“We’re not a democracy.”
It’s a remarkable statement about the United States. Especially when it comes from a member of the country’s Senate. But those were the words of a Republican senator from Utah, Mike Lee.
Plenty on the left might well agree with the assessment. Can a country in which minorities are so routinely denied the right to vote, or black citizens so frequently subjected to police violence or even murder, or where money speaks with so loud a voice, really be called a democracy?
At the very least, it’s clearly far from perfectly democratic.
But where are things any better? The British police, for instance, are regularly shown to be as discriminatory to the Black minority as their US counterparts. If they kill far fewer of their victims, that may be down only to their being less heavily armed. Money certainly talks loudly enough to drown out the British poor. And the current government in London treats parliament with contempt while it drafts legislation limiting the rights of citizens to sue it. None of this sounds like the behaviour of a self-confident and secure democracy.
Furthermore, Britain went ten years without a general election, between 1935 and 1945, with Parliament simply deciding that it could suspend that inconvenient practice while the country was at war. In that time, the US had three presidential elections, including 1944 when the country was locked in the greatest war it has ever fought, on two massive fronts (Europe and the Pacific).
It’s pointlessly utopian to go looking for an ideal democracy. We can only talk about relative degrees of democracy. And on that basis, the United States remains a nation that comes as close as any to realising the principles of democratic rule.
Indeed, perhaps we should forget about ‘realisation’ of democracy at all. What we should be looking for is nations which at least aspiring to democracy. That would make democracy a work in progress rather than a success. It would be an objective that no nation has yet reached.
What’s shocking about the “We’re not a democracy” comment is that it suggests that, for Mike Lee at least, it isn’t even an aspiration. For him, it’s not just that the US isn’t a democracy, it’s that it shouldn’t be one at all.
With a typo in the word ‘prosperity’, Mr Lee explains:
Democracy isn’t the objective; liberty, peace, and prospefity are. We want the human condition to flourish. Rank democracy can thwart that.
I was fascinated by that comment. I’ve never seen democracy described as ‘rank’ before. It’s an adjective I generally associate with notions such as corruption or incompetence, but not democracy.
Equally, given that the wealthiest nations all tend to be democracies (in aspiration at least), and generally at peace, even if only internally and with each other, it’s odd to suggest that being democratic somehow undermines peace and prosperity.
Lee also wrote:
The word “democracy” appears nowhere in the Constitution, perhaps because our form of government is not a democracy. It’s a constitutional republic. To me it matters. It should matter to anyone who worries about the excessive accumulation of power in the hands of the few.
It’s true that the word ‘democracy’ doesn’t appear in the US Constitution. But, given that he thinks the US should be a constitutional republic, he might have checked whether the word ‘republic’ appears in the Constitution either.
It doesn’t.
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| US democracy, safe in their hands? Donald Trump with his fan Senator Mike Lee |
All this could be quite funny. Just the weird rantings of a politician who is perhaps rather past his sell-by date. Unfortunately, Lee is from the right of the Republican Party and a staunch supporter of President Trump.
Now Trump, as we know, behaves in ways that make some wonder about his own commitment to democracy. He’s not prepared to say he’ll abide by the outcome of the forthcoming election. He’s making every effort to undermine the validity of mail-in voting. His backers are working to remove potential opponents from electoral rolls wherever they can.
Worse still, as well as trying to make it impossible to vote anywhere than in a polling station, he is calling on supporters to enter polling stations ostensibly to observe the voting, in reality (especially as many will be armed) to intimidate voters. There’s nothing new about that: in the former slave states, whites would often show up with guns to make sure Blacks or other potential adversaries of their supremacy, were denied a vote.
With the likes of Mike Lee and Donald Trump in charge, there is little chance of the US becoming more democratic, and a serious risk of its being far less so.
One of the big questions on 3 November isn’t just whether voters will loosen the grip of these anti-democrats on power. It’s whether there’s still time to stop them.
Not, I presume, that these characters want their contempt of democracy too widely known. Mike Lee may have revealed something deep inside the Trump faction of his Republican Party which it would rather have kept hidden. After all, clinging to the Presidency may be Trump’s only way of avoiding prosecution. Increasingly desperate of winning a fair vote, he may be happier than ever to try foul means instead, democratic or not. He may not want people to know in advance that his faction doesn’t regard the US as a democracy anyway.
Mike Lee’s words may have seemed crazy, but it’s possible they were just dangerously indiscreet.
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