Democracy in America II

The previous post was my first response to the January 6^th storming of the Capitol in Washington USA – which represented the logical culmination not only of four years of Trump rule but of at least 2 decades of onslaught against the democratic system in the country. This started with the “Florida hanging chads” of 2000; continued with sustained gerrymandering and voter restrictions; and culminated in the 2010 Supreme Court decision which allowed corporations unlimited funding of election campaigns.

 Such an attack on citizen rights raises three questions -

–        what sort of debate has this onslaught raised about the state of American democracy?

–        Where can we find a coherent agenda for rescuing American democracy?

–        with a realistic chance of success?

My googling unearths the following -

1. Only one such conversation seems to have been taking place – at the State of American Democracy website supported by the Ford, Germeshausen and Park Foundations, The Heinz Endowments and the Wallace Global Fund viz the great and good. This has led to a book Democracy Unchained – how to rebuild government for the people; ed David Orr et al (2020) which, so far, I've not been able to find to assess

2. There have, over the past decade, been a fair number of critiques of the system – eg Wolin's “Democracy Inc” (2008) I mentioned in the last post and Wendy Brown's “Undoing the Demos” (2015) but I've been able to identify only 3 recent books which set out strong and coherent agendas for electoral and political change.

The first by a Stanford University academic associated with the Journal of Democracy who has been monitoring the West's democratisation assistance over the past 30 years (including an abortive effort in Iraq) and has at last turned the analysis back onto the US itself in  Ill Winds – saving democracy from Russian Rage, Chinese ambition and American complacency ; Larry Diamond (2019)

David Daley is an activist and journalist who has just produced Unrigged – how americans are battling back to save democracy; (2020)

And  the Harvard Law Review recently produced this book-length analysis of The Degradation of American Democracy (Nov 2020)

The elements which need to figure in any serious reform of the contemporary American democratic system are summarised in this table of mine - 

Issue	Significance	Options	Constraints
Scale of campaign donations – money buys votes	massive	- The scale of corporation and Foundation contributions is particularly offensive. - Contributions should be individual and have a ceiling	Will be seen as threat to free speech
Voter restrictions	Huge – many southern (Rep) states have recently disenfranchised significant numbers of black voters	- Have proper electoral rolls - remove bureaucracy from registration	Should be straightforward – but Supreme Court would see it as threat to State rights
gerrymandering	large	More objective system to remaking of electoral boundaries	Highly political
Tone of broadcasting debate	huge	Bring back Law which required balanced coverage in broadcasting	Will be seen as threat to free speech
Reform electoral college system	many countries have same “first past the post” system		Would require constitutional amendment and would be highly divisive

 

Restrict filibustering	minor
Bring  element of PR into Senate elections	Massive – at moment large States (eg California)  have same 2 Senators as smallest	Gives Republicans currently a 40 million voter advantage in the Senate	Would require constitutional amendment and would be highly divisive

 In short, I get the sense that it has only been the events of January 6^th that have finally triggered the realisation of many Americans that their system is so broken it requires  a “Truth and Conciliation” approach to reform. For a slightly different view, see  https://howtosavetheworld.ca/2021/01/21/not-so-extreme/

Update; One year on, this rather fatalistic Boston Review article puts the decline of american democracy down to post-industrialisation