Trump impeachment won’t cure US ills
Impeaching Donald Trump will not solve America’s democratic deficit, explains Canterbury University’s Dr Nicholas Ross Smith.
United States president Donald Trump easily survived an impeachment vote in the House of Representatives on Wednesday. However, in light of former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn’s decision to plead guilty and cooperate with the Russia probe, Trump’s days in office maybe numbered.
Removing Trump from office – if possible, as the process to impeach and then remove is tricky – would probably be a good thing given the ignominious start he has made as America’s 45th president. He is clearly not up to the job as his first year in office has been one egregious faux pas after another. However, removing Trump from power would not represent any sort of a ‘‘win’’ for American democracy.
The last 12 months have highlighted numerous ailments with American democracy. Obviously the threat of external interference is under the microscope at the moment, but even more pertinent issues remain unaddressed, such as the corruption of the DNC; voter apathy; the rise of antiestablishment sentiment; the quirks of the American electoral system; and the pervasive culture war, to name but a few.
The problem is that America’s democratic ills run a lot deeper than the aforementioned issues. The truth is that American democracy, for some time, has been quite flawed. A 2014 study by Princeton University’s Martin Gilens and Northwestern University’s Benjamin I Page made the argument that economic elites and organised groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on US government policy, while average citizens and massbased interest groups have little or no independent influence.
What Gilens and Page argue is that the US is more an oligarchy than a democracy. Whereas a democracy is supposed to be a system where the power is with the people (demos = people, kratia = power), an oligarchy is a system where a small group of elites rule (oligoi = a few, archein = to rule).
How did this ‘‘oligarchisation of power’’ occur in the US? Well, firstly, it is a mistake to see it as either a recent phenomenon or the result of an individual (i.e. Trump) or a movement (i.e. the alt-right). Rather, the oligarchisation of power in the US is an innate byproduct of the American democratic system.
Although this appears counterintuitive, any democratic system which has elections as the dominant mechanism of its popular participation is integrally undemocratic and prone to the emergence of oligarchy (New Zealand is not immune from this either).
Elections tend to favour candidates with power, status and money. They are also quite corruptible as interest groups/ lobbies know exactly who to access. Furthermore, elections are naturally divisive events which lead to partisanship and reduced cooperation. Lastly, as candidates campaign to win votes, shameless populism tends to come to fore to win votes.
The 2016 US presidential election demonstrated this quite aptly. The two main candidates were not liked by the people. Both had dubious links to interest groups. Both represented partisan political parties, and used populist demagoguery in their campaigns. Speaking of which, there was zero constructive debate on actual issues during the lead-up to the election, just a cacophony of obnoxious campaigning to an increasingly apathetic populace.
All of this helps maintain oligarchy at the expense of democracy. Plus, because we are indoctrinated to see ‘‘circuses’’ like the 2016 presidential election as democracy-in-action, few have been able to look beyond this and see the systemic problems which undermine American democracy.
To this end, it is important to see Trump not as the harbinger of American oligarchy – although he could well worsen it – but rather a symptom of the oligarchy already in place.
This is why removing Trump from office would merely a superficial adjustment because it would not change the embedded ills of the US democratic system.
What is needed are deeper solutions to American democracy, ones that look at systemic fixes rather than window-dressing reforms.
The obvious systemic fix starts with lessening America’s reliance on elections. Embracing more deliberative forms of democracy would be a start. For example, using citizens’ assemblies selected by lottery – like our jury selection in NZ – to debate and propose policies on single issues would help give ordinary citizens a say. A lottery is much fairer than an election because it does not discriminate against ethnicity, class, gender, or sexuality. Also, re-engaging people in politics would likely, over time, reverse the growing apathy in the U.S.
In addition, decentralising the American system by empowering local bodies would also help narrow the democratic deficit. Frankly, the U.S. is too large and too centralised – worryingly, NZ is even more centralised – to be an efficient democracy. Plato calculated that an optimal polity would be limited to no more than 5040 heads of families because larger the polity, the more susceptible it is to tyranny. Devolving power in the US back to the states and then beyond to the most local level possible would make presidential elections less pivotal and give ordinary people a larger say.
However, because the current discourse is obsessed with Trump and Russia as the key factors of America’s democratic woes, this unique, but brief window for serious discussions about what a more democratic system for the US could look like might be lost, and, as a consequence, the oligarchisation will continue.
Dr Nicholas Ross Smith is a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Canterbury’s National Centre for Research on Europe. His main research areas include geopolitics in Eastern Europe, EU and Russian foreign policy, democratisation and geoeconomics in an emerging multipolar world.