‘Democracy Or Barbarism’
Electoral Democracy in Crisis
Vinod Mubayi
Electoral democracy, the political arm of the liberal, free-market capitalist system, is in a crisis, most of all in the country that consider itself as the world’s oldest democracy and a model for the rest of the so-called “free world”. When the socialist world disappeared with the Soviet Union going under, some pro-West intellectuals proclaimed the end of history as far as any future socio-economic system beyond electoral democracy was concerned. It was a bold prediction that now appears to be seriously off the mark. One manifestation of this crisis in the US is the prospect of the forthcoming presidential contest in the US in November 2024 where the leading candidate according to current polls is a 78-year-old psychopathic narcissist and convicted criminal Donald Trump. When a major political party is in complete thrall to a shambolic liar, convicted in one criminal case and under indictment or threat of indictment in several others, it is obvious that something is very wrong with the system.
His previous opponent, geriatric President Joe Biden, has been dubbed Genocide Joe for his steadfast support of the Israeli genocide of the Palestinian population in Gaza, not that Trump or the Republican Party is any less a supporter of Israel, in fact they are, if anything, more extreme than the Democrats on this issue. Biden, however, withdrew his candidacy after his disastrously fumbling performance in a debate with Trump on June 27 and his replacement on the Democratic ticket is Vice-President Kamala Harris who has been endorsed by Biden.
The essence of the crisis lies in the recent decision of the US Supreme Court that grants the US President, and even a former President, immunity from prosecution for virtually all actions that could be deemed “official.” Since there is no clarity in the court’s judgement on where the boundary between official and non-official actions lies, the ruling is a blank cheque to a President to commit any act howsoever illegal it may be under the law. Journalist James Risen pointed out that the ruling was a blank cheque for Trump, “a brazen attempt to protect him from his ongoing criminal cases and to grant him virtually unlimited power if he gets back into the White House. With its ruling, the Supreme Court’s right-wing bloc has made it clear: They are tired of democracy. The justices want a dictator. Three of the justices who voted with the majority were appointed by Trump himself when he was President. So, the ruling reeks of corruption of a high order, truly worthy of a judgement passed by a court in a banana republic.
In effect, the Supreme Court ruling converts a constitutional democracy, whose elementary premise is that no one is above the law, into a monarchy. The crimes that Trump is accused of, such as openly trying to buy votes in the state of Georgia or inciting his followers to forcibly prevent the US Congress on Jan. 6, 2021 from certifying the election of Biden, are so serious and were committed so openly that there is hardly any doubt what the outcome of a fair trial would be. But if Trump wins the election in November there is no doubt that all prosecution would cease; and even if he loses the ruling of the Court, whose conservative members will enjoy their positions for many more years, ensures that any future reckoning with the law will remain extremely uncertain.
The heart of the crisis, one that for various reasons afflicts a number of other “democratic” countries, is the rampant economic inequality and joblessness spawned by neoliberal capitalism over the last several decades. The fact that almost half of the US population, many of them white, working-class residents of the now de-industrialised rust belt of America’s heartland, prostrates itself before what the New York Times newspaper calls “a felon who flouts the law and the Constitution, an inveterate liar beholden to no higher cause than his self-interest and a reckless policymaker indifferent to the well-being of the American people”, shows plainly that free-market capitalism is not working for them and they are willing to blindly follow a huckster selling a bizarre mix of fascist rhetoric, white supremacy, anti-immigrant racism, and Christian nationalism along with a blanket endorsement of Israeli genocide.
Whatever rhetoric they employ, neither of the two major political parties in the US is remotely capable of or, equally remotely, willing to make any significant change in the neoliberal capitalist system that richly rewards the elites who control and finance the main segments of the political system. Republican Party leaders, like the Vice-Presidential candidate J D Vance of white working-class origin, who have lately seemed to take potshots at corporate capital are a hypocritical fraud as Vance himself has benefited greatly from Silicon Valley venture capitalists. Elon Musk, the richest or second richest tycoon in the world, has proclaimed his complete support to Trump and is giving many millions to the Republican Party election campaign. Republicans rally their audience with fervent appeals to “patriotic” symbols and to reactionary social and cultural mores such as outlawing abortion or promoting religion in schools or fulminating against the LGBTQ community or “wokeism.” Democratic Party elites may not pander to reactionary social and cultural symbols but their determination to maintain the economic system is not very different.
There is, however, another aspect of the global economy that is hugely consequential for the long-term survival of humanity itself and on which there is a sharp difference between the platforms and programmes of the Republican and Democratic Parties. This is the continuing use of fossil fuels (coal, oil and gas), and their contribution to greenhouse gas emissions, global warming and climate change. The science behind this phenomenon has been established for many decades including, ironically, by scientists of some of the major oil companies as far back as 1980. The Democrats, by and large, accept the science and even if there is some backsliding and compromise, the Biden administration has broadly put in place programmes to ameliorate the worst impacts of global warming.
The Republicans, in contrast, are in total denial of the science. They not only believe that global warming is a hoax, they want to intensify extraction and use of fossil fuels in the US. Trump and the Republican Party’s energy programme has been summarised by them in three words: “Drill, Baby Drill!”. Trump, of course, had pulled the US out of the Paris climate accord when he was President and while Biden promptly rejoined it, if Trump becomes President again, his and his party’s programme, which is in direct contradiction to what the UN and much of the rest of the world is doing, will pose a major global threat. If there was a functional international court with real powers, the Republican Party would be indicted for what is, in effect, a crime against humanity that expanded fossil fuel exploration and production would pose.
Meanwhile, the sinister role of right-wing manifestos like Project 2025 in which much of the Republican leadership is invested cannot be ignored. Organised by the right-wing Heritage Foundation, this project aims at nothing less than creating a framework for a fascist Christian nationalist state in the US should Trump win the election. By way of example, it would allow the President to fire most of the non-partisan Federal bureaucracy and replace them with Trump loyalists. It would likely end the separation of church and state, diminish civil liberties, and eliminate or greatly restrict what conservatives consider to be the ‘nanny’ state, i.e., government regulation of private corporate behaviour that, for example, negatively impacts the environment. The current right-wing Supreme Court is also quite complicit in this; its recent ruling significantly shrinks the powers of the Environmental Protection Agency EPA to curb harmful environmental emissions.
While the US is mired in its own swamp, the other major “democracy” India has narrowly averted a descent into a toxic autocracy. In the run-up to the recent national election, Prime Minister Modi ran a particularly vicious campaign targeting religious minorities and boasted that his BJP party would earn an overwhelming majority in the national parliament, which the opposition parties and many of the country’s marginalised minorities including the Dalits feared would allow the Modi regime to trash the secular constitution and convert India into a Hindu Rashtra (nation). During Modi’s decade long rule, India has become one of the world’s more unequal countries where the top 1% own 53% of the national wealth while the bottom 50% account for barely 4.1%. Joblessness, especially among educated youth, is rampant while the mainstream media that is owned by the regime’s handful of crony capitalists mostly functions as a godi (lapdog) media of the government and shies away from any negative reporting about the regime’s performance. It seems that Modi and his cohorts had bought their own propaganda as the results showed that instead of gaining a large majority, the BJP lost a fifth of its seats and its majority and was only able to stay in power by forming a coalition with two other parties whose past record is somewhat questionable.
One would have imagined that its losses in the elections would have curbed the BJP’s autocratic impulses but as the old saying goes a leopard cannot change its spots so the Modi regime is implementing new repressive laws that were passed in the previous Parliament when the BJP held an absolute majority. Human rights lawyers contend that these laws would enable a “police raj (rule)” and lead to criminalising legitimate, non-violent dissent and opposition against the government; it would provide the government with arbitrary and virtually unlimited power to selectively arrest, detain, prosecute and convict practically anyone by branding them as terrorists and anti-nationals. Not to be left behind, the state of Maharashtra which is home to the financial capital of India, Mumbai, and is currently ruled by the BJP in alliance with turncoats from the Shiv Sena and the Nationalist Congress Party, has proposed a draconian new law the Maharashtra Special Public Security Act 2024 that harshly criminalises dissent by making it a crime to be a member of vaguely defined “unlawful” organisations.
Thus, in both the world’s oldest and largest electoral democracies the danger of fascist or quasi-fascist rule remains strong. The situation in many European democracies is no different.
The social-democratic left parties that ruled in Scandinavian countries have been replaced by right-wing parties and in Sweden, the fascist right-wing Swedish Democrat Party is part of the ruling coalition. In Germany, the neo-Nazi AfD is now touted to be the country’s second-largest party while the hitherto openly fascist Giorgia Meloni is the Prime Minister of Italy.
The character of each of these democracies can be gauged by their response to the defining moral issue of present time: the genocide of the Palestinian population in Gaza by the state of Israel. The US, of course, is Israel’s enabler, so one would expect nothing from it but none of the others, including India, which continues to sell arms and ammunition to Israel, have shown the slightest propensity to hold Israel to account. It is the smaller states such as South Africa that took Israel to the International Court of Justice who showed what moral courage can be in international relations.
The root cause of the crisis remains neoliberal capitalism which is not only causing extreme economic inequality in many countries it is also implicated in the failure to deal more decisively with global warming caused by continued use of fossil fuels. Economic transformation, in particular, the demise of steady industrial jobs and their replacement by ill-paid, precarious gig work has been accompanied by the steep decline in trade unions in the US, which used to offer some protection to workers. In the absence of a viable left or left-democratic political force, this has left large sections of the people vulnerable to the vile, fascist Make America Great Again (MAGA) slogans of hucksters like Trump.
As one witnesses this crisis of electoral democracy, Rosa Luxem-burg’s prophetic words “socialism or barbarism” come to mind. As she said a century ago: ‘Bourgeois society stands at the crossroads, either transition to socialism or regression into barbarism’.
It goes without saying that the socialism of the 21st and future centuries cannot be the socialism of the 20th century. What its content could be, however, has to be defined, discussed and elaborated and, if humanity has to survive in a humane condition in the future that discussion has to begin now.
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Vol 57, No. 15 - 18, Oct 5 - Nov 2, 2024 |