America’s failure
The US is tearing itself apart because its political system has failed, writes Peter Hartcher.
China’s authoritarian system has been promoting itself as superior to American democracy for more than a decade.
The global financial crisis devastated the United States economy while China emerged largely unscathed, and Beijing’s propaganda machine seized on the contrast: ‘‘The ‘China model’ has created miracles, opened a unique path of development and superseded belief in a superior ‘America model’, marking its demise,’’ proclaimed the People’s
Daily in 2009.
It was around the same time that Freedom House, a prodemocracy think tank in the US, declared a ‘‘democratic recession’’. In its latest annual pulse-taking, published in March, it found that the recession of democracy worldwide was entering its 14th consecutive year.
Twice as many countries suffered declines in freedom as enjoyed improvements, Freedom House reported. It counts the US among the countries in democratic decline, with freedom falling by eight points on its 100-point scale over the past 10 years.
Today China hardly need press its case against the US. All it has to do is sit back and let the daily US news tell the story. More than 100,000 Americans dead from coronavirus. Some 40 million thrown out of work in the last couple of months. Race riots in America’s major cities. While its president promotes yet more division.
The US is tearing itself apart. The strap on Australia’s Sky News on Monday morning summarised it as ‘‘Fire and fury’’. That was Donald Trump’s threat against North Korea three years ago. Yet today Kim JongUn continues to build weapons and it is the US suffering fire and fury. Entirely self-inflicted.
China’s Communist Party need not say a word. But it can’t help itself. America is drinking ‘‘a glass of bitter wine brewed by the US itself’’, China Central TV called it. Another state propaganda organ, The Global Times, headlined: ‘‘US double standards on domestic riots and Hong Kong turmoil mocked on Chinese internet’’.
This was supposed to be about the time when China’s dictatorship collapsed, to be replaced by a bright democratic dawn, according to the consensus of elite US opinion until very recently. Instead, it’s the US governance model now on the defensive.
John Keane, a politics professor at Sydney University, says: ‘‘I think this is one of the great golden or historical moments for the Chinese empire. We have the US as a republic and as an empire showing all the signs of a degraded country and an empire in decline.’’
In Keane’s latest book, The
New Despotism, he says that China is only one of a growing number of despotic states, but it is ‘‘the leader of the pack’’.
Of course, failures of US governance are not an indictment of liberal democracy itself as a form of governance.
Other liberal democratic countries continue to be highly successful. Whether it’s Germany, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Korea or Taiwan, these are all liberal democracies that continue to deliver the highest living standards and greatest liberties available to humanity today.
America’s problems are not intrinsic to liberal democracy. They are American failures. Above and beyond any single US problem is the system that is supposed to fix problems – its political system.
When a country’s political system fails, its problem-solving mechanism fails. The US today is in such a poor state because its biggest problems never get solved – they just accumulate.
The dry tinder piles up. The dreadful race riots of the 1960s should have been a catalyst for reform, but turned out to be a premonition of race-based rage to come. As Serena Williams says: ‘‘The worst part is this is nothing new, it’s just filmed.’’
The fact that the US is the only rich country to suffer declining life expectancy should have led to change in the underlying problems – deep inequality and ramshackle healthcare. Instead, the political system continues with tax cuts for the well-off, and exploitative working conditions and threadbare social welfare for the poor.
And healthcare? America’s unique status as the only rich country without universal healthcare remains, in spite of Barack Obama’s efforts.
Another problem that America proves incapable of solving is mass gun ownership. While the rest of the developed world sees free firearms access as a problem, the US sees it as a solution. The solution to more gun deaths, it keeps telling itself, is more guns. The second amendment seems incapable of ever being amended.
And while the guns get bigger and more numerous, what of the butter? The US economy does produce strong bursts of growth, but in a convulsive cycle. It has suffered three recessions to Australia’s one.
China, of course, was the source of the pandemic and so it’s also the source of the global downturn. But the great recession of 2008-09 was a result of unchecked risktaking on Wall Street, in turn a failure of regulation and prudential supervision.
And so the tinder builds up. Racism, inequality, thirdworld healthcare, convulsive economic growth. Every one is
a failure of US politics, often a result of over-politicisation.
I was long baffled by the paradox of American competence: how could a nation with such supreme expertise in so many fields produce such dismal national outcomes? A wise old Australian diplomat solved the puzzle for me quite a few years ago: ‘‘The expertise gets crowded out at the top.’’
Donald Trump is a beneficiary of American anger and frustration. A critical mass of voters gave up on the political system to solve their problems and turned to a celebrity demagogue. Trump was an alternative, but not a solution. Populism is a political style that offers unworkably simple solutions to complex problems.
So the problems still won’t be solved. Instead, the president is cheerleading the anger, stoking the flames, hoping to exploit the conflagration for his re-election.
All this allows the repressive regime of Xi Jinping to sit and gloat. Ronald Reagan spoke of America as ‘‘the shining city upon a hill’’. Just now all we can see is the flames reflecting against the clouds.