Watching Mr. Trump trying to overturn a democratic election with the enthusiastic support of many Republicans has surprised many because the United States is supposed to be the democratic country that all other countries aspire to.
If you are one of these people who is surprised you should not be. Authoritarian rule has been the predominant form of government since humans formed civilizations. It is said that humans began to become civilized when we settled down into agrarian settlements and societies. It is also mentioned that when this happened the more egalitarian governing arrangements of hunter/gatherer societies gave way to rule by one person or a small group of people.
If you then look through that history, which spans about 10,000 years, you will note that less than a thousand years of that history featured any form of democratic government. The Athenians had a form of democracy for a short while. Rome was a republic for several centuries before descending into a dictatorship. Then there is the United States, which introduced democracy to the modern world, almost 2000 years after the Roman Republic became the Roman Empire. Some would have us look at the Magna Carta but we need to remember that it was about limiting the powers of the Crown of England in relation to that country's nobility. It was not a democratic constitution.
Further, even though the Athenians, the Romans and the Americans all had democratic looking forms of government, the Athenians and the Romans were the only examples of such, during their eras, and US has only been joined by about two dozen other democracies in the past 200 years or so, with most of them joining in the last 70-80 years. Otherwise, authoritarian governments have been the norm.
The simple fact is democracy is not the natural system of governance of our species. In all cases where democracy has flourished it has collapsed into authoritarianism within a few short centuries or less.
To expect the US to be different is flat wrong. It does look like the US is slowly descending into authoritarianism and maybe it can be reversed but it is an open question. Certainly, this week the Supreme Court of the United States legally squashed the attempts by the Texas Attorney General to overturn a democratic election but in that same week, in Florida, someone very critical of the Florida government's handling of the COVID crisis had their home raided by armed police for a reason that is still unclear to me. Maybe it will turn out she did do something illegal or maybe this will be an indication that the authoritarians in the US were prevented from destroying the American democracy in one fell swoop but that they can still continue to gradually undermine it away from the spotlight in Washington.
What does this mean for the rest of the democracies of the world? Who knows. We are certainly seeing authoritarians pop up in the other democracies of the world, including those which we can say have very stable democracies. It could very well be that the latest experiment in democracy will suffer the same fate as the previous ones. We will have to wait and see to be certain.
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A few days ago, the New Zealand elections saw a return of Jacinda Ardern’s Labour Party to the centre of power. What we don’t know for sure, despite the landslide, is whether she is going to share the reigns of her government. That is because New Zealand is one of a handful of countries in the world that has a real democracy. If we want to know how (not) to do democracy (and we do, believe me), then this is a good place to start.
In 1996, the Kiwis introduced a new electoral system called MMP, Mixed-Member Proportional. I will spare you the details, but in essence, it means that voters get two votes: one for their district and one for a political party. MMP was first introduced to the world by the Germans, who still use it to great effect. What it does in practice is that it successfully undermines a two-party system. It gives more diverse and smaller parties a voice and because those parties often get to rule with one or more other parties, bipartisanship is absolutely necessary. That is vital in the polarised political climate we’ve got in the world at the moment. It also helps people have more faith in their representatives, which is handy when governments need citizens to (not) do things, like in the case of a pandemic.
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