaigns for the 2016 election,
the US Republican Party (GOP) had a veritable grab-bag of largely lackluster
candidates, none of whom was thought likely to be able to win over Democrat
Hillary Clinton—and perhaps not over independent Bernie Sanders either. The
combination of the GOP’s desperation to win and their surprise at the small but
vocal far right-wing and evangelical base that was suddenly rallying around
billionaire businessman Donald Trump led the party leadership, with few
exceptions, to hold their nose and back Trump’s candidacy despite the fact that
no one was very sure of his politics, his conservatism, or his loyalties—which,
it appears to have turned out, were only to himself. Basically, the GOP lent
itself as a vehicle to Trump’s political ambitions and allowed him to usurp its
power as one of the country’s two main political parties.
Already at mid-year last year, in the annual Global Peace Index report,
published by the Institute for Economics and Peace, the United States had
slipped eleven notches from its already embarrassingly low rung on that list to
114th out of 163, in the ranking of most (and least) peaceful
nations—while most of its first world allies placed within the top twenty. It
is worth noting that the GPI bases its annual reports on data from the previous
year—so, from before Trump was sworn in as president. But its report made
special mention of the fact that major political turmoil arising from Trump’s
2016 election win was a main reason for the continued slide of the US on the
world peace scale.
The GPI takes into account a broad range of criteria that go into the
establishment of a peaceful existence (and co-existence). These include, among
many others, such things as political instability, ease of access to small arms
and light weapons, nuclear and heavy weapons capability, number of jailed
persons per 100,000 inhabitants, likelihood of violent demonstrations,
political instability, relations with neighboring countries, etc.
It will be interesting to see where the US ranks when the next GPI report
comes out in mid-2018, with data sourced from the first year since Trump’s inauguration.
That report will surely have to consider the growing split between Trump’s
supporters and non-supporters and the president’s encouragement of that divide;
the continuing saga of special and congressional investigations into possible
collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia in Moscow’s reported meddling
in the 2016 presidential election; investigations into possible obstruction of
justice charges against Trump and members of his entourage; Trump’s call for
even harsher correctional policies in a country that only represents 4.4
percent of the world population but houses over 20 percent of the world’s prisoners
(about 2.3 million people); his hostile approach to relations with southern
neighbor Mexico; his defense of military grade assault weapons in the hands of
civilians; his threats to distribute nuclear arms among more countries (such as
Japan and South Korea) in the face of a now clear North Korean nuclear threat;
and his open threats to use nuclear arms if provoked, as well as his
heightening of tensions in the Middle East by officially (and gratuitously)
recognizing Jerusalem as the capital of Israel.
If nothing else, President Trump’s clearly documented lies and his characterization
of the mainstream media as “fake news” (defined by objective observers as
practically anything that disagrees with the autocratic US leader’s positions),
when it is he and his entourage who are continuously generating false
information, has served as an example for autocrats around the world and
provided them with a kind of “permission” to treat their countries’ independent
media in similar terms. This in itself is—to the extent that the president’s
base repeats and believes his false accusations—a dangerous precedent for
American democracy and, as such, for democracy worldwide.
According to Levitsky and Ziblatt, “Once a would-be authoritarian makes
it to power, democracies face a second critical test: Will the autocratic
leader subvert democratic institutions or be constrained by them?” They add
that “constitutions must be defended—by political parties and organized
citizens, but also by democratic norms, or unwritten rules of toleration and
restraint. Without robust norms, constitutional checks and balances do not
serve as the bulwarks of democracy we imagine them to be. Instead, institutions
become political weapons, wielded forcefully by those who control them against
those who do not...[E]lected autocrats subvert democracy—packing and “weaponizing”
the courts and other neutral agencies, buying off the media and the private
sector (or bullying them into silence), and rewriting the rules of politics to
permanently disadvantage their rivals. The tragic paradox of the electoral
route to authoritarianism is that democracy’s enemies use the very institutions
of democracy...to kill it.”
In this sense, the co-authors of How
Democracies Die believe that “...the United States failed the first test in
November 2016, when it elected a president with no real allegiance to
democratic norms.” They opine that it wasn’t merely deep voter dissatisfaction with
business as usual in Washington that made Trump’s surprise victory possible,
but also, and more importantly, “the Republican Party’s failure to keep an
extremist demagogue from gaining the nomination.” This is not the first time
that such figures have appeared on the political horizon (e.g., Huey Long,
Joseph McCarthy, George Wallace), they remind us. “But an important protection
against would-be authoritarians has not just been the country’s firm commitment
to democracy but, rather, our political parties, [as] democracy’s gatekeepers.”
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| Levitsky and Ziblatt |
The Harvard professors make the point that “many observers take comfort
in the US Constitution, which was designed precisely to thwart and contain
demagogues like Trump.” After all, they point out, the Madisonian system of
checks and balances has endured for more than two centuries, surviving the
Civil War, the Great Depression, the Cold War, and Watergate. But will it be
able to survive the onslaught of Trumpism?
About this, say Levitsky and Ziblatt, “We are less certain. Democracies
work best—and survive longer—when constitutions are reinforced by norms of
mutual toleration and restraint in the exercise of power. For most of the
twentieth century, these norms functioned as the guardrails of American
democracy, helping to avoid the kind of partisan fights-to-the-death that have
destroyed democracies elsewhere in the world, including in Europe in the 1930s
and South America in the 1960s and 1970s. But those norms are now
weakening.”
The authors warn that, during Barack Obama’s presidency, many
Republicans, in particular, abandoned restraint for a strategy of winning by
any means necessary. “Donald Trump has accelerated this process,” they write,
“but he didn’t cause it. The challenges we face run deeper than one president,
however troubling this one might be.”
One thing is certain, whatever happens, for better or for worse, in the
coming year—and indeed during the rest of Donald Trump’s presidential term—is
likely to have a long-lasting effect on peace and democracy, not only in the
United States, but in the entire rest of the world as well.
Excellent!
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