The Failing American Democracy: A good Idea that Has Gone Wrong.
Tiruvannamalai, Tamil Nadu, India, November 4th, 2016
Salaroche

Democracy is failing in the United States. The mechanisms to make it work, as imperfect as they were from the start, are still in place and are still functioning relatively well, but the people in charge of those mechanisms have lost sight of the long-term purpose the founding fathers had in mind when they conceived them.

As an idea the American system of government made plenty of sense from the beginning, but for it to work required that the people in charge of making it work made sense too. Thus, with a few amendments here and there, the structure for governance has so far been patched up well enough so that it hasn’t been seriously derailed off the Democratic tracks over the past 240 years or so.

The separation of the Executive, the Legislative and the Judicial powers was a good foundation for the future of the Republic. The system of checks and balances was a good premise for safeguarding the idea of Democracy. It minimized the possibility that the President could become a tyrant and it ensured that any attempts by Congress to implement legislations deemed unconstitutional by the Supreme Court could ever be implemented.

As everything else that human beings create, however, the American system is not perfect and it is liable to fail in the sense that anything that can go wrong eventually DOES go wrong. Just remember how the 2000 presidential election exposed for the fourth time in history the fragility of the American electoral process. On that occasion the vote of the Electoral College did not reflect the will of the people, thereby subverting Democracy once again.

But even as the electoral system failed, all the interested parties opted to abide by the Supreme Court’s decision and, bruised as it was, the American Democratic ideal once more limped away from that political ordeal. But it was able to do so only because everyone involved decided to look for common grounds. Had Al Gore and the Democrats chose to pursue a confrontational route the consequences of their stance would have been unpredictable, but no doubt detrimental to the American Democracy.

Thus, an essential mechanism of Democratic governance broke down in the year 2000, but the people in charge of making it work kept sight of the long-term purpose of the Republic’s existence and fixed the problem well enough for the Democratic system to survive, at least for two or three later elections.

What a difference a few years make. As the situation stands today, on the eve of the 2016 Presidential Elections, even before all the electoral votes have been cast, without any evidence of any sort, the legitimacy of the results has already been contested. “I will totally accept the results of this great and historic presidential election… if I win”, said the Republican presidential candidate after having repeatedly made it clear that, in his view, the elections are rigged in favor of his Democratic opponent.

What sense of common national purpose can anyone draw from any such divisive statements? How badly will American Democracy be damaged if and when the Republican candidate loses his bid for the presidency and his followers stage all kinds of hostile demonstrations and even riots protesting against the results?

But that would only be the icing on the cake. The stage for a serious breakdown of the American Democratic system has already been set and will materialize if and when the Democratic candidate wins the presidency. The plot for that drama has already been written and has already been clearly articulated: Republicans in Congress have basically sworn to block any proposal coming out of a Democratic White House for the next four years and beyond. Is this the characterization of American Democracy in the twenty-first century?

Evidently, the system of checks and balances was a good premise for safeguarding the idea of Democracy in the US, but in conceiving it the founding fathers overlooked a built-in essential frailty: The potentially short-sighted, self-serving, corruptible character of the elected officials in charge of making the system work.

The system of checks and balances presupposes that the Legislative branch will curtail the powers of the Executive only whenever the latter displays abuses in its authority, not in a systematic way irrespective of the damage that a constant hostility against the President may inflict upon the country. Regardless of how brilliant the system of separation of powers may have seemed to be at the moment of inception, as it stands today and as it seems to stand for the foreseeable future, such system may itself be the cause of a catastrophic failure of Democracy in America.

To function well, Democratic systems require that all actors in the nation struggle to find common grounds where they can negotiate and compromise so that society as a whole can move forward for the benefit of the great majority of its members. But when, as Republicans in Congress have already done, the majority in the Legislative branch declares an all-out political war against the Executive for sheer ideological reasons the result is an usurpation of power equivalent to a Dictatorship of the Legislative where the other two branches of government are left incapacitated and at the mercy of Congress. In such case American Democracy would be so only in name.

But the somber scenario presented above applies only in the case of a Democratic win on November 8th. In the aftermath of a Republican win things could look much grimmer for Democracy in the US. With the cult of personality the GOP candidate has forged among his fans the danger of the US following the steps of past authoritarian systems of government is imminent.

With the Republican candidate’s history of dodging taxes and swindling others with his financial scams the US could easily become a Conocracy or Scamocracy where financial and business regulations are watered down to the point of irrelevance and the common citizen is left at the mercy of powerful, immoral financial actors. With the candidate’s well-known inability to ignore any offense thrown at him the country may soon become a Jingocracy where threats of war are constantly hurled against other nations for the slightest anti-US innuendo.

With the candidate’s highly-publicized disrespect for women the US might in the short term become a Machocracy where women’s rights are slowly but constantly regressed to a few decades back. The Candidate’s obvious demonizing of minorities and foreigners could effortlessly turn the nation into a WASPocracy where WASP privileges could be methodically restored to pre-Civil Rights times. Finally, with the candidate’s complete disregard for facts and knowledge of any kind, the US may very likely fall under the influence of an Illiterocracy where incompetent appointees could neglect and mismanage the functions of government to the point of rendering it useless.

In a nutshell, the prospects for Democracy in America don’t look very promising these days because a large sector of the population, mostly whites, no longer believes it is working for them. In consequence, the thin veneer of social cohesiveness that has held the ethnically-diverse American society together has been wearing off fast over the past few years.  

9/11 was the last straw that broke the back of the illusory camel of American invincibility, feeling which was only exacerbated by the ensuing catastrophic wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Hordes of white Anglo-Saxon Americans are presently panicking because their neighbors no longer look like them and because some of those neighbors look more prosperous than they do. The two major political parties have abandoned the vanishing middle classes and, as a result, the American standards of living aren’t getting any higher anymore.

Under such circumstances, the American people’s faith in American Democracy keeps dwindling by the day to the point in which millions of them, again mostly whites, are now looking into the abyss of a possible authoritarian regime American style and are very eager to take the plunge. American Democracy keeps going down the drain, and it is going that way because the elected officials that were supposed to make it work have failed in keeping the democratic ideal above partisan and personal interests.

And if you think that all of the above sounds like some kind of joke, think again, for either of the two post-election scenarios presented here may very soon come true.

Salaroche