American Democracy in the Age of Trump

By Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

 

Everyone knows that Donald Trump is a narcissistic boor, and has been so forever. Fine. So no one needs be surprised. That isn’t even the problem. 

The real issue is this: How did the United States get to a confluence of factors that led to his election as president, a most improbable, if not astounding, outcome? It clearly represents a meltdown of the American political system.

“Donald Trump’s election was possible because both political parties mistakenly decided several decades ago to have binding primary elections determine presidential nominations,” argued Eitan Hersh, a political science professor at Tufts University near Boston, in his July 2 New York Times  article, “The Problem with Participatory Democracy is the Participants.”

Rather than having party leaders vet candidates for competency and sanity, as most democracies do, “our parties turned the nomination process into a reality show in which the closest things to vetting are a clap-o-meter and a tracking poll.”

This is true, but then who gets to “vet” the party leaders? Are they somehow more competent than the general electorate? They may be determined people with their own hobbyhorses who have come up the ranks from municipal and state contests, which most voters care little about. 

Unlike for most “jobs,” there are no criteria for those who get these positions. After all, that’s democracy. Otherwise, we would need specialists, philosopher-kings, or a mandarinate, to govern us. Maybe even political scientists!

What democracy really needs is a well informed population that can tell the difference between propaganda and facts, between politicians who are just hungry for power and those who genuinely wish to dedicate their lives to improving the country for the common good.

So the real question should be this: how did the Democratic Party become so alienated from the white lower-middle and working class, such that it became an alliance of liberal oligarchs and so-called ethnic and sexual “minorities?”

Why was it so beholden to big money that it was able to beat back any attempts (not just those of Bernie Sanders) to prevent the nomination of an utterly mendacious Hillary Clinton -- arguably the only person in America who could have lost to Trump? That’s what we need to ask ourselves. 

After all, as Globe and Mail columnist Lawrence Martin in his Aug. 30 article “Clinton Should do Her Party a Favour – And Vanish,” remarked, “she can't live with the embarrassment of losing to a carnival barker.” 

Will the Democratic Party increasingly be one representing mainly this collection of identity groups, while Republicans become a “white” party? If so, then elections will be, as Donald Horowitz so aptly put it in his book Ethnic Groups in Conflict, a “census count.” 

Welcome to the way they work in places like Northern Ireland, Fiji, Guyana, Kenya, Ukraine, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Sri Lanka, and dozens of other deeply divided plural (not “multicultural”) states.

In these countries, politics is a zero-sum, no-holds-barred, game, where the outcome is total victory for one side and total defeat for the over – often a prelude to violence. Let’s hope America does not continue to slide down that path.