Flawed
Fortune reports we’ve been downgraded, we who are Yanks.
While U.S. citizens could once claim to be part of the 9% of people in the world governed by a “full democracy,” they are now part of the near 45% who live in a “flawed democracy.”
That’s according to the Economist Intelligence Unit, which downgraded the U.S. in their 2016 Democracy Index published Wednesday. The move puts the U.S. in the same category as Poland, Mongolia, and Italy.
The “full democracy” period must have been quite brief, since before the Voting Rights Act we definitely were not one.
What besides Trump makes us not one?
- the electoral college
- gerrymandering
- voter suppression (made possible by the Shelby ruling)
- money in political campaigns (made much worse by the Citizens United ruling)
All that preceded Trump.
To arrive at this conclusion, the paper analyzed over 200 countries and considered factors like political culture and political participation.
“Popular trust in government, elected representatives and political parties has fallen to extremely low levels in the U.S.,” the paper’s authors wrote. “This has been a long-term trend and one that preceded the election of [Donald] Trump as U.S. president in November 2016.”
And then he pushed it off a cliff.
Yes, this all predated Trump. It probably had to in order for Trump to be elected. Our democracy isn’t flawed because we elected Trump; we elected Trump because our democracy is flawed.
And it’s a positive feedback loop: lousy politics makes for lower expectations, lower standards, lower participation, all of which allow and support lousier politics. Sheer apathy inducement and disgust makes for effective voter suppression all on their own. Even meeting the standard “no worse than Trump” (!) means current and future politicians can erode democratic institutions and laws with near total impunity. We have two effective political parties, one of which is clearly a-okay-fine with a government for sale and as a laughingstock, and another that rarely sets its ambitions as any higher than “noticeably better than the Republicans”.
Something else for Trump to blame on Obama.
I noticed that my homeland is in the ‘full democracy’ category, it’s a very short list. Mainly three English-speaking countries and Scandinavia.
Does this revelation imply that USAians won’t in the future lecture the rest of the world on democracy? Probably not.
Most of the people I live near (almost smack dab in the center of this large sprawling flawed democracy) won’t even hear of this; and if they hear of it, they won’t believe it’s true. They’ll think it’s a conspiracy of the socialist European countries and the UN (and Obama, of course).
iknklast @5
Depressing. There’s a ‘Middle Kingdom’ mentality in the US, it’s understandable in such a huge and powerful nation. Perhaps the best we can hope for is that the US will be less inclined to bomb the crap out of Third World countries with the expectation that ‘democracy’ will miraculously emerge from the ashes.
There might be a flaw in The Economist’s methodology. I can’t see how any country that’s infested with millionaires and billionaires can be classed as a ‘full democracy’.
RJW, I don’t think a ‘full democracy’ necessarily has to have outcomes we consider right, or even good. It simply has to reflect the will of the majority and to provide all participants with an equal and adequate opportunity to participate.
I’d like to think the outcomes would be good, but even living in a country ranked fourth (as of the 2017 rankings) and the highest ranked English speaking parliamentary style democracy, it all feels more fragile than it should. It’s also depressing seeing how many people are attacking democracy and our institutions online. It does make me wonder how much we are being targeted for destabilisation.
Rob,
I agree with your first sentence. My point was that in countries where information is manipulated by powerful media oligarchs, the voters are deliberately misinformed. So regardless of the efficiency and fairness of the electoral system those societies are not real democracies. There’s a rather disturbing proportion of people under 25 that don’t consider democracy important.
I’m not convinced democracy is under more threat now than in previous generations. Democracy is always under threat, it is indeed, fragile, even in the West. Americans are learning the hard way how much their democratic institutions depend on the good will of politicians. The Coalition government here is continually eroding our rights in the name of national security.
Think of the fascist movements in Europe, the Communists and of course the conservative ideologues who hate the plebs.
I think I agree with all of that RJW
I’m dosed up on painkillers at the moment so my apologies if the following doesn’t make sense.
On the subject of democracy, today’s under 40’s in the West have never known anything but democracy; even the communist USSR and GDR is something they know only from the history books. They see a booming China and compare it to the relatively stagnant West and wonder what all the fuss is about preserving democracy. Us old gits can try and tell them about the abuses of power and of the populations that had no voice, but they just shrug and point to a president who won with less votes than the loser, and to anti-terror laws that strip us of our rights that we thought were cast in stone, and they don’t understand just what they stand to lose if democracy is allowed to die.
I have no solutions except to keep hammering the point home at every opportunity.
At this point, maybe the thing is less to encourage the protection of what we still have for its own sake and more to struggle to regain what we’ve lost or never yet had. (That last, in the U.S., would include a more democratic system with regard to the out-sized power of small states.)
Or, more precisely, huge states with tiny populations.
AoS – my experience with the under-40s has been sort of the opposite. The ones I have talked with have an almost mystical view of democracy, as though there is some sort of magic that will bring us through as long as we go by the will of the majority.
Which is why I hear so many of them accepting things like Trump, and arguing the idea that we should teach creationism – not because they believe in it, but because they believe we are a democracy, rather than a republic, and because they do seem to believe that democracy means that the majority can remove the rights of the minority if it is the will of the majority to do so.
Plus, a lot of them have been raised on a media that tells them that everything the government has ever done is bad, bad, bad, bad. They may be liberals, they may be listening to NPR, they may be soaking in liberal thought, but so many on the left now think that government can’t do anything right – and GW Bush, followed by DJ Trump, isn’t doing much to help that. Hurricane Katrina convinced them more, because FEMA was so awful. They can’t see that those moves were made by people who deliberately appointed the worst possible people for the job, and those people came through for them by making it look like all government is incompetent and corrupt. So any career politicians are immediately to be suspected.