Tag Archives: Democracy

Democracy is a fragile politics of practice

undemocracy noun [un.de·​moc·​ra·​cy]. A country that asserts democratic values, but subverts democracy in practice. Usage: The United States of America is the world’s greatest undemocracy.

There are many countries far less democratic than the United States. According to the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU), North Korea is the world’s least democratic country, and it keeps company with a host of other authoritarian states including China, Iran, Russia and Saudi Arabia. The EIU list and the recently published report by Freedom House on the civil liberties track record of countries is unsurprisingly similar. No one seriously considered the world’s political bottom dwellers to be democracies — no matter what style of fig-leaf electoral process they may adopt.

The appellation undemocracy is reserved for those states that claim to be democracies, behave in many ways like democracies, and simultaneously subvert the values of democracy in practice.

American Presidents, without irony, have described their country as The World’s Greatest Democracy (TWGD). Bill Clinton, Gerald Ford, and Barack Obama all described the US in those words. Other leaders believe it (or choose to agree with it). Israel’s Prime Minister, Bibi Netanyahu, used those words to describe the US in a speech to Congress in 1996, and President Reuven Rivlin of Israel, used them in a congratulatory statement to President Donald Trump on his electoral victory in 2016. And that is ironic!

‘In a recent article calling for the impeachment of Donald Trump, Thomas Friedman used turns of phrase which, while not identical in form to TWGD, strongly suggested that he genuinely believed the US was TWGD.

[The US] is a nation that at its best has always stood up for the universal values of freedom and human rights, has always paid extra to stabilize the global system from which we were the biggest beneficiary and has always nurtured and protected alliances with like-minded nations

The complication is that the US “talks a good democracy” but it does not practice one. This is evident in the two “winning” electoral strategies that are regularly adopted: the gerrymander and voter suppression.

Any approach to winning an election that subverts the fair count of eligible voters is inherently undemocratic. Politically clever. Astute. Undemocratic. The hypocrisy of claiming to be The World’s Greatest Democracy when winning relies on subversion is audacious (and obnoxious).

They paused briefly before plunging over the edge

Lemmus brexitus. A small, foolish rodent with an over inflated sense of its importance to others, and a limited sense of the precarious nature of its own existence. It is found in greatest abundance in England and Wales with a more limited range in Northern Ireland and Scotland.

Lemmus lemmus (the Norwegian Lemming)

In 1958 Walt Disney gave the world a “documentary” film called White Wilderness. Knowing that facts should never get in the way of a good story the producers arranged for lemmings to be thrown off a cliff creating the enduring truth that lemmings commit suicide.

Genetically and morphologically unrelated to the common lemming, L.brexitus has nonetheless taken on the darker, mythic nature of its namesake. Like Walt Disney, they will not let facts interfere with a good story: a story of Empire, pink blotches on a map, and the greatness of Britain.

The heroic tale rests on an asinine conceit, that generational change — effectively constitutional change — should be made on the basis of a simple majority from a referendum. A majority of voters did vote to leave the EU. It was not a huge majority, and it was not a majority of people in a majority of countries within the United Kingdom. But it was, nonetheless, a majority.

The reason that generational change usually requires a greater level of approval than a simple majority is that it ensures a smoother transition, greater cohesion, and better coordination. Australia, Canada, and the United States all have much higher hurdles for making generational change to their fundamental governance.

Not so the United Kingdom.

When I pointed this out to a colleague, he observed (complete with the pitying look reserved for imbeciles), that we had entered the EU on that basis, why should we not leave it on the same basis? He was, of course, completely wrong. When a referendum was held in 1975 to determine the United Kingdom’s continued membership of the European Communities, more than two thirds of voters (67.2%) voted to remain. A majority of voters in every country in the United Kingdom voted to remain. There was nothing precarious about the decision. It was decisively the will of the people to be European.

There is no ground swell of support for leaving or remaining — and in the absence of such support, keeping the status quo is rational thing to do. Instead we are watching the grey dishwater of indecision gurgle down the drain, carrying the leftovers from the smorgasbord that Europe offered. The last vestiges of a GREAT Britain and a UNITED Kingdom will be caught in the grease trap.

Sotto Voce