Why America Needs Good Government
As polls in the battleground states shift and sway, and pundits warn that the margin will be razor thin, escaping anxiety over the 2024 election has become impossible. If Donald Trump becomes the 47th president and commands the military to round up the “bad” people, as well as millions of illegal immigrants of color, will the constitutional guiderails of the country as hold? President Obama once characterized this paralyzing deadlock as a “fever” that would break after the 2012 election. Instead, it has deepened and spread.
The most common approach of the two parties and the legion of consultants who advise them is to focus on the motivations of distinct groups within the electorate. Examining how Democrats lost white working-class voters or whether Republicans have alienated suburban women may be useful in some contexts, but the methodology considers symptoms, not causes.
American Apocalypse, The Six Far-right Groups Waging War on Democracy » digs down to the roots of what spawned and nurtures MAGA, identifying the six amply funded, well organized, and rabidly private sector groups that produced the drastic revamp of a Republican Party controlled by Trump. The six include big business, the Tea Party (or, as it is known today, the House Freedom Caucus), the Federalist Society, Fox News, white evangelicals, and armed militia. Although the six do not appear to collaborate, they are well-financed armies fighting—and increasingly winning—parallel wars of attrition against government.
The groups do not coordinate their attacks nor do they confer on ideology, strategy, or tactics. Yet their priorities land on a surprisingly tight bullseye: the size and power of the administrative state. Their campaigns have already paralyzed crucial functions of government, causing grave suffering among Americans living in the path of hurricanes and drought or working in crowded meat-packing plants during the COVID 19 pandemic. Race relations have deteriorated at an alarming rate as has the quality of education in public schools. As climate change worsens and the next pandemic looms, incapacitated national government will continue to cause worse harm.
Three examples illustrate these consequences: the capture of the Supreme Court by a conservative supermajority, violent threats by militia members that have left our public health infrastructure severely weakened, and corporate domination of the political process through massive campaign spending.
Over the Supreme Court’s last three sessions, its conservative supermajority has issued a slew of negative opinions that immobilize agencies assigned to safeguard public health, worker and consumer safety, and, especially, protection of the environment. These decisions tear policymaking power out of the hands of civil service experts and transferred it to federal judges.
A total of 890 federal judicial positions exist nationwide—nine on the Supreme Court, 179 on courts of appeals, 677 for district (trial) courts, and 25 for specialty courts addressing topics like patents. President Trump appointed 245, including three to the Supreme Court. President Biden has appointed 213 judges to the lower federal courts and one Supreme Court justice. Business and other conservative groups make a beeline for Trump judges in Texas when they file lawsuits that are often successful.
Most people are dimly aware of Leonard Leo, the lobbyist who was instrumental in placing Justices Alito, Roberts, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett on the Court. But focusing on Leo obscures the more important story of how his organization, the Federalist Society, became the gatekeeper for the candidacies of conservative judges. The organization has 75,000 members, including 65,000 lawyers and legal scholars and 10,000 law students, and sponsors numerous conferences so that members can learn right-wing theories of how government should not operate. Members know that if they want to become judges under Republican administrations, they must maneuver their way onto the organization’s lists of judicial candidates that are constantly updated and reviewed.
Second, during the pandemic, and especially in the western states, militia groups harassed senior public health officials, including following them home at night and deploying armed protesters wearing MAGA hats and carrying Trump flags to demonstrate on their front lawns. The chief health officer of Orange County, California attended a meeting where an unidentified woman read her address out loud. She resigned. Another health officer told her children not to do their homework in front of windows so they would not be targets of armed militia members. The harassment drove as many as 500 top officials from the profession. State public health agencies bore the brunt of responsibility for COVID 19. Most experts agree that a second pandemic is inevitable. At this rate, we will unprepared once again.
Campaign finance rules strongly favor big business and megadonors who made fortunes from those enterprises. More than seven in ten Americans believe in limits on the amounts of money contributed by single individuals and corporations. Regardless, according to the invaluable research group Open Secrets, the 2024 federal election cycle is on track to cost at least $15.9 billion. Outside spending by super and hybrid PACs largely favors conservatives with the super PAC Make America Great Again spending $277 million so far. Both parties benefit from such contributions, of course, but Democrats have at least advocated for campaign finance reform.
These are just three examples of how the war on government is already underway, benefitting the few and damaging the many. The mob violence on January 6, 2021 resulted in the deaths of nine people. It and other episodes, including the far-right march in Charleston, have provoked 47% of Americans to fear that the country could erupt into civil war during their lifetimes. Should such violence recur and spread, it will undermine the tradition of a peaceful transition of power based on free and fair elections. Digging deeper to understand root causes of American polarization has never been more important.
Professor Rena Steinzor offers a thought-provoking analysis of challenges confronting the democratic system i.e. not just a form of government but also a way of life in the United States of America.Such trends are prevalent in other democracies too. Unfortunately, there seems to be a wave of authoritarianism sweeping across the democratic world. Long back, Aristotle characterised 'degenerated' form of democracy as 'mobocracy'. Rationality and sanity are relegated in order to procure popularity and secure electoral majorities. Populism and demagoguery are rampant and have devastating consequences on the fabric of a pragmatic and egalitarian society. Lobbyists, influence of money power on election campaigns and government policies, paid-cum-sponsored polls, biased media reporting, superficial research, racism, primordial considerations etc. are among the most serious difficulties. Polarisation of electorate is a 'systemic requirement' for political parties to win elections. These ailments are so debilitating that Socrates (an exceptional minority) had preferred to drink hemlock and die, instead of making adjustments and compromises with peculiarities of the majority-based democratic system. As a possible solution to endemic problems of democracy, Plato in his 'Republic' wrote that either king should become a philosopher or philosopher should become a king. Let us wait and watch how do the champions of democracy react to untoward events after the 2024 US presidential elections.
Posted by: Dr. Kishor Dere | November 5, 2024 at 12:54 AM