Can US Democracy Survive Joe Biden, Not To Speak Of Donald Trump?

A recent article in New Yorker, written by Isaac Chotiner, asks: “Has Modi pushed Indian democracy past its breaking point?”

His assumption is that the media and the judiciary have been tamed, and now it is the turn of political opponents.

Chotiner’s trigger event was apparently the conviction of Rahul Gandhi for defamation by a lower court in Gujarat, which resulted in his ouster from Parliament. 

Two simple counters are possible without even thinking deeply.

One, if Indian democracy could not be derailed even with the imposition of internal emergency in 1975, one wonders whether Narendra Modi’s rise as India’s most powerful politician can easily do so.

Two, even assuming Rahul Gandhi is all that Chotiner claims he is (“the Prime Minister’s main opponent”, which many regional parties would contest vehemently), one wonders why the author cannot see that the decision to convict Rahul Gandhi can be overturned by any higher court, of which there are several layers.

It is worth noting that even in the National Herald  corruption case, in which Sonia Gandhi and Rahul Gandhi are out on bail, even after 10 years the trial hasn’t even begun. So, no, Modi’s “main opponent” is not going to be put away anytime soon.

The problem with Western opinion-mongers is that they get 20/20 vision only when it comes to their designated enemies, whether it is Vladimir Putin or Xi Jinping, but almost never when it comes to applying those same standards of judgement when it comes to their own country.

The question one should be asking, especially after the Democratic establishment and the US Deep State have pulled out all the stops to get Donald Trump convicted before the 2024 presidential elections, is this: “Will US democracy survive Joe Biden?”

For fairness, one should really ask whether US democracy can survive both Biden and Trump. Or even more important, can this democracy survive the Democratic and Republican fringes, which have ensured that there is no middle ground where consensus-builders can operate to preserve democracy?

Between woke liberalism and white supremacists, where is the middle ground on which most democracies are built?

One is not talking about US democracy only because of the questions raised about Indian democracy by Chotiner.

Indian democracy is far from perfect, but given the relative challenges — a relatively poor country which got freed from colonial rule barely 75 years ago versus a rich country that got its own freedom nearly two and a half centuries ago — this is a genuine question.

It must be answered by US elites who think they have a god-given right to decide what is right and wrong all over the world.

The larger question is, why do democracies fade or die?

Two Harvard professors, Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, wrote a book to answer this question soon after Trump was elected in 2016. It is titled: How Democracies Die.

The book’s thesis, as summarised by The Independent Review, a journal on political economy, is that democracies die when authoritarian tendencies rise. And the markers of authoritarian tendencies are four-fold: “(1) the rejection, in words or action, of the democratic rules of the game, (2) the denial of the legitimacy of political opponents, (3) toleration or encouragement of violence, and (4) a willingness to curtail the civil liberties of opponents, including the media.”

Even though the authors claim that Trump exemplifies each one of these tendencies, we must wonder whether the US Democratic establishment and the Deep State, including its academic institutions and probe agencies, are any different?

Consider the evidence.

The arrest and indictment of Trump on flimsy charges. Trump is supposed to have used funds that didn’t belong to him to ask Stormy Daniels, who claimed she had an affair with Trump, to stop talking about it before the 2016 elections.

One wonders why what Trump did to conceal his private life is somehow such a big deal in America, where such deals are the norm.

Even the courts accept fines from corporations that do wrong and drop the charges and prosecution. (Read about the Trump case here, here).

The Wall Street Journal believes that if Trump must be arrested, it must be for serious charges and with irrefutable evidence, not in a seven-year old case involving the payment of hush money to seal the lips of a former woman friend.

Media in allied countries are worried about what the Trump case can do to perceptions about American democracy.

If Trump is the Democratic party’s strongest political opponent, what does this say about American democracy?

Does this not suggest a degree of denial of the legitimacy of Trump’s political constituency, which is the second point in Levitsky’s and Ziblatt’s thesis on how democracies die?

Next, we must address the first question raised by the authors: the rejection, in words or deeds, of the legitimacy of the democratic rules of the game.

Here one must assess Uncle Sam on three levels. One is its actions as the world’s most powerful country and how it has behaved against political opponents abroad; two, how it deals with its own internal dissenters; and three, how do key domestic institutions work to uphold (or not uphold) the rules of democracy.

The first point hardly needs any supporting evidence. The US does not subject itself to any international rules of behaviour, not the International Courts or international law.

America is a law unto itself, and now China is doing the same thing. The US has invaded or militarily intervened in many countries (Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Vietnam) without any UN sanction and overthrown many democratically elected leaders abroad.

It continues to support bigoted or autocratic regimes (Saudi Arabia, Iran under the Shah, some Latin American dictatorships, Pakistan), and has often been on friendly terms with genocide enablers (Bangladesh in 1971 being one of them).

The second point: how does it deal with its own dissenters? Uncle Sam’s hounding of Edward Snowden (who had to seek refuge in Vladimir Putin’s Russia) and Julian Assange — who leaked sensitive documents to the media — is instructive.

We now also know, through the recently-released Twitter files, that the US Deep State had direct intervention powers in what got published or what got downplayed.

In testimony given to the House Judiciary Committee on the “weaponisation of the federal government”, independent journalist Matt Taibbi said he saw evidence that a “Censorhip Industrial Complex” had taken over the social media giants. 

A news report summarising his testimony had this to say, most of it in Taibbi’s own words: “When #TwitterFiles reporters were given access to Twitter internal documents last year, we first focused on the company, which at times acted like a power above government. But Twitter was more like a ‘partner to government’. Along with other tech firms it held a regular ‘industry meeting’ with FBI and DHS (Department of Homeland Security), and developed a formal system for receiving thousands of content reports from every corner of government: HHS, Treasury, NSA, even local police. Emails from the FBI, DHS and other agencies often came with spreadsheets of hundreds or thousands of account names for review. Often, these would be deleted soon after.”

So the torchbearer of freedom and media freedom was busy telling the media what to publish and what to delete? 

Worse, sections of the media, especially during the Trump years, were complicit in efforts to bury stories that were likely to impact Joe Biden’s campaign in the 2020 elections.

Famously, the New York Times and Washington Post went out of their way to suppress a New York Post report on Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, who had links to Chinese interests. (Read here).

And if you want to read how compromised the New York Times is with respect to the establishment over the long term, you could do no worse than to read Ashley Rindsberg’s book, The Gray Lady Winked: How the New York Times's Misreporting, Distortions and Fabrications Radically Alter History. 

Even while we worry about a compromised media in India, in the US it seems to be as bad, if not worse. The newspapers with the most power and prestige show up as the most compromised. Speaking truth to power is apparently dependent on who is in power, Trump or Biden.

So, while the New Yorker can pronounce India’s media as compromised or subjugated, the same seems to be the case in the US.

As for the judiciary, the less said the better. In India, the judiciary effectively selects judges; executive pressure on which judge to choose is minimal.

In the US, the judiciary is selected by a purely political process, and the tendency to pack the Supreme Court with judges who are ideologically aligned to the party controlling the White House or the Congress is now clear.

Currently, Conservatives nominated by Republican presidents dominate the Supreme Court (read here, here), which explains why a liberal cause, right to abortions, was overturned by the court last year.

Clearly, neither the media nor the courts can be trusted to rise above partisan beliefs. And we want to believe the US judiciary is not compromised by powerful vested interest groups?

Next, we come to academia. This is the saddest story of them all. Two years ago, historian Niall Ferguson and many Right-wing ideologues and public intellectuals decided to part company with Ivy League institutions and set up their own higher education institution in Austin, Texas.

While doing so, they said that the so-called “liberal” academic institutions had become “havens of intolerance and administrative over-reach”, no longer interested in the truth. You can read Ferguson’s passionate critique of liberal intolerance here.

As for “cancel culture”, where liberals decide who can be invited or not invited to campus or even a cultural event, you can just type “cancel culture” in Google and get thousands of articles proving the point.

Here are some of the other bits of evidence that should worry all genuine believers in democracy, and America’s lurch in the opposite direction.

First, there is a migration to the fringe in both the main parties, the Democrats and the Republicans and it predated Trump. 

Since the 1980s, the inability of the two parties to agree on funding government expenditure in any particular year has led to funding gaps and the shutdown of government and layoffs of employees.

According to this Wikipedia article, this happened at least 10 times. Three of the shutdowns were severe, spreading over 21 days, 16 days and 35 days during the Bill Clinton, Barack Obama and Trump administrations respectively.

Can a democracy work well if the central government just shuts down? And the two major political parties cannot even agree to keep government running?

Second, the US is notorious for mass shootings at random and vulnerable targets, thanks to its liberal gun laws and everyday access to assault weapons.

There are literally hundreds of mass massacres in the US every year, and this year, till 28 March, there have already been 131. In 2021, the number of such incidents totalled 690. 

Remember Levitsky and Ziblatt’s third point, about growing support and toleration of violence as another sign of authoritarianism?

It is not just about Trump supporters storming Capitol Hill in 2021 January; it is about ordinary malcontents who can just pick up an assault weapon and kill scores of people.

How is democracy safe if this is what ordinary citizens have to fear every day? And data show that Afro-Americans are more likely to face police brutality than people from other races.

The US is a country that is simply unable to control violence, both by its trigger-happy citizens and its law enforcers. 

Last, US elections now are no longer about real issues: they are about ideology and the legitimacy of who funds any ideology is now shrouded in mystery.

In the 2020 presidential election, over $320 million of “dark money” found its way to various candidates’ coffers or causes. The phrase “democracy dies in darkness” cannot be more aptly applied than here.

How can US democracy ensure the election of good candidates when we cannot even know who is funding which cause and for what purpose. 

Now let us read the four points that signal a slide towards authoritarianism again in the book How Democracies Die.

These four points are: “(1) the rejection, in words or action, of the democratic rules of the game, (2) the denial of the legitimacy of political opponents, (3) toleration or encouragement of violence, and (4) a willingness to curtail civil liberties of opponents, including the media.”

On which of these criteria does the US score even passing marks? Should we not worry about whether or not the self-appointed guardian of global democracy is falling seriously short on this score?