What could America Do to Stabilize Democracy?
I was asked to write this article a few months ago by an American thinktank, but they didn’t like what I said and tried to change it into something completely different. As I told them, these are the occasions I have Substack for.
In this version, I did remove a few paragraphs relating to Ireland, which I thought were too much of an aside for the subject matter, but which I had originally put in as they wanted an ‘international angle’, and I was (as it turned out futilely) trying to deliver.
Also, before you read the article: a timely reminder that I turned out to be correct about pretty much everything that has happened in America to date in a book that was published over five years ago (which you are kindly invited to purchase here: https://www.amazon.com/Beasts-Gods-Democracy-Changed-Meaning/dp/1783605421), and which no one wanted to hear at the time either…
So…the article…
What could America Do to Stabilize Democracy?
I grew up in Southwestern Ontario, not far from my relatives across the Great Lakes in Detroit, so I’ve always had a front row seat at American politics.
As someone whose family had recently immigrated from South America and who later moved to Europe (first Germany, then Ireland), I’ve had ample opportunity to contemplate American politics from a variety of angles.
While that hasn’t always led to a completely positive assessment, criticism isn’t the same thing as a wholesale rejection. Much as I might appreciate other cultures, I still like Western culture the best, and the USA tends to represent the furthest freedom-loving edge of that culture. I’d never want to make America another Canada or another Europe.
Nonetheless, many Americans seem to feel that their politics has put them through the wringer over the past few years and are looking for answers elsewhere as to how they could stabilize themselves.
That is both an easy and a difficult question to answer.
It is easy to think about what Americans could theoretically do.
They could transform into a parliamentary democracy, for example, where the leader of the House of Representatives is also the leader of the country. There would be less gridlock, less general confusion about who is responsible for what, and the difficulty of deciding on one person to represent the entire country, both symbolically and in real political terms, would be significantly less fraught.
Or, Americans could change their voting system to a multi-member representative system, which would help smaller parties.
They could adopt universal education and healthcare facilities, ensuring a certain uniformity of experience with these institutions across the citizenry, and thereby improving solidarity and societal cohesion.
They could reintroduce the fairness doctrine in media, which could improve civility and help to mitigate bias in reporting.
Or a short defined election campaign period, beyond which all electoral spending would be banned.
Perhaps, most of all, Americans could just calm down and stop treating every minor issue like the national emergency it isn’t.
But to be frank, none of those things, with the possible exception of the fairness doctrine, are really American, and perhaps more to the point, in the present climate of partisan animosity any such action will be perceived as a power grab by one ‘side’ or the other (whereby it doesn’t help that such perceptions would not be completely baseless).
So, the question is: how can one stabilize American democracy and still preserve ‘the American way’ and make some progress in the foreseeable future?
Here are some ideas:
1) Deal With Your Issues Democratically
When he passed away in 2016, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia was noticeably less mourned among progressive media outlets than Justice Ruth Bader-Ginsburg would be four years later. However, the conservative Catholic often made an important point: that his originalist interpretations of the Constitution were necessary in order to prevent the judiciary from overstepping the bounds of its power. Updates to the US legal system should be made democratically, he argued, by changing the text of the law itself, not by judges interpreting laws expansively.
While Scalia’s arguments were sometimes dismissed by progressives due to his conservative leanings, it is true that treating the Constitution as a set of principles from which all future decisions can be logically deduced can cut off important societal discussion of those issues. The more narrowly courts interpret their role and the legal texts themselves, the more these issues get pushed back to the legislature and ultimately the electorate. While this can create conflict in the short-term – since the issue at stake now has to be hashed out politically – it helps to ensure that courts do not wander too far from the will of the people in their interpretations of the law. Rather than taking the line that B follows from A, and C follows from B, and that certainly therefore D follows from C, etc. the courts have to occasionally check back in with everyone else to ensure that the country is all still on roughly the same page.
I believe that Americans have in some sense been avoiding this political reckoning for the very reason that ‘ordinary voters’ rarely hew to the ideological lines of professional activists. This is to say that there are relatively few people who have liberal or conservative opinions on every issue. The ‘average voter’ tends to mix and match more pragmatically, possibly favouring gun control, but unlikely to give up steak ‘to save the environment’ anytime soon, for example.
For this reason, political activists have focused on trying to gain control of the courts, particularly the Supreme Court. While the Justices themselves are often less blindly politically aligned than many commentators want to believe, this clearly shows how the focus of American politics has been on top-down control and the ‘capturing’ of certain institutions that will then enforce the wished-for policy (often all-conservative or all-liberal).
Obviously, a situation in which so much rides, on say, the selection of a single judge or the election of a single politician, is highly unstable. If one truly believes that one is only a few untimely deaths away from potentially major change then assassinating high-level judges starts to sound like a real prospect.
Violence requires a target, and this is even more true of political violence.
Thus, if Americans want to worry less about the forces of darkness (other Americans) capturing their infrastructure, be that a court or the office of President or anything else, I would suggest downgrading the importance of that infrastructure. Take the pressure off. In this case, by taking the issue out of the hands of the court or President and pushing it back to the multitude of people, who are, given their numbers, more difficult to control and, in a democracy, the ultimate decision-makers of last resort, anyway.
In many other nations, this is an option that is made use of much more frequently.
Since I moved to Ireland in 2006, we have held over a dozen national referendums. These referendums are binding and are the method via which we alter the Constitution. Similarly, Switzerland holds about a dozen referendums a year (in quarterly installments), also allowing (unlike Ireland) citizen-initiated referendums.
Although some American states, most famously California, also hold referendums, the United States does not have a national referendum mechanism.
I believe that Americans are often wary of the potential ‘divisiveness’ of bringing issues out into the open via referendum, and people often talk to me fearfully about majority rule democracy creating ‘winners and losers’. But that kind of divisive decisiveness is what you need in order to be able to move on. Having a short, sharp argument with a clear victor is not damaging.
Having an argument that goes on forever is.
Even your Friendly Neighbours to the North know this.
When I was fifteen (and I remember this well) Quebec held a referendum on whether to separate from Canada. They decided to stay by about half a percentage point. It was quite a nail-biter and not the kind of thing Canadians felt completely calm about. Quebec is territorially a large part of Canada, contains significant energy resources (in the form of hydroelectric dams) and, perhaps most concerningly, is somewhat centrally located, with four Maritime provinces on the far side of it from the rest of Canada. So, the prospect of Quebec separating was a pretty big deal, basically equivalent to taking out the Ohio to Florida swathe of the United States.
While the Canadian parliament has since decided that a ‘clear majority’ in a referendum would be necessary to trigger separation,[1] and the 1995 referendum is sometimes viewed as having been badly handled by the federal government, the federalists nevertheless managed to ‘call the bluff’ of the separatist movement and reveal that, close as it was, they couldn’t quite get the votes together.
Was that high-stakes?
Yes.
Was it stressful for everyone involved?
Sure.
Do referendums always solve everything once and for all and is the long-awaited magic referendum on Irish unity, for example, guaranteed to make everyone on this island hold hands while singing kumbaya together?
No. There are really no guarantees here.
But all the same, you sometimes need to really air issues and get some clear democratic answers directly from the people or after a while you end up running on empty.
2) Rebuild a Strong Middle Class and Define Your Nation
A strong middle class is necessary for democracy, not because it is a nice thing to have (although it is), but because democracy necessitates that economic dependency between members of the same society has been eradicated to the greatest extent possible. This is so the society can ‘harvest’ the independent thinking and potential of each individual to the greatest extent possible.
Democracies depend on their citizens. Therefore, those citizens need to develop to their full potential. The more a democracy can develop and retain its human resources, as it were, the more successful it will be.
In this regard, it is truly unfortunate that many more affluent Americans have come to enjoy the perks of a stratified society in which labour, particularly menial labour, is performed by people who have no legal rights in America and for whom even the smallest advantage is an improvement. Sometimes these labourers live and work inside the USA, and sometimes they perform their labour in other nations for export. Indeed, some writers have even tried to justify deep inequality among Americans with the argument that other people in other parts of the world have been slightly enriched by American-led globalization.[2]
The problem with this argument is that the USA is not one polity with say Bangladesh or Guatemala. People in Bangladesh do not get to vote in American elections or otherwise participate in its politics. They are merely the passive recipients of factory work that has ‘improved’ their standard of living. They are really in no position to ‘talk back’ to their benefactors. If they could, one imagines the world would be a rather different place.
This lack of ability to talk back is why the marginally enriched citizens of developing nations have become the fulcrum upon which well-off Americans seek to triangulate their own internal issues. People who are either far away or not fully integrated into the nation can be raised up when you need them, but generally they don’t get in your way. I believe this is an underexamined aspect of exploitation and one of its effects is to avoid the issue of America’s shrinking middle class by deflecting concern to others who are often not fully equipped with rights and may even be residing in other nations with no intention of relocating to the United States.
The need to define the citizen-body of a nation may sound old-fashioned, but contrary to so much modern opinion, our ancestors were not, in fact, idiots, and it is very hard to change what they did without thinking carefully about what you are going to replace it with.
We have been organized into modern nation States since the Peace of Westphalia was agreed in 1648 and any State needs to define who is in and who is out, where it begins and where it ends, since even a nation as powerful as the USA is not able to rule the world and all of the people in it.
Many modern progressives seek to define as many people as possible as being ‘in’ any given nation, since they view ‘inclusivity’ in completely positive terms. However, things are not always so simple.
When you become a member of a State, that State acquires personal jurisdiction over you. Yes, you may now be able to participate in politics to a greater degree, but you can also be drafted into the armed forces, for example. If you are an American, you have to file a tax return no matter where you live in the world. When I became an Irish citizen, I had to take an oath of loyalty to the nation, and should they ever lock me up, I doubt that the Canadian embassy will be too interested in hearing from me. In legal terms – you’re in, you’re in. For better or worse. Like marriage.
When it comes to integrating new citizens, I feel that the USA has a distinct advantage compared to European nations, precisely because its culture is more malleable and diverse. At the same time, the country is definitely failing to clearly demarcate the boundaries of that citizenship and nationhood. What do you owe your fellow citizens and what do you demand of them?
Europeans are often xenophobic, but the flip-side of that is their solidarity with each other. When I told some Swiss colleagues that I had been cut out of the Canadian medical system due to my long residency abroad, they were aghast, and (despite my own ambivalent attitude) repeated several times ‘but you are Canadian’ and that it was ‘not right’ to treat one’s countrymen in such a fashion.
Similarly, many Irish people complain that one needs to ‘look after the Irish first’. Now, on the surface that does sound very racist, but at the same time, they do actually mean it. For example, it bothers many Irish people immensely that there are homeless people in Ireland, and while they may also be generous about giving to people in faraway lands, they view helping their fellow citizens as a far stronger duty. Even, and this is the crucial bit, in the full knowledge that some of them may be less-than-deserving.
One of the nicest things about living in Ireland is the knowledge that the vast majority of complete strangers will help you do almost anything.
Americans are, of course, also a kind and generous people, but it is notable that the desire to help has increasingly focused on the superficial, easy win. If someone far, far away has one dollar a day, and you give them two, you can make a cool graph showing that their income has doubled. Job done. Hence the triangulation over Insert-Country-of-Your-Choice.
America’s problems are harder to deal with: inflated property prices that will eventually enrich a small proportion of the millennial generation while crippling the rest; a university system that exploits its students and enriches key staff members; a bloated national defense budget; the opioid epidemic, the list goes on.
But because your affluent are so busy ‘helping’ everyone else out there in the world, there isn’t really anything you are solving together and there isn’t really anything you’re working together to achieve. The closest thing the USA currently has to an inspiring common project is a space program run by a private company.
The incentive to properly educate has also deteriorated since there is nothing you particularly need your own citizens for – if education is required one can filch the educated from somewhere else at someone else’s expense. Hence the demise of the middle class.
Instead of being raised up by a common purpose that needs to make the best of its citizens if only to make the nation strong and prosperous though the use of their skills, every day, more and more people in America become economically dependent on other Americans, enjoy less and less autonomy and thus cease to think independently. The country does not invest in them, because it sees no value in them. Then the problem spirals from there. This is typical of a developing world nation. And it is typical of many developing countries that their democracies are quite instable and politics tends to divide sharply between socialists and the hard right.
So much as I admire the ‘liberty’ aspect of America, there is a reason that ‘equality’ and ‘solidarity’ were part of the original revolutionary slogan.
Therefore, I suggest that Americans figure out who their neighbours/co-citizens are and either love them as God commanded or embrace them as comrades in a godless socialist utopia, according to preferences. It comes out to the same thing: stop giving to the needy, and start making them your equal, so that someday they can give you a hand when you need it.
3) Build Capacity from the Ground Up
There’s relatively little any of us can do about the top-down policy of the United States or equivalent organizations like the European Union, for that matter. The European Union could have engaged more with citizens following its 2005 referendum debacle – it chose not to. The US could have decided not to bail out Wall Street at the expense of ordinary Americans after the 2007 crash – it chose not to. There is little point in continuing to preach to the willfully deaf about the many useless ‘should have beens’.
However, what we can do is follow the instructions of Buckminster Fuller and build a new model of decision-making that makes the old one, and its many flaws (in this case chiefly top-down power) obsolete.
This is where quite a lot of us now concentrate our efforts, and we have had significant results.
Participatory budgeting, which allows the residents of an area to allocate public budget by popular vote, has spread around the world from Chicago, to Iceland to Kenya. In larger municipalities these decision-making processes attract tens of thousands, sometimes hundreds of thousands, of votes, and other effects, such as a tendency to spend more on poorly-served areas, and cut down on corruption and clientelism have been observed. Needless to say, participatory budgeting also provides a great avenue for large numbers of people to understand (and possibly change) public spending processes.[3]
Grassroots intra-party democracy has also had some major successes over the past years. The Pirate Party, which generally endorses e-democracy and direct democracy, has proven to have an enduring if somewhat fluctuating appeal, particularly in Iceland and the Czech Republic.
However, perhaps the most interesting, and certainly the to-date most successful of the direct democracy political organizations is Italy’s Five Star Movement (M5S). The Five Star Movement was a long time in the making and its breakthrough moment at the polls in 2013 was met with a wall-to-wall outpouring of wrath in the English-speaking media, following which very little was said.
That’s possibly because the Five Star Movement has been co-governing Italy for the past two years now, and regularly uses an online voting system, which has nearly 200,000 members, to set policy and decide on issues of importance up to and including coalition agreements with other parties. This platform also allows members to select candidates for office and scrutinize bills, and contains a range of information to help people become politically active.
Whatever M5S’s faults or shortcomings may or may not be, this is far more grassroots participation than anyone thought possible, and it has been achieved in the face of extreme opposition.
When I speak to people about democracy, they often want to hear about Taiwan or Uruguay or, seemingly, Antarctica. As long as it is far away. Very few people want to hear about the thing that is happening in the world’s eighth largest economy and fourth most popular tourist destination. The thing that hasn’t sown the predicted chaos, led to fanciful ‘cyber-utopianism’ or otherwise destroyed the country in the wave of xenophobic, anti-vax, fascist populism that so many pundits predicted as the inevitable consequence of emancipating ordinary voters.
But the lack of attention to these topics doesn’t change the fact that millions of people around the world are becoming active in direct democracy, be that through online decision-making initiatives like M5S’s or the similar participatory budgeting.
Regardless of anything that may happen at a national or supernational level, those people are the seed for a future, diffused, stable, one-person, one-vote democracy.
Those of us working in this area do not pride ourselves on being exclusive, hard-to-reach technocrats. We are definitely happy to help and support others start these kinds of projects, and we are certainly ready to scale, so feel free to reach out and start building this decision-making capacity wherever you are.
Conclusion
I doubt this is the advice too many people wanted to hear regarding the stabilization of American democracy. As I said at the beginning of this essay – the answers are both easy and difficult. It’s easy because the answers are obvious and technically simple to achieve. However, it is difficult, in that I suspect many people do not want to stabilize democracy, but rather to stabilize the status quo. I very much doubt that many truly want what most of us working in the democracy space spend our time doing, which is to work all day in order to give power to other people.
It’s a tough gig.
I ask myself why I do it nearly every single day. Equally I doubt that anyone in a high-level position will take this advice in the near future. People might make laws others dislike via referendum, it’s become de rigueur to opine that the lower middle class has brought their oppression on themselves through ignorance and vice, and anything online is bristling with Russians.
Such is the quasi-official line of the allegedly politically interested who have been looking for and finding easy answers, that is to say, answers they are comfortable with, for the past twenty years with mixed results.
[1] This is understood to mean a super-majority and is meant to address the very real concern that repeated referendums could be held under the idea that as long as one should return a positive result, however slight, the country would separate, regardless of the number of past negative referendums.
[2] Stephen Pinker (originally also from Canada), for example, explicitly makes this argument in his book Enlightenment Now.
[3] For more information, see eg. Yves Sintomer, Carsten Herzberg, Giovanni Allegretti, Anja Röcke & Mariana Alves, ‘Participatory Budgeting Worldwide: Updated Version’, Engagement Global, on behalf of the Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development, Germany; Brian Wampler ‘Citizen Participation and Participatory Institutions in Brazil’, International Conference on Public Participation of the Gauteng Legislature, 2012.