If anyone thinks that the United States is the most democratic country in the world, they are mistaken. According to the Democracy Index compiled annually by The Economist, the United States ranks 25th and is classified as a “flawed democracy.” The United States left the “major democratic league” back in 2016. The problems with democracy did not arise suddenly and not at all with the appearance of Donald Trump in the White House. Trump is a visible consequence, not a cause. The failure of the American democratic mechanism should be sought back in the 1960s. By the way, one of the reasons was the Vietnam War (we recently wrote about it), which seriously undermined voters’ trust in the state. And this trust has only been falling over the years. Discontent was also caused by the isolated establishment of both parties, which finally “broke away” from the people.
The United States ranks 25th and belongs to the countries with “imperfect democracy”
Back in 1995, Christopher Lasch wrote in his book “The Rise of the Elites,” which is extremely relevant not only for the United States, that the American privileged classes “have withdrawn not only from dying industrial cities but from any public services at all.” Thanks to globalization, the new elites, those in the top 20% of income, as opposed to the elites of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, who were rooted in the life of the state, no longer live the same life as their fellow citizens. They belong to the celestials: private clinics, private education, bodyguards; they live in closed societies… Their integration into the global market of labor, recreation, information, and culture makes them “tourists” in their own country.
In addition, the United States has a huge number of problems that directly or indirectly affect the decline in democratic indicators. In particular, the country ranks first in terms of the growth of the number of prisoners (only the Russian Federation is approaching the United States). The incarceration rate here is the highest in the world – 702 people per 100,000 people. Currently, more than 2 million people are behind bars in the United States. But that’s not all – only a third of the total number of convicts are in prison in the United States. The rest, more than four million, are serving alternative sentences or have been released early. The total is about 6 million. For a country that until recently claimed to be the “first democracy in the world,” this is too much.
The dangers of modern democracy
The hopes that authoritarianism in the twenty-first century was doomed were not realized. It turned out to be very resilient and capable of rebirth. Instead, democracy has shown its own vulnerability, facing a huge number of threats: terrorism, economic crises, waves of migration, environmental collapse, political populism, the rise of post-nationalist and leftist sentiments, the pandemic, and more.
According to Freedom House, the level of freedom and democracy in the world has been steadily declining for 15 years in a row. The level of political rights and civil liberties is declining. The same is noted by The Economist, which called the fall of democracy unprecedented.
History is almost unpredictable. Only some minor political options can be predicted. The era when democracy could be imposed is probably over. John Mill (1806-1873) warned against this practice: “No one has the right to force an individual to do or not to do anything on the grounds that it would be better for him, or that it would make him happier, or, finally, that other people think it would be more noble and even expedient to do so” (“On Liberty”). Otherwise, it will be imitation democracies, epigonism. Just as in the past, Europe imitated France of the seventeenth century, the time of Louis XIV. Wherever “little Versailles” appeared then!