FLASH
Shkruar nga Francis Fukuyama
In a parliamentary system, the party elite can move to replace a failed leader with someone more worthy, but this cannot happen in the US.
According to the non-profit organization Freedom House, there has been a steady decline in the quantity and quality of liberal democracies around the world for the past 18 years. Among laggards, there is no more serious case than that of the United States.
American institutions have been in steady decline for some time and are now at a point of great crisis. Political breakdown occurs when a society's institutions fail to adapt to changing circumstances. This has been going on for a generation, and is now culminating in a major crisis that will occur over the next eight months. The US system is built around a complex set of checks and balances institutions that make it easy for political minorities to thwart the will of the majority. When these institutions are combined with extreme political polarization, they create governmental paralysis and the inability to perform basic functions like passing an annual budget.
Some of these rigidities are built into the US constitution. The Electoral College dramatically overrepresents residents of smaller states, while the Senate is a major source of unequal representation. Wyoming, with a population of less than a million, has two senators, as does California with almost 40 million. Routine legislation requires supermajority approval, meaning 40 out of 100 senators can block anything they don't like.
What is particularly infuriating about blocking funding for Ukraine, for example, is that most members of the House and Senate, as well as much of the public, favor such a measure. They can't pass a bill, however, because a hardline conservative faction within the Republican House membership staunchly opposes — not just Ukraine funding, but any bipartisan deal that includes Democrats.
In today's polarized America, Maga Republicans are prone to vetoing simply for the sake of undermining the other side. They have been calling for stronger security measures on the southern border for months. Biden basically gave in to their demands in order to get funding for Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan.
Several other aspects of the American political order have contributed to the polarization. Presidentialism locks in the winner for an unchangeable four-year term, and that person can only get out through impeachment, which is an extremely difficult process. One of Trump's biggest advantages today is Biden's age and general unpopularity. In a parliamentary system, the party elite can move to replace a failed leader with someone more worthy, but this cannot happen in the US.
This is in turn related to America's long process of selecting party candidates. The first-past-the-post system, when combined with popular primaries, favors candidates at either extreme. Because of a Supreme Court ruling that equates campaign spending with free speech, money makes a tremendous difference in US elections.
All these problems can be solved through reforms. States may require that electoral votes be apportioned on a proportional basis. Plurality voting could be replaced by ranked-choice voting that would require voters to specify second- and third-place preferences and facilitate the emergence of third parties. The country could impose tighter limits on campaign finance and the 60-vote supermajority requirement in the Senate could be scrapped. This list does not even touch on major constitutional reforms, such as the abolition of the electoral college or changes in the power of the Senate. For now, these are in the realm of fantasy.
As frustrating as these problems are, they are only the tip of a much larger iceberg. While Trump has been an extremely skilled demagogue, what is driving this shift to the right is the voters themselves. There are many "normal" Republican leaders who understand why populist policies are bad for the country, yet they support them because they live in fear of their base.
Any democracy depends on an electorate that is well informed and supportive of the norms on which the system rests. But a surprising number of Americans have bought into weird conspiracy theories and alternate realities. Polls show 17 percent support QAnon, whose narratives include Democrats drinking the blood of children in hidden tunnels under Washington. More than half of Republicans believe vaccines do more harm than good, while many evangelicals think the closing of churches during the pandemic was the first in a campaign by liberals to close their churches forever.
Faith in American democracy has been replaced by admiration for strongmen and authoritarian governments overseas. Trump praises Xi Jinping of China and Kim Jong Un of North Korea for ruling their people with an iron fist.
The Republican Party has returned to its pre-1941 isolationism, but it is isolationism with a difference. At the time, isolationists believed that America was pure and should not be tainted by association with foreign countries. Today, they believe that their country needs cleansing.
Needless to say, this migration of anti-Americanism from the left to the right has major implications for world order. A victory for Trump in November would mean a decisive end to US support for Ukraine. In time, we may have to witness the fall of Kiev to Russian forces. But Vladimir Putin will not stop there, and Trump has made it clear that he has no intention of fighting to protect NATO allies. In his interview with Tucker Carlson, Putin said he would not attack Poland or Lithuania, but he did not mention Estonia, which like Ukraine hosts a Russian-speaking minority.
A similar logic would apply to Asian allies such as South Korea and Japan. Anyone who thinks Trump would defend Taiwan against a Chinese invasion should think again.
However, it is not too late to reverse this decaying process. Most Americans do not understand the depth of the fundamental threat that Trump poses to their democracy, but regard him as a normal politician with somewhat different political preferences. Anyone who imagines that a second Trump term will simply repeat the first has not paid attention to what he has said and done.
Democrats have a lot of work to do to wake people up to the magnitude of the challenge facing the country. If that happens, there is a chance that, rather than another narrow victory, they will win decisively. If this happens, they can start thinking about reforms that will reverse the decaying process. Believers in a classically liberal America must reduce the ability of political minorities to thwart the majority and simplify our extremely complex processes and procedures to make government more effective. But first, they have to win./ Adapted "Pamphlet" from "Financial Times"
Lini një Përgjigje