No reason to envy a country where the minority rules

The US used to claim it was bringing democracy to the world. Somehow, it never got around to bringing it to itself.

Last week’s midterm elections underlined a reality that is routinely ignored: the US is not a democracy. One of the core features of a democracy is that each adult should enjoy a vote of equal value. America does not even come close.

People who don’t know the US system may have been confused last week because the Democrats won control of the House of Representatives but may end up losing two or three seats in the Senate.

This seemed to show voters were confused. Actually, it showed that the system is rigged. More than 55% of voters in Senate elections voted for Democrats, 43% for Republicans. In a fair system, the Republicans would have been humiliated.

But in the US, a state with a population of 39-million gets the same two senators as one with half a million.

This was never fair but has become grotesque: if the trend continues, not long from now 70% of the US population will elect just 16 of the 100 senators. The same bias means presidential elections are decided not by who gets most votes from the people but who gets most in an electoral college, which cancels out many votes in the larger states Donald Trump and George W Bush won the presidential election despite the fact their opponents won more votes.

The US system also gives states the right to draw up electoral districts for the House of Representatives. Inevitably, they rig them to favour the party in power. States also make their own voting rules. Those with Republican majorities routinely use those powers to deny the vote to racial minorities who tend to vote Democratic.

The system reached its height in 2018 in the state of Georgia, where the Republican candidate for governor was also in charge of deciding who should vote. He is said to have won because he found ways of depriving tens of thousands of people of their vote.

A party that gets most of its support from small rural states

and uses it to deny its opponents the vote can win the presidency and a majority in both of the houses that make laws. To ensure the rigging cannot be undone, the minority can then appoint judges to the Supreme Court, even if they have a history of abusing women, who can serve for life and be counted on to interpret the constitution to make sure minority rule is never undone.

The US is, therefore, like apartheid SA, a country under minority rule. The muchrevered US constitution was drafted by slave-owning men who wanted to ensure the majority never ruled. The system they created is working exactly as they hoped.

Knowing this is important to South Africans because many of us assume our young democracy is inferior to those in the West in general and the US in particular. But in our democracy, every adult can vote, the candidates with the most votes win, and elections are not run by the candidates.

Nor is this the only area in which we are more democratic. According to Reporters Without Borders, our media are the 28th freest in the world, the US’s is 45th and much-revered Britain is 40th.

We have no business hankering after the day when our democracy will reach the exalted standards set by the US. Nor should we be listening to lectures on democracy’s merits from local admirers of the US.

We should rather be offering to help Americans achieve the democracy we enjoy.

● Friedman is research professor with the humanities faculty of the University of Johannesburg.