Ch 1.8 | 🙇♀️ The United States is a flawed democracy
We, as Americans, pride ourselves on our exceptionalism. We are a nation founded on individual freedoms (although only for white men in the early days), checks and balances, and representative governvement. But in recent years, our system of government has not lived up to those ideals.
In fact, the United States has been a “flawed” (rather than “full”) democracy for eight years running, according to the Economist Intelligence Unit, a sister company to the The Economist newspaper.
Each year, the EIU explains elaborates on the scores it assigns the United States. In early 2022, I wrote about the post-2021 report:
The researchers pinned the United States’ low score on two factors, both of which are tied to polarization: functioning of government and political culture.
“Pluralism and competing alternatives are essential for a functioning democracy, but differences of opinion in the US have hardened into political sectarianism and institutional gridlock,” they wrote, explaining why the U.S. score for government functionality had hit a new low point.
The narrowly divided Congress “has further crippled the legislative process, particularly as Democrats contend with widening divisions between their moderate and hard-line members. Obstruction will worsen ahead of the November 2022 mid-term elections — which could flip the majorities in both houses of Congress — as neither party will want to appear to be ceding ground to the other,” they wrote.
In the ensuing years, President Biden and a divided Congress managed to pass a handful of major bills with bipartisan support (including the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act and the CHIPS Act), other issues have been tossed aside despite backing from both sides of the aisle as we near the 2024 election. Remember the bipartisan immigration deal?
In fact, the latest EIU study warns about the dangers inherent in our political system.
“To reverse this worrying turn away from democracy, governments and political parties need to work hard to restore trust in representative democracy by delivering on the issues that matter to the electorate,” the EIU writes in the report.
The report criticizes the United States for the heavy advantage given to “anointed successors” and incumbents:
“If the election comes down to a contest between the president, Joe Biden, and the former president, Donald Trump, as looks likely, a country that was once a beacon of democracy is likely to slide deeper into division and disenchantment. A lot more than a ‘get out the vote’ campaign is required to inspire voters, including the 80m or so Americans who routinely do not vote. Nothing short of a major change in the agenda of politics, and a new crop of political leaders, will do.”
Other studies have also exposed problems in the U.S. political system. Freedom House, which studies civil and political rights around the world, currently ranks the United States 58th on its freedom scale — tied with Croatia, Panama, Romania and South Korea.
From that report:
The United States is a federal republic whose people benefit from a vibrant political system, a strong rule-of-law tradition, robust freedoms of expression and religious belief, and a wide array of other civil liberties. However, in recent years its democratic institutions have suffered erosion, as reflected in rising political polarization and extremism, partisan pressure on the electoral process, mistreatment and dysfunction in the criminal justice and immigration systems, and growing disparities in wealth, economic opportunity, and political influence.
Need more evidence that we have a problem?
A December 2022, poll conducted by NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll found that more than eight in 10 Americans believe there is a serious threat to democracy.
And the conservative National Review published an article in September 2023, "Something is Going to Break," reinforcing the fact that the system isn't working. Michael Brendan Dougherty wrote:
How can the United States claim to be a functioning democracy when it now regularly produces elections where the candidates are so loathed by such large numbers of the population? Nearly 60 percent of the country said that Donald Trump should not hold office again, but in a head-to-head matchup with Biden, he’s currently leading. Nearly three-quarters of the country believes Biden is too old to be president at all. But, again, matched against Trump, many Democrats are concluding that he’s their best and only realistic hope.
It wasn’t always this way. America’s political system was once the envy of the world. It advanced public interest and gave rise to a grand history of policy innovations that fostered both economic and social progress. But we've faltered and we are losing our competitive edge on the global stage.
In large measure it's because national politics is tearing us apart. Victor Davis Hanson, a conservative pundit and military historian, offered a dark take on the state of play, what he called “The thinnest veneer of civilization.”
“So we are in a great experiment in which regressive progressivism discounts all the institutions and the methodologies of the past that have guaranteed a safe, affluent, well-fed and sheltered America. Instead, we arrogantly are reverting to a new feudalism as the wealthy elite — terrified of what they have wrought — selfishly retreat to their private keeps. But the rest who suffer the consequences of elite flirtations with nihilism cannot even afford food, shelter and fuel. And they now feel unsafe, both as individuals and as Americans.”
It’s a pretty bleak assessment. Our faith in the institutions that were once cherished has all but evaporated. Another conservative writer, Jonah Goldberg, gave his own interesting take in the Making Sense podcast:
“If you’re willing to reject the sort of the ‘groupthink’ of either political party and stand up for the simple liberal institutions that define much of what it means to be an American in both a political and in some ways cultural sense too and if you’re classically liberal at heart, where you’re willing to engage in good faith arguments and deal with inconvenient facts in a good faith way, that makes you something of an outlier from either side these days.
I’m not trying to do a symmetry between … you know a lot of people understandably hate the both sides thing… but there is a remarkable mirroring going on among the hard left and the populist right in terms of embracing identity politics kind of arguments, tribalist kind of arguments, and so there are people like you [Sam Harris] and people like Jonathan Haidt. … I can list a bunch, Yascha Mounk …. who probably profoundly disagree with me about various public policies, but agree with me on the epistemological level, and agree with me on the basic sort of systemic level about what are the institutions customs, norms, mechanisms or whatever you want to call them, that preserve and define a free society and that creates this weird sort of transideological kind of fellowship that I do think, I don’t know if it’s totally new in American politics, but it feels new, at least in my lifetime.””
Do you get what he's saying? We must move beyond our ideologies and once again believe in the foundation of the institutions that made America great. In other words, we must restore faith in the system of governing. It's the system and our faith in it that is the problem.
(One note with respect to Goldberg’s use of the term “liberal”: Our partisan politics and the propaganda machine behind if have perverted the word “liberal” into something it’s not. We will discuss this further in “Can you Define Socialism?”