Why the US is a model of how not to be a democracy

Yogendra Yadav in The Print

Democrats all over the world wait anxiously for the much-deserved departure of Donald Trump. It could be a long wait and could well extend to another four years. At the time of this article being published, the vote count appears to be leaning towards Trump. Yet, those who care for democracy, must be grateful to Trump for something. He has singlehandedly demolished one of the biggest myths of our time: the myth of the greatness of American democracy, the idea that the US was as an exemplar of democracy, a model for others to emulate. This may be a painful realisation for many. In the last instance, this is good news for Democrats.

Now, Trump should not get all the credit for demolishing the American model. He simply ensured that the whole world woke up to some of the most poorly kept secrets of American politics. Above all, he left no room to doubt that, like everywhere else, some of the top leaders in this great democracy were intellectually and morally challenged. That someone like him could bully his way to the White House and, perhaps, retain it for another term reveals something very disturbing about the American public. His mishandling of the coronavirus pandemic blurred the imaginary distinction between the first and the third world. His appointment to the Supreme Court, just before the elections, threw light on what a scandal apex judicial appointments in the US are. His not-so-hidden support for White supremacists in the face of the #BlackLivesMatter movement exposed the underbelly of racial divisions in the US. Finally, the global attention he brought to the presidential election 2020 has served to expose the shoddy electoral system in the US. Clearly, the US could learn a thing or two from India on how to conduct elections and carry out a quick and clean count of votes.

In sum: Thanks to Donald Trump, the world learnt that the US is just one of the democracies in the world. It has its strengths and its weaknesses. It needs to learn from other democracies before it preaches the same to the rest of the world. No matter who emerges victor, the process and the outcome of the current election is bound to reinforce this lesson. 

Not a model

I learnt this lesson much earlier, thanks to my friend-cum-co-author-cum-teacher, the late Alfred Stepan. A great scholar of comparative politics, Professor Stepan (and the late Juan J. Linz) could talk about intricacies of authoritarian regimes in South America, the Catalan issue in Spain or the Russian minority in Ukraine with as much ease as he would discuss the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) in Sri Lanka or the Burmese transition to democracy. He was passionate about India (an M.F. Husain in his drawing room reminded everyone of his India connect) and curious to understand every single detail of Indian politics. (He travelled to Mizoram to understand how the state returned to normalcy after 1987). I learnt a lot from him and Professor Linz while co-writing a book, Crafting State-Nations.

Towards the end of his life, Professor Stepan started reflecting on his own country, the United States, by placing it in a comparative perspective. He was no Left-wing critic of American capitalism. He was quintessentially American and passionately liberal-democrat. His conclusion, much before Trump was anywhere on the scene, was unambiguous: if the world is to democratise, the US is not a model to emulate.

I was an easy convert to this view, as I have always suspected moral claims from the global North. But I have found this a tough lesson to take across in a world obsessed with the US of A. Trump made my job easier. Today may be the right day to mention four key reasons why the US is not a model for a democracy. The first two are related to institutional design and the other two are about the nature of politics.

Flawed systems

The first is the famed but deeply flawed “presidential” system of the US. It is well known that the US-style presidential system institutes regular conflict between the legislature and the executive, leading to routine deadlocks. Alfred Stepan theorised it differently: the real problem with the presidential system of government is that it makes power indivisible and coalition making that much more difficult. This comes in the way of the power-sharing so necessary for the accommodation of diversities. Also, the American system leads to several veto points. Stepan demonstrated brilliantly that the greater the number of veto points in a political system, the higher the inequality in that society. He never failed to remind us that among the long-standing democracies, the US was the most unequal country. That is why any attempts to replicate the US-style presidential model, whether in South America or in the ex-USSR countries, has mostly been a disaster.

The second element of the US model is its unique federalism. In the US, every power is assumed to be with the state, unless specifically given to the centre. You can see this even in how they conduct national elections. Each state has its own rules of who can vote, under what procedure, when and how. Not just that, each state has its own timetable of when they would count results, whether votes received after today would be accepted and what would be the deadline for completing the count. The states zealously guard these rights in a society that is otherwise increasingly homogeneous. This was held out to a “pure” model of federalism. Stepan reminded us that this was by no means a model, that it was a feature of a certain kind of “coming together” federalisms and need not be replicated by countries where various units were already together before they adopted federalism.

The US is a textbook example of what political scientists call “symmetrical” federalism. Every federal unit has exactly the same powers. Every state, tiny or gigantic, has two seats in the US Senate. And the Senate is more powerful than the House of Representatives that reflects the population strengths of various states. Stepan pointed out that accommodation of deep diversities requires special situations to be recognised and given special treatment. Therefore, “asymmetrical” federalism of the kind we have in Canada and India is more suited for living with deep diversities. Here, too, the US is not a good model.

Trump adds to the list

Trump has added two more reasons to the list of why the US is not a model for democracies. One, Trump’s presidency has exposed how hollow the American two-party system is. Both the major parties are devoid of ideological orientation or organisational depth. Far from providing a choice, the two-party system is a model of choicelessness. Even if Biden were to win this election, he would be a paler copy of Trump, minus the vitriolic. Two, the last four years have proven how fickle, gullible and manipulable the American public opinion is. Alex de Tocqueville had noticed it more than two hundred years ago. Trump proved that the onset of mass media and social media has made it worse. Whether he wins or not, he has shown that you can get away with lies, hatred and bigotry. Worse, he has shown that you can do so in the face of the most powerful media in the world that repeatedly called him out. Clearly, free speech offers little assurance that truth shall prevail. The US is not the first place in the world to offer this sombre lesson. India is among the long list of countries to offer similar lessons.

The world awaits a new theory of democracy. Meanwhile, we can begin by celebrating the demolition of the US-led model of democracy. Not just because the dismantling of any hegemon brings vicarious pleasure. But because this realisation sets us on the right path. There is no model of democracy. There is no golden route to the finished product called democracy.

Democracy is a treacherous journey where you clear the path as you go along. This is as true of Donald Trump’s America as it is of Narendra Modi’s India.

Shut down Madarsa/Masjids

 

Grooming of young girls, love jihad etc Parents need to be aware

 

Global crisis due to political Islam

 

 

French President Emmanuel Macron merely dared to say Islam is in crisis, and got himself into big trouble.

Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan asked him to get his head examined. Pakistan’s Imran Khan wrote a two-page sermon to fellow Muslim nations calling for a re-education of the West about Islam.

No such restraint for Malaysia’s 95-year-old Mahathir Mohamad. He got so furious as to nearly justify mass killings of the French for what they might have done to Muslims in the past, besides indeed condemning the decadent, ‘Christian only in name’ West where women often walk around with no more than a “little string (that) covers the most secret place”. Protests broke out in Pakistan, Bangladesh and India.

But, did Macron speak the truth or not? The reaction of these prominent leaders from powerful and populous Muslim countries points to a crisis. If tens of crores of Muslims across the world feel that they are victims of mass Islamophobia, it is a sense of siege and crisis. Unlike a sacred scripture, however, there can be many versions of what this truth is. Here is this humble editorialist’s effort.
 
Let me break it down in five broad points:

1) All religions are political. At this point, though, Islam is the most politicised. You can surely hark back to the centuries of the Christian Crusades, but that was some time back. Doesn’t matter if that imagery is often invoked by leaders of al-Qaeda, ISIS and sometimes also the odd angry Islamic nation.

Islam is also the second largest faith in the world, with nearly 200 crore adherents, just behind Christians by about 20 per cent. Like Christians, Muslims also live across the world. But unlike Christians, in the countries where they have a majority, very few have democracy. That’s a checkable fact. Important to note, about 60 per cent of all Muslims are in Asia and four of their largest populations in the world live under different degrees of democracy, between India, Indonesia, Bangladesh and Pakistan.

Stretching this argument further, in countries where Muslims have a majority, secularism is generally a bad word, or a Western concept. But in democratic nations where Muslims are a minority, they persistently put the republic’s secular commitment to test. France, Britain, the US, Belgium, Germany are all good examples. There is a reason I do not include India here. Because, unlike Europe to which they migrated lately, in India Muslims were equal and voluntary partners in forming this new republic.

2) There is an unresolved tension among Muslim populations and nations between nationalism and pan-nationalism. This arises from the concept of Ummah — that all Muslims of the world are one supra-national entity. Check this out from Imran Khan’s two-page discourse to his fellow Ummah leaders. We have seen this expressed in the subcontinent sometimes. In the Khilafat Movement of 1919-24, protesting against Kemal Ataturk’s winding up of the Ottoman Caliphate and founding of the Turkish Republic, to Salman Rushdie to the now-fading support for Palestine. And now France.

There are some interesting consequences here. While the notion is pan-Islamism, many more wars are fought between Muslims and Muslim states than with others. The Iran-Iraq war was the longest, a large number of Islamic states joined the coalition against Saddam under the US, and, closer home, in the Af-Pak region, Muslims only kill Muslims and not all of them in Friday bombings at Shia mosques.

The last time we saw a truly pan-Islamic alliance fight against a common, non-Muslim enemy was the 6-Day War in 1967 against Israel. There was a bit of it again in the Yom Kippur War in 1973. But then Egypt and Jordan signed up for peace. Iran is left mostly alone to fight Israel from a distance, Syria has self-destructed. In none of Pakistan’s wars against India has any Islamic nation come to its aid. Barring Jordan transferring some F-104 Starfighters in 1971. 

3) Which brings us to a brutal irony. If pan-Islamism, the Ummah spirit, has worked on the ground, it is with multi-national terror groups. Al-Qaeda and ISIS are truly pan-Islamic organisations, which mostly target settled Islamic states. ISIS actually says that if you believe that all Muslims are part of the same Ummah, then they must also have a Caliphate subsuming international boundaries and enforcing the common Shariat.

Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, keep counting. This should also make us reflect on why is it that so few Muslims from the subcontinent, home to one-third of all the world’s Muslims, are seen in al Qaeda or ISIS. The argument I put forward in this debate is, in our nations, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, nationalism trumps pan-Islamism. Muslims in these countries have a flag and a cricket team to support, a leader to love or hate. And if they hate him, to vote him out or protest in any preferred manner. Why should they prefer some mythical Caliphate?

4) The fourth is a crippling contradiction. There are sharp national boundaries dividing Muslim populations and wealth. A bulk of the populations, in Asia and Africa, lives in poor economies. Whereas the world’s wealthiest nations, the Gulf Arabs, have relatively minuscule populations. They won’t distribute their wealth equally to the rest in the spirit of pan-Islamism.

They are happy to find a compact with the West, and now also with India and Israel. Because for them, everything, their political power, royal privileges, global stature depends on that one thing pan-Islamism challenges: Status quo. Nobody has an answer to this GDP-population mismatch. And the rise of a power like ISIS only further fortifies these walls.

5) And last, because of a democratic deficit, in most Islamic countries you cannot even protest, express your resentment against your regime. You might feel sickened that your royalty is sold to the American Satan, but you can do nothing about it. Not shout a slogan, wave a placard, write a blog, a letter to the editor, even a tweet. This could land you in a jail forever, or get you beheaded. So, you go and do it where you can.

That is why, in 2003, I wrote a ‘National Interest’ headlined Globalisation of Revenge. Because you cannot do any of this in your country, you do it in Europe, America. You cannot even whisper a word in anger in your brutally-controlled national security state, so you go to another. Where you can freely live, train to be airline pilots, and then slam those planes into the twin towers. Where even Khalid Sheikh Mohammed has the right to a somewhat fair trial. You can’t fight your masters, so why not punish the master’s masters? Isn’t this globalisation of revenge?

In conclusion, let’s return to the killing of Samuel Paty in France. The killer was Abdoullakh Anzorov, an 18-year-old from a Chechen refugee family. Chechnya is a tiny Russian republic in the North Caucasus with just over a million people, 95% of them Muslim. Russians subdued their separatist rebellion after two brutal wars. But, by the time ‘normalcy’ came, half of that little population was living in refugee camps. Many sought a better life in Western democracies, like this teenaged assassin’s family.

Let’s reconstruct the jigsaw. When Chechnya fought a jihad against the Russians, many Muslim ‘fighters’ from across the world, including many veterans of Afghanistan, joined them. Because this was all they had learnt to do yet, fight a jihad against the Russians. Pan-Islamism led to death, destruction and mass destitution of Chechens. Tens of thousands escaped to liberal democracies for safety, a better life and peace. Now they also want compliance with their own social and religious values there. To decide what your cartoonists can draw and teachers can teach. Reflect on this and then debate if the five points we detailed earlier make sense or not.

RSS Chief & Happiness of Indian Muslims

 

Why are they gunning for Republic TV?

 

The power of negative thinking

Tim Harford in The FT 

For a road sign to be a road sign, it needs to be placed in proximity to traffic. Inevitably, it is only a matter of time before someone drives into the pole. If the pole is sturdy, the results may be fatal. 

The 99% Invisible City, a delightful new book about the under-appreciated wonders of good design, explains a solution. The poles that support street furniture are often mounted on a “slip base”, which joins an upper pole to a mostly buried lower pole using easily breakable bolts. 

 A car does not wrap itself around a slip-based pole; instead, the base gives way quickly. Some slip bases are even set at an angle, launching the upper pole into the air over the vehicle. The sign is easily repaired, since the base itself is undamaged. Isn’t that clever? 

 There are two elements to the cleverness. One is specific: the detailed design of the slip-base system. But the other, far more general, is a way of thinking which anticipates that things sometimes go wrong and then plans accordingly. 

That way of thinking was evidently missing in England’s stuttering test-and-trace system, which, in early October, failed spectacularly. Public Health England revealed that 15,841 positive test results had neither been published nor passed on to contact tracers. 

The proximate cause of the problem was reported to be the use of an outdated file format in an Excel spreadsheet. Excel is flexible and any idiot can use it but it is not the right tool for this sort of job. It could fail in several disastrous ways; in this case, the spreadsheet simply ran out of rows to store the data. 

But the deeper cause seems to be that nobody with relevant expertise had been invited to consider the failure modes of the system. What if we get hacked? What if someone pastes the wrong formula into the spreadsheet? What if we run out of numbers? 

We should all spend more time thinking about the prospect of failure and what we might do about it. It is a useful mental habit but it is neither easy nor enjoyable. 

We humans thrive on optimism. Without the capacity to banish worst-case scenarios from our minds, we could hardly live life at all. Who could marry, try for a baby, set up a business or do anything else that matters while obsessing about what might go wrong? It is more pleasant and more natural to hope for the best. 

We must be careful, then, when we allow ourselves to stare steadily at the prospect of failure. Stare too long, or with eyes too wide, and we will be so paralysed with anxiety that success, too, becomes impossible. 

Care is also needed in the steps we take to prevent disaster. Some precautions cause more trouble than they prevent. Any safety engineer can reel off a list of accidents caused by malfunctioning safety systems: too many backups add complexity and new ways to fail. 

My favourite example — described in the excellent book Meltdown by Chris Clearfield and András Tilcsik — was the fiasco at the Academy Awards of 2017, when La La Land was announced as the winner of the Best Picture Oscar that was intended for Moonlight. The mix-up was made possible by the existence of duplicates of each award envelope — a precaution that triggered the catastrophe. 

But just because it is hard to think productively about the risk of failure does not mean we should give up. One gain is that of contingency planning: if you anticipate possible problems, you have the opportunity to prevent them or to prepare the ideal response. 

A second advantage is the possibility of rapid learning. When the aeronautical engineer Paul MacCready was working on human-powered aircraft in the 1970s, his plane — the Gossamer Condor — was designed to be easily modified and easily repaired after the inevitable crashes. (At one stage, the tail flap was adjusted by taping a Manila folder to it.) 

Where others had spent years failing to win the prestigious Kremer prize for human-powered flight, MacCready’s team succeeded in months. One secret to their success was that the feedback loop of fly —> crash —> adapt was quick and cheap. 

Not every project is an aeroplane but there are plenty of analogies. When we launch a new project we might think about prototyping, gathering data, designing small experiments and avidly searching for feedback from the people who might see what we do not. 

If we expect that things will go wrong, we design our projects to make learning and adapting part of the process. When we ignore the possibility of failure, when it comes it is likely to be expensive and hard to learn from. 

The third advantage of thinking seriously about failure is that we may turn away from projects that are doomed from the outset. From the invasion of Iraq to the process of Brexit, seriously exploring the daunting prospect of disaster might have provoked the wise decision not to start in the first place. 

But I have strayed a long way from the humble slip base. It would be nice if all failure could be anticipated so perfectly and elegantly. Alas, the world is a messier place. All around us are failures — of business models, of pandemic planning, even of our democratic institutions. It is fanciful to imagine designing slip bases for everything. 

Still: most things fail, sooner or later. Some fail gracefully, some disgracefully. It is worth giving that some thought.