The Humanist

America’s Increasing Democracy Deficit

Cecille Isidro — Sat, 02 Sep 2006 01:42:00 -0400

In the post-World War II period, America was seen by many as the "City on the Hill," an imperfect yet nonetheless shining beacon of government of, by, and for the people. But President George W. Bush’s harsh criticisms of The New York Times and other media outlets for their reporting on covert and potentially illegal spying programs underscores once again the degree to which a major crack has appeared in America’s democratic edifice.

The Bush administration’s reasoning is founded on a twisted form of Catch-22 logic. It goes something like this:

This war on terrorism is our new Cold War, and it will last a generation or two.
Because we are at war it is necessary to engage in certain behaviors-renditions, torture, domestic surveillance, secret prisons.
We cannot tell you what we are doing because it will compromise national security during a time of war.
The courts cannot review what we are doing because it will compromise national security during a time of war.
Any newspaper reporter or news outlet that reports a leak of these programs can be put under oath and forced to reveal sources, under threat of going to jail for contempt.
Only select members of Congress can know. But they cannot tell anyone because it will compromise national security.
When Congress passes laws, the president has the right to ignore them if he believes they infringe upon his war powers or his role as Commander in Chief.
The courts cannot review the president’s decision in Rule no. 7 because it would compromise national security.

Taken in their totality, these eight rules amount to an end-run around the U.S. Constitution. By the time one reaches the final rule, you realize how fragile American democracy has become. President George W. Bush has exercised only a single veto, a record low no president in modern times has come close to matching, because he doesn’t need it -- he simply ignores any congressional laws he doesn’t like.

It leaves Congress as mostly an advisory body to the president. It leaves the courts as a peripheral institution without its historical oversight role. And it leaves civil liberties -- and Americans who are used to enjoying them -- in a very precarious position.

America used to call this by another name -- autocracy.

U.S. history has been marked by periodic political struggles, with deep philosophical roots, about the nature of U.S. democracy and the role of government. On one side of this struggle have been those who see representative democracy as a vehicle for self-government and popular endowment, a strong current in the American stream propelled forward by the likes of Jefferson, Madison, Susan B. Anthony, Thurgood Marshall and Martin Luther King.

On the other side are those who believe in an elite democracy that requires only occasional popular input and ratification. President Richard Nixon crudely expressed this attitude when, oddly enough, he wiretapped himself in the Oval Office saying "blacks, whites, Mexicans and the rest shouldn’t have anything to say about government, mainly because they don’t have the brains to know."

But Nixon’s attitude is only the 200-years-later version of the one stated by first Chief Justice of the United States John Jay and other founders when Jay said that the upper classes "were the better kind of people" and that "the people who own the country ought to govern it." Truth be told, many of the founders were suspicious of "We the people."

The recent resurgence of antidemocratic attitudes makes it more urgent than ever that our nation reengage with a fundamental question: Does the American way of life require a participatory democracy and an engaged citizenry, as Alexis de Tocqueville observed here in the 1830s when he wrote, "The political activity that pervades the United States must be seen in order to be understood. No sooner do you set foot on American ground than you are stunned by a kind of tumult;" or can our nation exist, as conservative columnists Charles Krauthammer and George Will have suggested, as a "check-off" democracy, where most citizens live their lives largely ignoring politics, rising up at the ballot box only when riled by grossly offensive government policy, repugnant politician behavior, or an external threat?

As tempting as the vision of a democracy running on aristocratic autopilot may be, the reality is that an elite, trickle-down political system eventually dead-ends in arrogance, secrecy, and abuse of power. History is filled with examples of this bitter lesson, from the Roman Republic’s prototype democracy imploding into Caesar’s dictatorship, to Germany’s Weimar Republic transmogrifying into the brutality of Hitler’s Third Reich.

What will be the fate of the American Republic? The final pages of this chapter are being written with each passing week.

The United States used to stand for something around the world, but now most of the world is shaking its head. Any respect given to the United States is more out of fear of our military weapons than respect for core American values and principles. But with the country bogged down in Iraq, unable to achieve victory there, even our military seems not so mighty anymore. The loss of America’s global leadership role is just one of the many casualties of current administrative policies.

The new motto of this form of Catch-22 democracy is "trust us; we know what we are doing." But as Ronald Reagan used to say, "Trust, but verify," because Reagan knew that secrecy is the modus operandi of autocratic government.

Palestinian Elections: It's the Voting System, Stupid!

Cecille Isidro — Thu, 01 Jun 2006 18:20:00 -0400

Much hand wringing and second guessing have been produced from the recent Palestinian elections that resulted in Hamas, a group on the Bush administration's terrorist list, winning a sizable majority of legislative seats. Analysts on the right and left have scrambled for a response, with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice saying "nobody saw it coming."

The problem is, it never came -- if the "it" is supposed to be overwhelming Palestinian support for Hamas. The truth is, the electoral system used for the elections gave grossly unrepresentative results in which Hamas won nearly a super majority of seats even though they didn't win even a majority of votes. The Hamas "victory" was the result of a poorly planned democracy that could have been righted by employing the electoral methods used in the recently successful Iraqi elections.

The Palestinian elections used a combination of a U.S.-style winner-take-all electoral system and a more European-style proportional voting system. Palestinian voters had a vote for their favorite political party (the proportional vote) and votes for individual candidates (the winner-take-all vote). Unfortunately, the winner-take-all part broke down and Hamas won way more seats than their votes should have given them.

Look at the actual results. In the proportional vote, which is a national vote and therefore the best measure of the overall support for each political party, Hamas won about 45 percent of the popular vote and about the same percentage of seats -- 30 of 66 seats, no majority there. The incumbent party, Fatah, won 41 percent of the popular vote and 27 of 66 seats, only three behind Hamas.

So the election was actually quite close, and if those were the only election results, Hamas wouldn't have won a majority of seats and would have needed to form a coalition with other political parties. A likely possibility is Hamas would have formed a grand coalition with Fatah, which would have provided a stable transition.

Instead, the winner-take-all seats, which are allocated by local districts, completely threw the election to Hamas. Though Hamas and Fatah had nearly equal support nationwide, Hamas won 46 of 66 seats -- 70percent -- in the winner-take-all districts and Fatah won only 16 district seats.

Overall, Hamas won a stunning 58 percent of legislative seats even though their national support was only around 45 percent. It was a tragic breakdown of the electoral system. Instead of talking about negotiating a coalition government for the Palestinians, the talk now is about picking through the shards, figuring how to salvage the roadmap to peace.

It didn't have to be this way. The designers of democracy in Palestine had only to look to neighboring Iraq to figure out how to design a better method that would have produced more representative results and provided more stability for the peace process.

On December 15, 2005, Iraq held its second ever election, with Iraq's eighteen provinces electing 275 members of parliament using a proportional voting method. Each political party was awarded legislative seats in direct proportion to their vote in each province. The proportional method was intended partly to better include Sunni Muslims. Turnout was about 70 percent with exceptionally high participation among Sunnis.

Most importantly, due to the use of the proportional method, when the dominant Shiite party failed to win a majority of the popular vote, they also failed to win a majority of legislative seats. Surely if they had used a winner-take-all method like that used in the Palestinian elections, the Shiite bloc would have won a strong legislative majority even though they lacked a popular majority.

Instead, now the Shiites in Iraq are forced to negotiate with their legislative partners, including the Sunnis and Kurds, producing a government that preserves the fragile consensus in Iraq. It is really a shame that for all the billions of dollars in aid poured into Palestine, no one had the sense to make sure the elections were conducted using a method like the one used in Iraq that would guarantee representative results.

While various political analysts are saying Hamas' victory is a disaster built on short-sighted policies by the Palestinians, Israel, and the U.S., the truth is a bit more mundane. Hamas' overwhelming victory is the result of a poorly designed electoral system. Unfortunately, when you are trying to jumpstart democracy, the devil is in the details.

Beyond Fear: The Triumph of International Humanitarian Law

Cecille Isidro — Tue, 01 Jun 2004 00:00:00 -0400

There is a common affliction today that subconsciously threatens a generation of young American writers and social critics concerned about the direction of U.S. foreign policy. As war rages abroad and terrorists threaten us at home, fear increasingly dictates our national course; amidst a general and physical fright we posit only the tired formula of reacting to disaster. With mounting national hysteria, the imagination that is required to transcend conflict somehow escapes us. In a panic, the only question we know to ask is: when will the next attack come?

In a symbiotic relationship with those who actually wish to do us harm, fearmongers who plot U.S. foreign policy bait us with this basest human emotion, scaring us into acquiescence. We readily accept the counterintuitive notion that halting progress toward a common body of international law will somehow make us safer and more secure. Proponents of this philosophy would have us believe that only an America free to wield its power, unfettered by voices of caution or the dictates of international law, can guarantee its citizens' security. The United States is unrivaled in its military and economic muscle, and the unwavering stability of our democracy is the envy of the world -- yet we remain vulnerable. Under the ethos commonly referred to as neoconservatism, only one course of action emerges: become even mightier and consolidate global power so as to deter new threats as they emerge.

But those who refuse to languish in this general malaise are beginning to ask a very different question: can the world 's sole superpower really provide global leadership pursuing a foreign policy predicated on fear and anxiety? An ideology that sustains itself by preying on fear necessarily suspends us in a paralysis of social progress; to simply endure until the next crisis erupts condemns us to a cycle of human stagnation. This is progress's staunchest foe.

Yet hope remains, for humanity's natural state is neither static nor reactionary. Rather, history shows that the steady march of human progress prevails over quasi-theological dialectics that pit "us" against the threatening "other" -- or, in the inimitable words of George W. Bush, between "people who hate things versus we who love things."

Advancement beyond this primitive concept of world order surrounds us. Humanity's most shining example is the steps it has taken toward fashioning an ever-expanding body of international humanitarian law. Once thought an impossible task, we now have a stable cannon of law to punish -- and ultimately to prevent -- crimes of war. That old realist adage "in time of war, law is silent" no longer rings true. Efforts since World War II to define genocide and crimes against humanity, as well as labors to restrict the use of inherently indiscriminate weapons, represent a countervailing culture of optimism -- a culture with tangible successes that deserve to be celebrated.

The origin of crimes against humanity as a judicial concept was the result of a deliberate choice of the Nuremberg prosecutors, who lacked adequate legal precedent to punish the full scope of Nazi atrocities. Amid great controversy, and contrary to the demands of arch realists who felt that sovereign nation-states remained the only legitimate actors in international relations, the legal definition of crimes against humanity elevated the rights of the human person to a level of legitimate concern for the international community. The inclusion of crimes that didn't (then) fall into the definition of a war crime -- either because the perpetrator and victims belonged to the same state (for example, the German Jews), or because the victims belonged to a nationality of a state that was allied to that of the perpetrator (for example, Austrian Gypsies) -- revolutionized the laws that govern warfare. The world awoke to a new reality in which the need to punish systematic human rights abuses can supervene sovereignty in international law. That nationality need not determine the right of a victim to seek justice through international law remains the bedrock of human rights law to this day.

Parallel to the creation of crimes against humanity was the invention of genocide as a category of war crimes. Samantha Power, in her Pulitzer Prize