The Damaskinos Report

Context: American bashing

It seems fashionable nowadays for every "thinking" person to bash the United States. According to this world-view, Bush is an evil demagogue who spreads terror, ignores environmental problems, supports human rights abuses around the world, nurturing and breeding a group of Christian extremists intent on spreading intolerance worldwide, and causes all your flatulence to stink.

One manifestation of this tendency is for some to argue that the US is not a democracy. I note that a blog by Legal Eagle suggesting that Bush was democratically elected was immediately criticised by a commentator on the blog, who doubts whether Bush was so elected. There is no doubt the commentator makes a fair point that there are important defects in the US system. Voter turnout is low. Gerrymandering is so rife that there are very few "marginal" electorates. Only those who spend lots of money wins (though in one of the chapters of this book it is suggested that the it is in fact winners who attract lots of money, and not the other way around). However, does this make the United States an undemocratic state?

What is democracy?

For my own part, I think any consideration of what democracy is about involves quoting from an Australian High Court case from the 1970s, Attorney General (Commonwealth) v Commonwealth, ex rel McKinlay (1976) 135 CLR 1. The case dealt with the question of whether the inequalities between the number of voters in different constituencies may be thought to be contrary to the Australian constitutional requirement that the legislature be "chosen by the people". Whilst this phrase had been subject of much subsequent judicial interpretation, it is fair to say that, for everyday political purposes, it roughly corresponds with the idea of representative democracy (indeed, Justice Stephen's judgment recognised that the two concepts broadly correspond).

In short, the majority of the High Court held that so long as the inequalities in the sizes of the constituencies are not what one might consider extreme, there is nothing inherently undemocratic about such inequalities. One passage from this ruling, in particular, makes it a "must read" for all students of political science.

First, Justice Stephen's judgment started from the premise that:

"The principle of representative democracy does indeed predicate the enfranchisement of electors, the existence of an electoral system capable of giving effect to their selection of representatives and the bestowal of legislative functions upon the representatives thus selected. However the particular quality and character of the content of each one of these three ingredients of representative democracy, and there may well be others, is not fixed and precise."

From this, His Honour compelling suggested that:

"It is, then, quite apparent that representative democracy is descriptive of a whole spectrum of political institutions, each differing in countless respects yet answering to that generic description. The spectrum has finite limits and in a particular instance there may be absent some quality which isregardedas so essential to representative democracy as to place that instance outside those limits altogether; but at no one point within the range of the spectrum does there exist any single requirement so essential as to be determinative of the existence of representative democracy."

In essence, what Justice Stephen suggested was that:

1. yes, representative democracy does involve a free right for citizens to choose their own representatives in a fair manner (there had been American and Australian court rulings suggesting that such free speech of varying degrees is required for such a choice to be made); but

2. there are no hard and fast rules as to how this may be achieved, and there is no such thing as a "perfect" democracy. It all comes down to common sense. In that regard, I digress to note that a great American jurist, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr, once suggested that a law is unconstitutional if it made him "puke".

Is the US undemocratic?

Now, let us apply this analysis.

Is the US electoral system full of holes? You bet. I don't think I need to repeat what I've said earlier.

But is it capable of allowing citizens to make a free choice of their representatives to exercise political power? Absolutely. People are not coerced into choosing or who they choose.

Nor are there overwhelming restrictions on people stating their political views. For example Michael Moore, the infamous critic of the Republican Party is not contstantly threatened with violence from those with power or thrown into jail or tortured, is he?. Thus, if people wanted, they are able to hear a wide variety of views. It is one thing to say that people allow themselves to be mired in ignorant and bigoted rhetoric of the likes of Rush Limbaugh, but it is another to say that they are not allowed to read more balanced coverage found in the likes of the Washington Post even if they wished.

And for all the talk about gerrymandering, the fact is that it began as a civil rights "correction" mechanism to ensure more diverse electorates; the process merely got a bit out of hand in more recent times. In any event, there is no one pointing a figurative or literal gun at those living in a safe Democratic Party constituency that they are not allowed to vote Republican, or vice versa. That is much more than can be said for Singapore where the government routinely threatens voters with punishments if they dare to vote for the opposition.

To end on a similar vain as Legal Eagle's blog (as linked above), for all of the US's faults, it is an infinitely more open and democratic system as, say, North Korea. Of course, that is not to say that the US system is adequate - it clearly isn't. But to say categorically that it is undemocratic is simply an extreme example of the "the grass is greener on the other side" syndrome.