It's helpful to think about democracy vs not as a spectrum vs a binary choice. Even the countries you consider to be non-democratic have democratic elements. When I was growing up in Iran, it was probably a .5 democracy, these days it's a .3 or .4 democracy. Same goes for the US where it probably at peak was about a .8 democracy, and these days it's sliding towards the .6 range. It is not a sudden change from democracy one day to not.
But how should blue-state leaders actually defend against a red-state 2024 theft? Should the California and New York governors begin a 1776-style "correspondence committee" of blue states, to warn that a stolen Presidency in 2024 won't be accepted?
That sounds crazy. But what's the more practical answer? "Hope the Trumpist legislators feel ashamed" is not a strategy.
One thing I would add is that the modern definitions of "democracy" focus a lot on individual rights, strong and independent institutions, free press, etc rather than "do whatever the majority wants" or even "whoever gets the most votes rule as they wish".
The current ruling parties in UK, Japan, South Korea and Australia all have a majority of seats despite not winning a majority of the popular vote; Trudeau is PM despite the Liberals not winning a plurality of the vote. Yet all of them do well in the democracy rankings.
Similarly, many "more democratic" countries have very unrepresentative upper houses, although the upper houses usually have less power than the US Senate.
Eh, this is why we call it "liberal democracy", with the liberal part being individual rights, free press etc.
That other countries also have serious democracy deficits is no defense of the US's. Things like the House of Lords are also comically undemocratic and shouldn't exist.
It is often necessary to be undemocratic to protect individual rights. Consider California's prop 8, which was democratic but took away marriage equality.
We shouldn't be designing the system based on the assumption that the electorate will collapse into racially polarized blocs, and only from there attempting to mediate the inequities of a racially polarized electorate. I'm not trying to be mean here, but the only way to describe that is, "insane".
What you ARE describing are the problems with winner-take-all dynamics.
>> majority rule would mean the... majority gets 100% of its policy preferences
I've in fact been thinking about this for a long time, and I think we have to start from the acknowledgement that any legislative decision is inherently winner-take-all. In our government, that's already pretty well mitigated by the checks and balances; the key insight is that it needs to be *easier* for those checks and balances to be exercised.
Which in turn means that we need to prevent permanent coalitions -- like racially polarized blocs of voters -- from arising.
We need a multiparty system. Proportionalism gets you there. But literally every level of our elections feature some sort of winner-take-all dynamic - that is to say, *NOT* proportional. Single-member districts, first-past-the-post, literally winner-take-all EC delegations, etc.
Let's say there were competitive Libertarian and Green parties in a more proportionalized US, basically representing "urban fiscal conservatives + rural social liberals" and "urban social super-liberals + rural environmental liberals".
Any one election, either might be the kingmaker. Perhaps the Libertarians help the Republicans push through a tax compromise, but in the next coalition, they help the Democrats and Greens push through national zoning-reform legislation. The point isn't just the coalition system or the multiple parties, it's that the coalitions need to be encouraged to frequently fall apart over internal splits.
What our system does is give both coalitions an extreme incentive to RESOLVE internal splits. Donald Trump sucks, and Joe won the primary, so Berniecrats MUST suck it up and vote for him. There's no alternative route to power that doesn't hand it to the other side.
Parliamentary systems make it so that the election is primarily the barometer of public sentiment, and secondarily an input to how much power each side has in the coalition negotiations. The electorate makes its choice about which parties it trusts, and then the parties choose the leaders.
In America, the election is a referendum on the coalitions that have already been formed, and have only slightly changed from what they've each been for the past several decades. Each stage of the election is decided by a different electorate, and the general electorate can only ratify whose results it prefers through a rickety, outdated, combinatoric Rube-Goldberg contraption.
I'm not saying we couldn't *make* it sane and still retain its uniquely American character. I'm just saying it's currently *not* a sane way to translate the body politic's preferences into policy.
Amazing. This needs to be read by the right people at the Democrats. In India, we have filibusters in the form of farm protests. In China, corruption drives. Lol or so it seems to me.
One note:
"The BBC even reported that Gilens and Page’s paper demonstrated that the U.S. was “not a democracy”.
|| This is complete misinformation.|| Vox’s Dylan Matthews explained why in a 2016 article, and I have little add to his masterful and succinct debunking, so I’ll just quote him here."
This may sound to many that media outlets are misinforming people when all they did was report a salient development. I do not know if the reporters went back and reported that it was misinformation (they probably left the jobs). Even if they did, I'm not sure if it would influence the same people.
As an Indian, I strongly believe you guys will Build Back Better.
The Senate is quite literally an anti-democratic institution. It blatantly violates the "one person one vote" rule. And while that's always been true, it didn't bias to Republicans until recently. I don't know if saying that is politically helpful or harmful (maybe we could at least decrease the partisan bias a little with DC statehood), but sometimes commentary just seeks to accurately describe the world. Of course "Democracy" is a spectrum, we're not a full autocracy, and voting is important. But I also believe we're lumbering under poorly designed institutions. If we were designing the system from scratch, stuff like equal representation for WY and CA or lifetime Supreme Court appointments would obviously be absurd. Maybe if you're a politician you bite your tongue about it, but someone needs to point out that the emperor has a dumb Constitution.
Can I accept that as a factual description of what the Senate does? Sure, I suppose. Can I accept that as a democratic institution? Absolutely not. Perhaps that made sense for a loose confederation of states with a weak central government as the USA was originally conceived, but it's unfair for the present day. I'll posit the following as bedrock principles of a democracy:
1) Every citizen is able to vote without intimidation.
2) Votes are accurately counted and the winners take office.
3) The system is designed such that each vote has equal power both in the election of national officeholders and the makeup of any national legislature.
Break any of those principals, and it's easy to see how you can have the veneer of democracy, but not the core of it where the government truly represents the people. We've done decently at 1) since the Civil Rights Act, with exceptions like felon disenfranchisement, but are getting worse. I'm much more worried about 2) with the politicization of vote counting. But 3) we've always failed. I'm not saying I have a plan to fix it, but I don't see how it can be defended outside of motivated reasoning and status quo bias.
I don't think the structure of the Senate itself is the main reason for its dysfunction. We are actually in one of the most competitive partisan eras of our history - IE, for the first time ever, we've had several decades where both parties have had realistic chances of capturing trifecta government in any given general election.
And yet, policy effectiveness has foundered, because that competitiveness drove the parties to escalate their use of the filibuster - it makes sense to use whatever means you have available if it improves your chance of winning back control, vs. if you have no chance of winning, your best chance of policy victory is to negotiate for concessions and reserve the filibuster for defending from politically existential threats (like Dixiecrats did with civil rights for about a century).
I think we *could* manage a more-or-less effective government without the filibuster, if we could survive the initial turmoil it would cause, EVEN WITH the Senate as currently configured. In fact, the Senate would become more responsive and elections more dynamic, because the electorate would respond to real policy changes instead of fighting endless culture wars.
Another thoughtful, or, rather, thought-provoking, article. Thank you. I agree that throwing around terms like "defund the police" hurts the real discussions that should be happening.
While this is a good article, it fails in two ways. It doesn't consider the role of propaganda financed by the rich in creating the "desires" of the middle class, and it doesn't consider the bundling of the major financial interests of the rich with those "desires". The rich business conservatives outspend liberals by incredible amounts, and must be getting something for their money. Bundling of abortion issues with low taxes for the rich is not an accident, nor is the creation of a majority conservative SCOTUS to push those issues. You can have all the perfect democratic machinery you want, but if you control people's desires well enough to get them to vote your way, you have less than a democracy. Hence the laundry list of conservative positions which were created and promoted through massive, centralized propaganda campaigns rather than grassroots.
Great piece, I did find the part about packing the court interesting though. I felt it downplayed the packing over the last 4 years (without expanding the # of judges). Have you explored the ramifications of the 6-3 majority Trump put in place (and the 250+ federal judges)? I'd be interested in reading your thoughts on how that might play out.
As for SCOTUS, it might produce a wave of popular anger against the Right, if progressives don't screw it up by insisting that every institution be rigged to have a progressive slant!
Wow, I never looked up polls for that one. Almost makes me feel a bit better seeing opinion reflect the reality (to me anyway) of a degrading SCOTUS. Then again, we'll have to wait and see what happens with some of the major cases they're deliberating on now. Maybe I'll be surprised.
The thesis of this article seems to be, in large part, "major features of the US political system, like the Senate, can't be a big problem with democracy because the democracy-rating agencies don't count them against the US". Even if you set aside status-quo bias, which I think is a serious issue - why should we care what those people think?
Responding to "the US is undemocratic because some people's votes matter massively more than others because of where they live, and this is becoming more critical in practice as political opinions segregate geographically" with "well, these people didn't take off points for it" practically feels like a non-sequitur. What facts do those people know that makes that disparity not matter? Maybe the implicit argument is "the intrinsically undemocratic features of the US aren't much worse than those of other countries, and you should only use 'democracy' as a relative term", but that's an argument many of the people you're criticizing would reject, so you can't smuggle it in as a premise.
Seeing how politicized Corona became, I have my doubts that any strategy of explicitly defending democracy would not backfire. Perhaps that is the one issue that could unite Americans enough to pull us back from the precipice. Still, when I think of all the forces ranged against this (our sclerotic institutions, misinformation, and money in politics), I fear that even a miraculous summoning of the political will to stop our slide would fall find purchase. And let’s admit it: very few of us have yet had enough of fighting.
In the end, even the most perfect democracy cannot long survive a 50/50 split once the divide grows too wide.
Your citations for where the “left” is on various positions are always joke tweets. The criticism of the state of our democracy not withstanding and they are valid arguments, there are plenty of folks on left organizing voting drives and voters. I know this because I’ve been there and you might spend a little more time talking to folks, face to face, and a little less time on Twitter.
What does that have to do with where the left is on state of democracy? That’s just some writers talking about some other dorks’ white paper.
My point is to not conflate commentary and action. Just use me as an example, I agree with a lot of the ideas of how undemocratic institutions like the senate and SCOTUS are. I’ll also, like the last several elections, go all in donating, volunteering, voting. And I’ll do it knowing that I’ll probably be disappointed. I imagine that the folks you reference including mr internet hippo will too (voting at least). The commentary about the state of democracy has merit and the feeling that it’s in decline is tangible regardless of what some KPIs has to say about it.
This is where I’m getting lost. Vote participation has been increasing over the last few election cycles. To say that commenting on the state of democracy is hindering anything doesn’t make sense. It’s not why Dems got spanked in VA and won’t be the reason when they’re likely tossed out of House and Senate control next year.
But the Senate won't be abolished. And frankly I'm fine with that. And if I'm fine with that, imagine what kind of coalition you can get for abolishing it.
>>It’s not why Dems got spanked in VA and won’t be the reason when they’re likely tossed out of House and Senate control next year.
It DOES undermine Democrats' overall credibility with swing voters.
Look, the plain fact is, undoing Senate malapportionment is the single hardest thing to do under the Constitution. Look it up; it's the only type of amendment which requires unanimous consent of the states.
It's nice to argue about, but as long as the political fundamentals are "You need Cletus' vote to do anything" and "Cletus doesn't care about Senate malapportionment and is confused and angered that you're even bringing it up over any other concerns he has", then sorry bud, you have to play Cletus' game.
It's not intellectually dishonest to keep the Senate malapportionment -- and whatever other things you think might help improve the Senate in the meantime to clearing that enormous hurdle -- in the back of your head and tucked away on your platform, then talk to Cletus about the things Cletus wants, get his vote, and *then*, maybe, especially if it's to enact something Cletus wants, you do stuff like abolish the filibuster or require Congressional elections to all be RCV (which Congress *can* do!), then you do that, and you hope you can still compete for Cletus' or whoever else's vote now matters more than his under the new rules.
But it IS a massive rhetorical and strategic betrayal of your intellectual cause to not play Cletus' game right here and now. It's not fair, it's never been fucking fair, it stinks to high heaven, and so does Cletus, but that's the fucking game.
Given that Freedom house is funded by the US government (66% in 2006 rising to 86% in 2016, according to Wikipedia), I don't think any ratings from them concerning the US government can really be trusted. This is even discounting the past instances where Freedom House executives participated in CIA color revolution programs.
V-Dem gets money from Soros/Open Society as well as the ERC and NSF.
And the Economist Intelligence Unit - the Economist is ground zero for neoliberal cheerleading underlying the Washington Consensus economic model.
Nor am I particularly impressed with the fearmongering over "Elements of the GOP" stealing when they're just responding to the (more or less legal) same actions undertaken in the 2020 election by various state level Secretaries of State.
I also like (/sarc) how the focus on negative executive action is all on Trump when far greater unilateral executive fiats were decreed by Biden and the CDC.
Let's also not forget that the use of the SCOTUS to enact society wide changes is not a Republican innovation - it was the activist liberal Supreme Court in the 1960s and 1970s that started this trend.
Lastly, the "will of the people". Do we have a society of laws or not?
The United States Constitution was written specifically to prevent the domination of the federal government by a handful of large, populous states.
If this is to change, either undertake the constitutional process of amendment or else tear the whole thing down via Revolution.
As is, all the whining appears primarily to be geared towards the PMCs = the oligarchy = managers, professors, bureaucrats to exert unelected powers to one side or the other in theory, but towards the PMCs own interests in reality.
Whatever paid think tankers say - continually rising inequality conveys a completely different message.
What is it about Soros that gets all the nutcases so bent out of shape? He seems to me to be a wonderful human being, deserving our thanks for trying to promote liberal democracy. Oh…..
You mean besides being a bankster and a tool for hot money oligarchs worldwide? And either a willing accomplice or an active partner for color revolutions?
With regards to "is the US a democracy", it seems problematic that the liberals complaining about unelected judges are the same people who don't believe a majority of the population of a state should be able to vote to limit abortion.
There are some arguments made about "fundamental rights" to try to explain why the situation is different, but those are only convincing to people who already agree that liberals are correct.
Which raises the question: Considering the extent of partisan gerrymandering in some states, do those legislatures actually represent a majority of the voters? As an example, Republicans controlled the Michigan House after the 2012 elections, 59-51, despite receiving less than 50% of the total vote.
This is part of the huge (almost completely unacknowledged) logic problem the modern left faces -- a massive elevation of pure democracy as the be-all-and-end-all supreme good in governance while simultaneously insisting that there are certain very specific individual rights (from what source? who can say!) that somehow can't be infringed by majority vote.
I am glad that we are in agreement that the modern Left is the party solely responsible for preserving individual rights. I guess that leaves the modern right as the party of injustice.
We are not, in fact, in agreement on that, and I will refrain from saying something exceedingly impolite in response to you showing up nearly two years later just for the sake of blowing that wet fart over the thread. Oh, whoops.
Major claps for the point about oligarchy. I absolutely detest the fetishism about "money in politics", and I think it's mostly a self-serving lie told by the political class to ignorant/inattentive swing voters in order to keep them from reflexively "voting for the other guy this time".
I'd add to #1 that we need to push for Ranked Choice, Top Two, and other similar reforms. Skeptics often point to the failure of RCV to create multiple parties in Australia, which is a fraction of our population and far less sectionally diverse. I maintain that purging zero-sum dynamics like FPTP, winner-take-all, and single-member districts from our elections will free up room for regional parties to arise and give more competition to the two national parties.
I'm just saying it's a problem that's easily demagogued in ways that distract voters from actually solving it. Since everyone's taking the money, they can all hurl accusations back and forth at each other and turn it into a culture war issue: "George Soros is trying to abort all your babies" "The Koch brothers fund climate denialism". Or they turn it into a cheap applause line that allows them to segue into something harmless that they know will never happen (or will actually make the corruption worse) -- I'm thinking specifically here about "term limits", which is usually the refrain you hear immediately after any complaint about "money in politics".
The point is, regardless of how real the problem actually is, it remains a popular issue to talk about precisely because of its potential for distraction; and _that_ means that even if you genuinely care about it, it'll NEVER get truly solved by taking seriously *the public rhetoric around it*.
Of the people who DO take it seriously... the pols either do so because they don't understand it and it's just a cheap applause line for them, or they DO understand it and they're cynically using it to distract people. And the people hearing it almost NEVER understand this dynamic, let alone any of the other historical context of why money got to be so bad in our politics.
I hate to rely so heavily on a "false-consciousness" argument here, but I think it's entirely accurate to say that just about everyone in the public discussion has a particularly stupid form of false consciousness about it.
So, in summary... I'm not saying I don't take it seriously as an issue. I'm saying that no one involved UNDERSTANDS the issue in any kind of serious manner. The only way out of this is to stop taking them at their word, and start analyzing why money got to be so bad in our politics. And THAT'S why I bring up RCV/the 2PS, because IMO the 2PS's zero-sum dominance-based competition fuels the arms race of money in politics. (though that's a whole 'nother discussion for another time)
Ed: And once you come up with a solution, you pitch that and you say, "By the way, [RCV/whatever] will ALSO help with money in politics, because it does [XYZ]". If you can make a convincing pitch, then you're getting us actually closer to solving/mitigating it.
It's helpful to think about democracy vs not as a spectrum vs a binary choice. Even the countries you consider to be non-democratic have democratic elements. When I was growing up in Iran, it was probably a .5 democracy, these days it's a .3 or .4 democracy. Same goes for the US where it probably at peak was about a .8 democracy, and these days it's sliding towards the .6 range. It is not a sudden change from democracy one day to not.
I like the "defend democracy" frame!
But how should blue-state leaders actually defend against a red-state 2024 theft? Should the California and New York governors begin a 1776-style "correspondence committee" of blue states, to warn that a stolen Presidency in 2024 won't be accepted?
That sounds crazy. But what's the more practical answer? "Hope the Trumpist legislators feel ashamed" is not a strategy.
Great article!
One thing I would add is that the modern definitions of "democracy" focus a lot on individual rights, strong and independent institutions, free press, etc rather than "do whatever the majority wants" or even "whoever gets the most votes rule as they wish".
The current ruling parties in UK, Japan, South Korea and Australia all have a majority of seats despite not winning a majority of the popular vote; Trudeau is PM despite the Liberals not winning a plurality of the vote. Yet all of them do well in the democracy rankings.
Similarly, many "more democratic" countries have very unrepresentative upper houses, although the upper houses usually have less power than the US Senate.
Eh, this is why we call it "liberal democracy", with the liberal part being individual rights, free press etc.
That other countries also have serious democracy deficits is no defense of the US's. Things like the House of Lords are also comically undemocratic and shouldn't exist.
It is often necessary to be undemocratic to protect individual rights. Consider California's prop 8, which was democratic but took away marriage equality.
I think you have your props mixed up. Or is it a joke?
No, Intrepid is correct. Prop 8 banned gay marriage.
Thanks. So there were TWO prop 8s?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_California_Proposition_8
We shouldn't be designing the system based on the assumption that the electorate will collapse into racially polarized blocs, and only from there attempting to mediate the inequities of a racially polarized electorate. I'm not trying to be mean here, but the only way to describe that is, "insane".
What you ARE describing are the problems with winner-take-all dynamics.
>> majority rule would mean the... majority gets 100% of its policy preferences
I've in fact been thinking about this for a long time, and I think we have to start from the acknowledgement that any legislative decision is inherently winner-take-all. In our government, that's already pretty well mitigated by the checks and balances; the key insight is that it needs to be *easier* for those checks and balances to be exercised.
Which in turn means that we need to prevent permanent coalitions -- like racially polarized blocs of voters -- from arising.
We need a multiparty system. Proportionalism gets you there. But literally every level of our elections feature some sort of winner-take-all dynamic - that is to say, *NOT* proportional. Single-member districts, first-past-the-post, literally winner-take-all EC delegations, etc.
It's all baked into the pie, man.
I think most of the intellectual opposition to the "two-party system" comes from the belief that it dramatically limits what is politically possible.
It limits the degrees of freedom.
Let's say there were competitive Libertarian and Green parties in a more proportionalized US, basically representing "urban fiscal conservatives + rural social liberals" and "urban social super-liberals + rural environmental liberals".
Any one election, either might be the kingmaker. Perhaps the Libertarians help the Republicans push through a tax compromise, but in the next coalition, they help the Democrats and Greens push through national zoning-reform legislation. The point isn't just the coalition system or the multiple parties, it's that the coalitions need to be encouraged to frequently fall apart over internal splits.
What our system does is give both coalitions an extreme incentive to RESOLVE internal splits. Donald Trump sucks, and Joe won the primary, so Berniecrats MUST suck it up and vote for him. There's no alternative route to power that doesn't hand it to the other side.
Parliamentary systems make it so that the election is primarily the barometer of public sentiment, and secondarily an input to how much power each side has in the coalition negotiations. The electorate makes its choice about which parties it trusts, and then the parties choose the leaders.
In America, the election is a referendum on the coalitions that have already been formed, and have only slightly changed from what they've each been for the past several decades. Each stage of the election is decided by a different electorate, and the general electorate can only ratify whose results it prefers through a rickety, outdated, combinatoric Rube-Goldberg contraption.
I'm not saying we couldn't *make* it sane and still retain its uniquely American character. I'm just saying it's currently *not* a sane way to translate the body politic's preferences into policy.
Amazing. This needs to be read by the right people at the Democrats. In India, we have filibusters in the form of farm protests. In China, corruption drives. Lol or so it seems to me.
One note:
"The BBC even reported that Gilens and Page’s paper demonstrated that the U.S. was “not a democracy”.
|| This is complete misinformation.|| Vox’s Dylan Matthews explained why in a 2016 article, and I have little add to his masterful and succinct debunking, so I’ll just quote him here."
This may sound to many that media outlets are misinforming people when all they did was report a salient development. I do not know if the reporters went back and reported that it was misinformation (they probably left the jobs). Even if they did, I'm not sure if it would influence the same people.
As an Indian, I strongly believe you guys will Build Back Better.
The Senate is quite literally an anti-democratic institution. It blatantly violates the "one person one vote" rule. And while that's always been true, it didn't bias to Republicans until recently. I don't know if saying that is politically helpful or harmful (maybe we could at least decrease the partisan bias a little with DC statehood), but sometimes commentary just seeks to accurately describe the world. Of course "Democracy" is a spectrum, we're not a full autocracy, and voting is important. But I also believe we're lumbering under poorly designed institutions. If we were designing the system from scratch, stuff like equal representation for WY and CA or lifetime Supreme Court appointments would obviously be absurd. Maybe if you're a politician you bite your tongue about it, but someone needs to point out that the emperor has a dumb Constitution.
The Senate doesn't violate the "one person one vote" rule because it expressly doesn't provide representation to people, but to state governments.
Can I accept that as a factual description of what the Senate does? Sure, I suppose. Can I accept that as a democratic institution? Absolutely not. Perhaps that made sense for a loose confederation of states with a weak central government as the USA was originally conceived, but it's unfair for the present day. I'll posit the following as bedrock principles of a democracy:
1) Every citizen is able to vote without intimidation.
2) Votes are accurately counted and the winners take office.
3) The system is designed such that each vote has equal power both in the election of national officeholders and the makeup of any national legislature.
Break any of those principals, and it's easy to see how you can have the veneer of democracy, but not the core of it where the government truly represents the people. We've done decently at 1) since the Civil Rights Act, with exceptions like felon disenfranchisement, but are getting worse. I'm much more worried about 2) with the politicization of vote counting. But 3) we've always failed. I'm not saying I have a plan to fix it, but I don't see how it can be defended outside of motivated reasoning and status quo bias.
I don't think the structure of the Senate itself is the main reason for its dysfunction. We are actually in one of the most competitive partisan eras of our history - IE, for the first time ever, we've had several decades where both parties have had realistic chances of capturing trifecta government in any given general election.
And yet, policy effectiveness has foundered, because that competitiveness drove the parties to escalate their use of the filibuster - it makes sense to use whatever means you have available if it improves your chance of winning back control, vs. if you have no chance of winning, your best chance of policy victory is to negotiate for concessions and reserve the filibuster for defending from politically existential threats (like Dixiecrats did with civil rights for about a century).
I think we *could* manage a more-or-less effective government without the filibuster, if we could survive the initial turmoil it would cause, EVEN WITH the Senate as currently configured. In fact, the Senate would become more responsive and elections more dynamic, because the electorate would respond to real policy changes instead of fighting endless culture wars.
Great piece. Indeed it would not take much for Democrats to be seen as the party of stability. They should rally around that simple fact.
Another thoughtful, or, rather, thought-provoking, article. Thank you. I agree that throwing around terms like "defund the police" hurts the real discussions that should be happening.
While this is a good article, it fails in two ways. It doesn't consider the role of propaganda financed by the rich in creating the "desires" of the middle class, and it doesn't consider the bundling of the major financial interests of the rich with those "desires". The rich business conservatives outspend liberals by incredible amounts, and must be getting something for their money. Bundling of abortion issues with low taxes for the rich is not an accident, nor is the creation of a majority conservative SCOTUS to push those issues. You can have all the perfect democratic machinery you want, but if you control people's desires well enough to get them to vote your way, you have less than a democracy. Hence the laundry list of conservative positions which were created and promoted through massive, centralized propaganda campaigns rather than grassroots.
Great piece, I did find the part about packing the court interesting though. I felt it downplayed the packing over the last 4 years (without expanding the # of judges). Have you explored the ramifications of the 6-3 majority Trump put in place (and the 250+ federal judges)? I'd be interested in reading your thoughts on how that might play out.
Keep up the great work, cheers!
Thanks!
As for SCOTUS, it might produce a wave of popular anger against the Right, if progressives don't screw it up by insisting that every institution be rigged to have a progressive slant!
https://news.gallup.com/poll/354908/approval-supreme-court-down-new-low.aspx
Wow, I never looked up polls for that one. Almost makes me feel a bit better seeing opinion reflect the reality (to me anyway) of a degrading SCOTUS. Then again, we'll have to wait and see what happens with some of the major cases they're deliberating on now. Maybe I'll be surprised.
Thank you for writing this.
The thesis of this article seems to be, in large part, "major features of the US political system, like the Senate, can't be a big problem with democracy because the democracy-rating agencies don't count them against the US". Even if you set aside status-quo bias, which I think is a serious issue - why should we care what those people think?
Responding to "the US is undemocratic because some people's votes matter massively more than others because of where they live, and this is becoming more critical in practice as political opinions segregate geographically" with "well, these people didn't take off points for it" practically feels like a non-sequitur. What facts do those people know that makes that disparity not matter? Maybe the implicit argument is "the intrinsically undemocratic features of the US aren't much worse than those of other countries, and you should only use 'democracy' as a relative term", but that's an argument many of the people you're criticizing would reject, so you can't smuggle it in as a premise.
Seeing how politicized Corona became, I have my doubts that any strategy of explicitly defending democracy would not backfire. Perhaps that is the one issue that could unite Americans enough to pull us back from the precipice. Still, when I think of all the forces ranged against this (our sclerotic institutions, misinformation, and money in politics), I fear that even a miraculous summoning of the political will to stop our slide would fall find purchase. And let’s admit it: very few of us have yet had enough of fighting.
In the end, even the most perfect democracy cannot long survive a 50/50 split once the divide grows too wide.
Your citations for where the “left” is on various positions are always joke tweets. The criticism of the state of our democracy not withstanding and they are valid arguments, there are plenty of folks on left organizing voting drives and voters. I know this because I’ve been there and you might spend a little more time talking to folks, face to face, and a little less time on Twitter.
I cited a BBC article
What does that have to do with where the left is on state of democracy? That’s just some writers talking about some other dorks’ white paper.
My point is to not conflate commentary and action. Just use me as an example, I agree with a lot of the ideas of how undemocratic institutions like the senate and SCOTUS are. I’ll also, like the last several elections, go all in donating, volunteering, voting. And I’ll do it knowing that I’ll probably be disappointed. I imagine that the folks you reference including mr internet hippo will too (voting at least). The commentary about the state of democracy has merit and the feeling that it’s in decline is tangible regardless of what some KPIs has to say about it.
To put it another way, I will get behind and vote for senate candidates I like, and I also think we should abolish the senate.
Suit yourself, but the Senate won't be abolished and progressives only hurt themselves by calling for that.
This is where I’m getting lost. Vote participation has been increasing over the last few election cycles. To say that commenting on the state of democracy is hindering anything doesn’t make sense. It’s not why Dems got spanked in VA and won’t be the reason when they’re likely tossed out of House and Senate control next year.
But the Senate won't be abolished. And frankly I'm fine with that. And if I'm fine with that, imagine what kind of coalition you can get for abolishing it.
>>It’s not why Dems got spanked in VA and won’t be the reason when they’re likely tossed out of House and Senate control next year.
It DOES undermine Democrats' overall credibility with swing voters.
Look, the plain fact is, undoing Senate malapportionment is the single hardest thing to do under the Constitution. Look it up; it's the only type of amendment which requires unanimous consent of the states.
It's nice to argue about, but as long as the political fundamentals are "You need Cletus' vote to do anything" and "Cletus doesn't care about Senate malapportionment and is confused and angered that you're even bringing it up over any other concerns he has", then sorry bud, you have to play Cletus' game.
It's not intellectually dishonest to keep the Senate malapportionment -- and whatever other things you think might help improve the Senate in the meantime to clearing that enormous hurdle -- in the back of your head and tucked away on your platform, then talk to Cletus about the things Cletus wants, get his vote, and *then*, maybe, especially if it's to enact something Cletus wants, you do stuff like abolish the filibuster or require Congressional elections to all be RCV (which Congress *can* do!), then you do that, and you hope you can still compete for Cletus' or whoever else's vote now matters more than his under the new rules.
But it IS a massive rhetorical and strategic betrayal of your intellectual cause to not play Cletus' game right here and now. It's not fair, it's never been fucking fair, it stinks to high heaven, and so does Cletus, but that's the fucking game.
Given that Freedom house is funded by the US government (66% in 2006 rising to 86% in 2016, according to Wikipedia), I don't think any ratings from them concerning the US government can really be trusted. This is even discounting the past instances where Freedom House executives participated in CIA color revolution programs.
V-Dem gets money from Soros/Open Society as well as the ERC and NSF.
And the Economist Intelligence Unit - the Economist is ground zero for neoliberal cheerleading underlying the Washington Consensus economic model.
Nor am I particularly impressed with the fearmongering over "Elements of the GOP" stealing when they're just responding to the (more or less legal) same actions undertaken in the 2020 election by various state level Secretaries of State.
I also like (/sarc) how the focus on negative executive action is all on Trump when far greater unilateral executive fiats were decreed by Biden and the CDC.
Let's also not forget that the use of the SCOTUS to enact society wide changes is not a Republican innovation - it was the activist liberal Supreme Court in the 1960s and 1970s that started this trend.
Lastly, the "will of the people". Do we have a society of laws or not?
The United States Constitution was written specifically to prevent the domination of the federal government by a handful of large, populous states.
If this is to change, either undertake the constitutional process of amendment or else tear the whole thing down via Revolution.
As is, all the whining appears primarily to be geared towards the PMCs = the oligarchy = managers, professors, bureaucrats to exert unelected powers to one side or the other in theory, but towards the PMCs own interests in reality.
Whatever paid think tankers say - continually rising inequality conveys a completely different message.
Still doing the anti-semitism, huh?
Still being an idiot, huh?
What is it about Soros that gets all the nutcases so bent out of shape? He seems to me to be a wonderful human being, deserving our thanks for trying to promote liberal democracy. Oh…..
You mean besides being a bankster and a tool for hot money oligarchs worldwide? And either a willing accomplice or an active partner for color revolutions?
Your overlord has clearly spoken, Kent Brockman.
With regards to "is the US a democracy", it seems problematic that the liberals complaining about unelected judges are the same people who don't believe a majority of the population of a state should be able to vote to limit abortion.
There are some arguments made about "fundamental rights" to try to explain why the situation is different, but those are only convincing to people who already agree that liberals are correct.
Which raises the question: Considering the extent of partisan gerrymandering in some states, do those legislatures actually represent a majority of the voters? As an example, Republicans controlled the Michigan House after the 2012 elections, 59-51, despite receiving less than 50% of the total vote.
This is part of the huge (almost completely unacknowledged) logic problem the modern left faces -- a massive elevation of pure democracy as the be-all-and-end-all supreme good in governance while simultaneously insisting that there are certain very specific individual rights (from what source? who can say!) that somehow can't be infringed by majority vote.
I am glad that we are in agreement that the modern Left is the party solely responsible for preserving individual rights. I guess that leaves the modern right as the party of injustice.
We are not, in fact, in agreement on that, and I will refrain from saying something exceedingly impolite in response to you showing up nearly two years later just for the sake of blowing that wet fart over the thread. Oh, whoops.
Major claps for the point about oligarchy. I absolutely detest the fetishism about "money in politics", and I think it's mostly a self-serving lie told by the political class to ignorant/inattentive swing voters in order to keep them from reflexively "voting for the other guy this time".
I'd add to #1 that we need to push for Ranked Choice, Top Two, and other similar reforms. Skeptics often point to the failure of RCV to create multiple parties in Australia, which is a fraction of our population and far less sectionally diverse. I maintain that purging zero-sum dynamics like FPTP, winner-take-all, and single-member districts from our elections will free up room for regional parties to arise and give more competition to the two national parties.
I do think that there is some validity to the argument that the appearance of the impact of money in politics is a problem.
I'm not saying it's not a problem.
I'm just saying it's a problem that's easily demagogued in ways that distract voters from actually solving it. Since everyone's taking the money, they can all hurl accusations back and forth at each other and turn it into a culture war issue: "George Soros is trying to abort all your babies" "The Koch brothers fund climate denialism". Or they turn it into a cheap applause line that allows them to segue into something harmless that they know will never happen (or will actually make the corruption worse) -- I'm thinking specifically here about "term limits", which is usually the refrain you hear immediately after any complaint about "money in politics".
The point is, regardless of how real the problem actually is, it remains a popular issue to talk about precisely because of its potential for distraction; and _that_ means that even if you genuinely care about it, it'll NEVER get truly solved by taking seriously *the public rhetoric around it*.
Of the people who DO take it seriously... the pols either do so because they don't understand it and it's just a cheap applause line for them, or they DO understand it and they're cynically using it to distract people. And the people hearing it almost NEVER understand this dynamic, let alone any of the other historical context of why money got to be so bad in our politics.
I hate to rely so heavily on a "false-consciousness" argument here, but I think it's entirely accurate to say that just about everyone in the public discussion has a particularly stupid form of false consciousness about it.
So, in summary... I'm not saying I don't take it seriously as an issue. I'm saying that no one involved UNDERSTANDS the issue in any kind of serious manner. The only way out of this is to stop taking them at their word, and start analyzing why money got to be so bad in our politics. And THAT'S why I bring up RCV/the 2PS, because IMO the 2PS's zero-sum dominance-based competition fuels the arms race of money in politics. (though that's a whole 'nother discussion for another time)
Ed: And once you come up with a solution, you pitch that and you say, "By the way, [RCV/whatever] will ALSO help with money in politics, because it does [XYZ]". If you can make a convincing pitch, then you're getting us actually closer to solving/mitigating it.