Democracy’s Fate in 2017 and how it bodes for the future.

Those of us who grew up in the South America of the 1950s, ‘60s and ‘70s know all too well about how fragile democracy is. The maximum outward manifestation of the death of a democracy is that culminating moment when tanks roll out of the military bases and onto the streets, elected leaders are exiled or jailed, constitutional guarantees are suspended, and repression of the citizenry is installed as the governing norm.

But this is seldom a surprise first sign of the collapse of freedom and democracy. Quite often democratic institutions are in such a debilitated state that a dictatorial takeover is almost a foregone conclusion. Other times these institutions have been so infiltrated by populist and/or other autocratic elements that a coup per se is rendered completely unnecessary and redundant. In these cases, democracy merely whimpers and dies in the chokehold of a political elite or dictator, with no one mounting any sort of vigorous defense until it’s too late. And many times, those brought up passively believing that constitutional democracy is a “guaranteed and permanent institution” stand idly by, watching it expire, almost wilfully failing to comprehend what they are witnessing.

In numerous places around the world this past year, democracy was in crisis. And it seemed as if many an autocrat was taking the opportunity to strike while the iron was hot and while the US, once the guiding light of democratic principles, entered democratic meltdown mode itself.
Venezuela’s late president Hugo Chávez might have been freely elected, but like many populist autocrats before him, he used his widespread popularity coupled with distribution of the wealth his country had derived from oil as a means of expanding his personal power. Once ensconced as a populist autocrat, he was able to freely persecute his political opponents, bias the courts in his favor, silence or bully the independent media and eventually eliminate the limit on the number of terms a president could serve. This was a pattern emulated by several other South American leaders, perhaps most notably by former president Cristina Kirchner in Argentina. But there, democracy prevailed and she was eventually voted out of office in a relatively smooth democratic transition.

In Venezuela, however, the populist authoritarian model was much more highly entrenched. But Chávez’s successor, Nicolás Maduro, doesn’t possess Chávez’s charisma and when international oil prices plummeted, he no longer had the means to buy popular loyalty either. The past year has seen a deepening of the Venezuelan crisis to such an extent that the supposedly “socialist” government of Maduro has resorted to the iron-fisted tactics usually associated with far right-wing military dictatorships, even to the extent of dissolving the already largely rubber-stamp legislative branch and of unleashing extremely harsh repression on popular dissent.

Democracy is being similarly undermined—if under varying circumstances and to distinct degrees—in very different corners of the world: among others, from Hungary to Poland, from Russia to Turkey, from the Philippines to Sri Lanka, and from Cameroon to Zimbabwe (in this last case, where elections are to be held but where, as in Russia, those who have taken charge have no intention of being losers). And speaking of Russia, for anyone who had any doubts about perennial strongman Vladimir Putin’s autocratic designs, in the run-up to the latest elections—which he will clearly win—his only serious rival, anti-corruption activist Alexei Navalny, has been banned from running, based on trumped-up charges that cast him as a convicted felon.

Once the elections are over, Putin will be set to rule Russia for another six-year term until 2024. This will make him the longest-governing Russian leader since totalitarian dictator Joseph Stalin.    
In most cases, these autocratic regimes maintain a semblance of constitutionality, a parody of democratic rule, even if their constitutions are modified or completely re-written to accommodate their current leaders, and people still vote (although to what effect is, more often than not, less than transparent). But in all such cases, the tenets of democratic life, from individual rights and liberties to free expression and judicial security, are the first victims of encroaching authoritarianism.

In 2017, the United States of America, once the measuring stick by which democratic life was judged, provided the world with a less than stellar example to follow. The president, who took office in the first month of last year, managed to attract the ballots of only 26 percent of eligible voters. This gave him 46 percent of the votes cast for the two main candidates. His opponent, former Senator and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, won 48 percent of the votes cast for the two main candidates, and, in the popular ballot, outdistanced him by nearly 2.9 million votes. And yet, in a controversial quirk of “representative US democracy”, she lost the election because of a highly controversial result in the Electoral College. Although this has happened four other times in US history, the popular voting results in these other cases have always been much closer. This was, by far, the largest margin—more votes than the entire number of inhabitants in the city of Chicago—by which a US presidential candidate had ever won the popular vote and still lost the election.
Noam Chomsky—the virtual dean of American liberal thinkers and a tenacious watchdog for democratic principles—has pointed out on more than one occasion that the Electoral College, far from being a guarantor for US democracy, is, indeed, a limiting factor. He has opined that the Electoral College should be eliminated, but has added that this is unlikely to happen because it forms part of the originally constituted US political system. In an interview, Chomsky once said that while the founding fathers of the United States wanted a broadly democratic system, they also wanted to ensure that there would never be “too much democracy”. And the Electoral College was an insurance policy against just that.

According to Chomsky, “The Electoral College was originally supposed to be a deliberative body drawn from educated and privileged elites. It would not necessarily respond to public opinion, which was not highly regarded by the founders, to put it mildly. ‘The mass of people … seldom judge or determine right,’ as Alexander Hamilton put it during the framing of the Constitution, expressing a common elite view.” Chomsky adds that “It is only one of many factors that contribute to the regressive character of the [US] political system, which…would not pass muster by European [democratic] standards.”

There can be little doubt that the original framers of the US Constitution saw the idea of an Electoral College as a means of protecting “national interests” should a candidate be elected by popular vote whom they considered unsuitable for office. But some analysts have argued recently that the current president is precisely the type of candidate against whom such a tool was created to protect US democracy. And instead, it ended up being a tool that ensured that he did take office.

This notwithstanding, it’s worthwhile asking just how independent from popular sentiment the electors in the Electoral College are. The answer is a matter of states’ rights: Certain states have rules that bind their electors to the will of the people’s majority in their state. But in other states, Electoral College members are basically free agents who can vote for whomever strikes their fancy. And when they do, breaking ranks with the popular trend, they are considered “faithless electors”.
Herewith, a few examples: In Washington State, four electors in the last presidential election, who were originally expected to vote for Hillary Clinton defected—but not to Donald Trump. Three voted for former Bush Administration Secretary of State, General Colin Powell. The other one put in a vote for Faith Spotted Eagle, a Native American political activist who opposed the Dakota Access Pipeline. A Hawaii elector, who was also thought likely to vote for Hillary, voted instead for independent Senator Bernie Sanders, even though Sanders was no longer in the running for president and had asked his followers to vote for Clinton and deny Trump the election. And these were not the only cases of electors who simply ignored the popular voting trends in their states, and many of those who did, ultimately cast their votes for Trump.
This should not be taken as a critical statement against the US system as a whole, which I have long admired. But it does serve as an at least surface explanation for how someone so unpopular with the majority of Americans, and whose political and social philosophy is so apparently divorced from the democratic principles of that system can find his way into the White House.
In their new book entitled How Democracies Die, Harvard University professors Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt ask a compelling question: Considering the political direction taken by the Trump Era, how vulnerable is US democracy to such a fate? Bottom line, the authors indicate, “Extremist demagogues emerge from time to time in all societies, even in healthy democracies. An essential test of this kind of vulnerability isn’t whether such figures emerge but whether political leaders, and especially political parties, work to prevent them from gaining power. When established parties opportunistically invite extremists into their ranks, they imperil democracy.”

And there’s the rub: In the preliminary campaigns for the 2016 election, the US Republican Party (GOP) had a veritable grab-bag of largely lackluster candidates, none of whom was thought likely to be able to win over Democrat Hillary Clinton—and perhaps not over independent Bernie Sanders either. The combination of the GOP’s desperation to win and their surprise at the small but vocal far right-wing and evangelical base that was suddenly rallying around billionaire businessman Donald Trump led the party leadership, with few exceptions, to hold their nose and back Trump’s candidacy despite the fact that no one was very sure of his politics, his conservatism, or his loyalties—which, it appears to have turned out, were only to himself. Basically, the GOP lent itself as a vehicle to Trump’s political ambitions and allowed him to usurp its power as one of the country’s two main political parties.
Already at mid-year last year, in the annual Global Peace Index report, published by the Institute for Economics and Peace, the United States had slipped eleven notches from its already embarrassingly low rung on that list to 114th out of 163, in the ranking of most (and least) peaceful nations—while most of its first world allies placed within the top twenty. It is worth noting that the GPI bases its annual reports on data from the previous year—so, from before Trump was sworn in as president. But its report made special mention of the fact that major political turmoil arising from Trump’s 2016 election win was a main reason for the continued slide of the US on the world peace scale.
The GPI takes into account a broad range of criteria that go into the establishment of a peaceful existence (and co-existence). These include, among many others, such things as political instability, ease of access to small arms and light weapons, nuclear and heavy weapons capability, number of jailed persons per 100,000 inhabitants, likelihood of violent demonstrations, political instability, relations with neighboring countries, etc.

It will be interesting to see where the US ranks when the next GPI report comes out in mid-2018, with data sourced from the first year since Trump’s inauguration. That report will surely have to consider the growing split between Trump’s supporters and non-supporters and the president’s encouragement of that divide; the continuing saga of special and congressional investigations into possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia in Moscow’s reported meddling in the 2016 presidential election; investigations into possible obstruction of justice charges against Trump and members of his entourage; Trump’s call for even harsher correctional policies in a country that only represents 4.4 percent of the world population but houses over 20 percent of the world’s prisoners (about 2.3 million people); his hostile approach to relations with southern neighbor Mexico; his defense of military grade assault weapons in the hands of civilians; his threats to distribute nuclear arms among more countries (such as Japan and South Korea) in the face of a now clear North Korean nuclear threat; and his open threats to use nuclear arms if provoked, as well as his heightening of tensions in the Middle East by officially (and gratuitously) recognizing Jerusalem as the capital of Israel.
If nothing else, President Trump’s clearly documented lies and his characterization of the mainstream media as “fake news” (defined by objective observers as practically anything that disagrees with the autocratic US leader’s positions), when it is he and his entourage who are continuously generating false information, has served as an example for autocrats around the world and provided them with a kind of “permission” to treat their countries’ independent media in similar terms. This in itself is—to the extent that the president’s base repeats and believes his false accusations—a dangerous precedent for American democracy and, as such, for democracy worldwide.

According to Levitsky and Ziblatt, “Once a would-be authoritarian makes it to power, democracies face a second critical test: Will the autocratic leader subvert democratic institutions or be constrained by them?” They add that “constitutions must be defended—by political parties and organized citizens, but also by democratic norms, or unwritten rules of toleration and restraint. Without robust norms, constitutional checks and balances do not serve as the bulwarks of democracy we imagine them to be. Instead, institutions become political weapons, wielded forcefully by those who control them against those who do not…[E]lected autocrats subvert democracy—packing and “weaponizing” the courts and other neutral agencies, buying off the media and the private sector (or bullying them into silence), and rewriting the rules of politics to permanently disadvantage their rivals. The tragic paradox of the electoral route to authoritarianism is that democracy’s enemies use the very institutions of democracy…to kill it.”
In this sense, the co-authors of How Democracies Die believe that “…the United States failed the first test in November 2016, when it elected a president with no real allegiance to democratic norms.” They opine that it wasn’t merely deep voter dissatisfaction with business as usual in Washington that made Trump’s surprise victory possible, but also, and more importantly, “the Republican Party’s failure to keep an extremist demagogue from gaining the nomination.” This is not the first time that such figures have appeared on the political horizon (e.g., Huey Long, Joseph McCarthy, George Wallace), they remind us. “But an important protection against would-be authoritarians has not just been the country’s firm commitment to democracy but, rather, our political parties, [as] democracy’s gatekeepers.”

The Harvard professors make the point that “many observers take comfort in the US Constitution, which was designed precisely to thwart and contain demagogues like Trump.” After all, they point out, the Madisonian system of checks and balances has endured for more than two centuries, surviving the Civil War, the Great Depression, the Cold War, and Watergate. But will it be able to survive the onslaught of Trumpism?
About this, say Levitsky and Ziblatt, “We are less certain. Democracies work best—and survive longer—when constitutions are reinforced by norms of mutual toleration and restraint in the exercise of power. For most of the twentieth century, these norms functioned as the guardrails of American democracy, helping to avoid the kind of partisan fights-to-the-death that have destroyed democracies elsewhere in the world, including in Europe in the 1930s and South America in the 1960s and 1970s. But those norms are now weakening.”
The authors warn that, during Barack Obama’s presidency, many Republicans, in particular, abandoned restraint for a strategy of winning by any means necessary. “Donald Trump has accelerated this process,” they write, “but he didn’t cause it. The challenges we face run deeper than one president, however troubling this one might be.”
One thing is certain, whatever happens, for better or for worse, in the coming year—and indeed during the rest of Donald Trump’s presidential term—is likely to have a long-lasting effect on peace and democracy, not only in the United States, but in the entire rest of the world as well.