The sad and ironic truth is that the United States, which has spent decades and billions of dollars ostensibly strengthening democratic systems abroad, has completely neglected to do so at home, blinded by the belief in its exceptionalism and immunity from the problems affecting other nations.
It is jarring to think that a country that styles itself as the leader of the free world, a paragon of democracy, and “the shining city on the hill” could be facing its third disputed election in 25 years.
Jarring, but hardly surprising.
“If a factory is torn down but the rationality which produced it is left standing,” wrote US philosopher Robert Pirsig, in his book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, “then that rationality will simply produce another factory. If a revolution destroys a government, but the systematic patterns of thought that produced that government are left intact, then those patterns will repeat themselves”.
And the United States has been pretty bad at disrupting the “systematic patterns of thought” that have generated its chronic electoral and governance crises.
A rickety boat
Four years ago, on the eve of the most recent of those elections, The Atlantic magazine published an article titled The Election That Could Break America. Meant for its November edition, it was posted online early because of what the magazine saw as the “urgency” of its message.
In the piece, Barton Gellman laid out a troubling scenario of what would unfold if then-President Donald Trump lost and refused to concede. The United States, he argued, was sailing into “a perfect storm of adverse conditions... If we emerge without trauma, it will not be an unbreakable ship that has saved us.”
The “ship” he referred to was the country’s revered constitution and the system of regulating government power it established 235 years ago. He was arguing, in essence, that it was not unbreakable. “The political system may no longer be strong enough to preserve its integrity,” he said.
Today, as the United States holds yet another election that many are again warning could break it, that ship is looking more like a rickety boat. Both leading candidates, Trump and Kamala Harris, have said that US democracy is doomed if they lose.
The fears being expressed of a second Trump term point to the low confidence, both within the United States and abroad, in the country’s governance systems.
In his article, Gellman cited legal scholar Lawrence Douglas, who wrote: “[The US] Constitution does not secure the peaceful transition of power, but rather presupposes it”. It is on such presuppositions that nations break.
A substantial amount of the anxiety surrounding this election stems from the fear that those much-touted US guardrails cannot contain a president who does not live up to that constitutional presupposition.
“Even if Trump does not do half of what he threatens,“ the UK’s Observer newspaper recently editorialised, “victory for him would be a disaster for America and the world – and this time, there will be few if any ‘adults in the room’ to restrain him. His first victim could be US democracy.”
Election integrity
If a country always seems to be just one presidential election away from losing its democracy, would you describe it as having robust democratic institutions? Or perhaps as a fragile, unstable nation that struggles to consistently safeguard the democratic aspirations of its citizens?
Undoubtedly, the United States remains the world’s most powerful country, with little to fear from external enemies. However, thanks to a toxic mix of hubris, history, and resistance from deeply entrenched interests, the failure to reform its governance institutions and to reinforce them against assault by a rogue Executive has left the country vulnerable to internal rot.
Stephen John Stedman and Thomas Westphal called it “America’s electoral exceptionalism”, noting that the United States is the one democracy that seems immune from a global movement that has transformed how modern elections are held.
Today, Americans, who like to think of themselves as the freest and the bravest people in the world, are told they have to ignore a genocide in order to save their country from a fascist.
For example, it lacks uniform, capable, independent, and non-partisan election management bodies, leaving its elections vulnerable to partisan gerrymandering and voter suppression schemes that elsewhere would be considered mechanisms for “rigging” the election.
Furthermore, its anachronistic electoral college – partly created to entrench the power of slave-owning states – massively inflates the influence of voters in a handful of so-called “battleground states”. There is also the undue influence of campaign spending, especially on advertising, which distorts voters' understanding and perception of issues. Elections in the United States are some of the most expensive in the world, and ads are the biggest thing campaigns spend money on.
The situation has been getting worse. In 2012 the Electoral Integrity Project ranked the integrity of US presidential elections as similar to contests in South Africa, Mexico, and Bhutan. Less than a decade later, they were closer to elections in Rwanda and Myanmar.
Slim possibility of reform
The problem goes beyond elections. Today, Americans, who like to think of themselves as the freest and the bravest people in the world, are told they have to ignore a genocide in order to save their country from a fascist. It would be a breathtaking constriction of the imagination to call that the product of a robust democracy.
What I have said regarding my own country, Kenya, is true for the United States: What matters more than having good leaders is having good systems.
Americans do not have to take my word for it. In a speech given when the United States was not much older than Kenya is today, US activist Wendell Phillips said: "Only by continual oversight can the democrat in office be prevented from hardening into a despot: Only by unintermitted agitation can a people be kept sufficiently awake to principle not to let liberty be smothered in material prosperity”.
Phillips knew that to rely on the presupposed goodness of rulers, on their willingness to play by the rules, is a treacherous proposition. Better to build systems that can effectively hold them to account and limit the damage they can do. If the United States had spent the last four years doing this, rather than patting itself on the back, it, and the world, would not be back here.
Sadly, few believe that there is any real political appetite for reform. The country will likely survive this election too. And in its aftermath, the valorising of the US electoral and governance system will again lull the populace to sleep – setting up another potentially catastrophic encounter with reality in the not-so-distant future.
