Is Democracy Still Viable?

People whose patterns of life and livelihood are under threat, where their expectations are no longer likely to be met (particularly based on multigenerational patterns of work and social experience that face radical change), either adapt or are pushed down and out. Economic desperation, instability and hopelessness, are not fertile grounds for democratic institutions to take root and grow. History shows us that when economic disenfranchisement spreads through traditionally once-“successful” demographic cohorts, unscrupulous politicians retreat into finding less powerful constituencies to blame for their malaise.

In post-WWI Germany, a nation slammed with unsustainable war reparations, watched as inflation rendered their currency meaningless, as unemployment and poverty soared, and as the victorious allies (most particularly France) plundered German territory and assets with abandon. Oddly enough, the blame was not placed on those allies. Instead, a political demagogue found those “external” enemies too challenging to blame, too hard to attack, and so Adolph Hitler needed a relatively helpless grouping that lived within German borders to blame for Germany’s economic chaos: Jews. He slaughtered them.

Today? Even as international outsourcing fell to automation as the number one job displacer in the United States, those with the capacity to implement that job-destroying automation were the local American powerhouses: corporate America, the incumbents that were theoretically – under right wing dogma – the job creators under the failed theory of “trickle-down economics.”

But blaming the power elite for the demise of working class jobs was a non-starter to a billionaire running for office. Unscrupulous politicians on both sides of the aisle found it easier to reach back to the last economic disruptor – international outsourcing – and place blame with foreign countries and trade practices. Donald Trump also found one internal group that was a particularly easy target to place blame: undocumented immigrants, even as the only jobs they were taking in droves were the hard and stoop-labor that traditional Americans would not touch at any price.

So the election of a blame-placer, a man who made it clear that only he (as an individual) could fix America and make it great again, of necessity, required that he shove bureaucratic institutions and anyone who disagreed with his radical plans aside. The Constitution was an inconvenient barrier. Perhaps as marking a bigger global trend, the United States moved rapidly away from its traditional democratic safeguards into a world that tended to favor efficient (or seemingly efficient) autocrats. Autocrats unable to use military force instead use as their primary tool of persuasion control of public mass media. Decimate those who disagree as liars and unpatriotic; elevate those who hold the party line as the purveyors of truth, even if there opposite is true.

Academics studying the vectors of sliding democracy began analyzing the qualitative and quantitive data. Writing for the July 4^th Washington Post, academic researchers Anna Lührmann and Matthew Wilson write: “[The] newly released 2018 Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) Project report rates the state of democracy across 178 countries, offering the most updated, comprehensive assessment of where things stand.

“A year ago, in 2017, we found that democracy was on the decline — but not as much as many pundits believed. Today, we are less optimistic than we were a year ago. Our new report shows that democracy’s decline is gaining momentum: One-third of the world’s population lives in a backsliding democracy.

“These conclusions are based on new data released by the V-Dem Project, the largest-ever social-science effort to measure democracy around the world… The survey asks more than 3,000 scholars and other country experts to evaluate each of 178 countries on the quality of core features of democracy. These experts distinguish between de jure and de facto democratic countries. For example, most countries today hold elections, but some of these elections are free and fair while others are severely rigged…

“At the end of 2017, most people in the world lived in democracies. But since then, one-third of the world’s population — or 2.5 billion people — have lived through ‘autocratization,’ in which a leader or group of leaders began to limit those democratic attributes and to rule more unilaterally. The current autocratization trend is visible across the world — and affects Europe and the whole American continent. Only sub-Saharan Africa shows some democratic improvements on average…

“People with average levels of income have almost as much influence on politics as rich people in many Western countries — but not in the United States. On this indicator, the United States scores lowest among all Western countries, ranking 75th globally. One in four people, or almost 2 billion people, live in countries where the more economically well-off have gained more political power in the past 10 years.

“Four of the 10 most populous countries of the world have been affected by autocratization — India, the United States, Brazil and Russia. The most populous democracy — India — has become less democratic as the Hindu-nationalist government led by the Bharatiya Janata Party has passed or enforced stricter laws and regulations that reduce the media’s freedom to criticize the government and that restrict the range of expression. However, India’s elections are still considered free and fair.

“Brazilian journalists face increasing harassment when reporting about the major political corruption scandals that have shaken the country in recent years. What’s more, after years of political crisis, political opponents show less respect for each other in public debate. Such polarization harms democratic institutions in the long run.

“President Vladimir Putin’s Russia now appears at the bottom end of our Liberal Democracy Index ranking because of decades of increasing repression against opposition activists and critical media. Twenty-six countries separate Russia from North Korea at the bottom end of the scale…

“The United States fell 24 places in the country ranking on liberal democracy over the past two years, from seventh in 2015 to 31st in 2017. When we compare the United States’ score in 2017 with its average score over the past 10 years, the drop is precipitous and unprecedented…

“Experts lowered their estimates of democracy in the United States because they began to be skeptical that the U.S. Congress will rein in executive overreach. Similarly, experts lost faith that the opposition party can contribute to overseeing, investigating or otherwise checking the majority party. The U.S. executive branch was assessed as showing less respect for the Constitution and compliance with the judiciary, two indicators that the judicial branch can restrain the executive.

“For all four indicators, the score for the United States declined. The downward trend in the United States is much worse than in other countries. In terms of government compliance with decisions of the Supreme Court, the United States used to rank among the top countries of the world — but has now declined to No. 48.”

The trends are, to put it mildly, extremely disheartening. The denigration of long-standing credible journalists and the willingness of limited but powerful media to become a mouthpiece for “whatever Trump says” in exchange for much higher advertising revenues have severely contributed to the failure to check otherwise authoritarian trends here in the United States. The ability to distort the political process without judicial intervention, such as the rise of modern, statistically-driven gerrymandering and voter access, has become extreme. The thought of a Trump controlled Supreme Court plus two Houses of Congress feel like powerful erosions of democratic guarantees. Can the 2018 mid-terms make a difference? The issue is very much in doubt.

I’m Peter Dekom, and I see such polarizing trends as of necessity splitting the United States into smaller separate nations… and unfortunately with more than a little threat of violence.