Democratic Resilience
A (Conditional) Reason for Hope
It’s difficult to prophesize in our country. The rate of technological and cultural change continues to increase and many of the traditional institutions which bracketed society (church, family, university, law enforcement, the media) continue to wither or (in the case of universities and the media) curdle. Things have changed greatly in the past 5 years and neither party seems committed to a sensible program or the coherent values which they promoted until a decade ago.
Yet I could name a dozen promising trends. In terms of birthrate, resources, social trust, disposable income, etc. America is still sitting pretty. So… which trends really reflect the situation?
None of them do, of course. Many trends are not linear, or will not continue, or depend on external factors which are always shifting. Some metrics are cyclical, or reactive: this is, they regularly move in opposite directions, or they increase/decrease until reaching a certain point and then they reverse. We see reactive trends everywhere in human affairs: if labor conditions continue to get harder and harder eventually there is a revolt and the situation reverses; If a popular political party gains control of the government their support peaks at a certain point and their voter base begins to ebb, as their predecessors recede from recent memory and all of the public issues of the country are blamed on the party; Crime will continue to increase, and then the town will decide they’ve had enough and double their spending on and hiring of police.
Democracies are much richer and more complex and more technocratic than they used to be, and along with elite domination of the government apparatus we also have the emergence of political parties and ideologies, which confuse and divide people and probably cause more harm than almost any other factor. If you can convince half of the voters that police are a bad thing, or that hiring minorities is more important than hiring excellent candidates you can weaken the competence and trust and safety of that area enormously and make effective reform extremely difficult. We should never be complacent in the face of elite corruption or mass ideological delusion (as my next case studies-South Africa and Great Britain-will demonstrate).
Nevertheless, sometimes things get so bad and the causes are so obvious that the voters react by throwing out the politicians who facilitated or enabled the problems in the first place. I see a growing trend of that happening with immigration in the United States. Immigration has become completely out of control and is the best data point I have available to establish that our executive branch is not fit for purpose and is not being managed by even normal ‘Beltway Insiders’. This is a fast-growing catastrophe (10 million people and counting, including probably disproportionate numbers of career criminals and violent psychopaths) and almost nothing has been done about it. The recent legislation doesn’t even begin to address the issue, in my opinion. I will leave Congress out of this analysis: the executive branch has all the resources and legal authority to manage the border right now, and even shut it down. Its failure to do so indicates that the Democrat party has moved even farther leftward and that normal political and national security considerations are not being aired.
BUT the issue is grabbing attention. The media is reluctant to report on it but this becomes almost irrelevant when public schools in your borough are being taken over as migrant housing camps and illegal immigrants are regularly robbing your neighbors and occasionally shooting at police. I cannot say that immigration will cause a massive Democrat deficit in November but I am confident that it is contributing to the ongoing loss of Democrat support in working class and legal immigrant communities, including among black Americans. This kind of loss has profound psychological implications for Democrats. Their rhetoric and their worldview become completely untenable if 40-50% of black voters turn away from them. Poor whites already have. Hispanics are quickly moving in the same direction.
Something similar happened with the law enforcement policy rhetoric in 2020. Democrat politicians and rich white people of all varieties were suddenly seized by guilt and confusion (not enough to give up their safe houses or enviable schools or highly paid jobs, but certainly enough to vote to cut police budgets). A dozen cities reacted with maudlin public flourishes and slashed their police budgets. Within 2 years nearly all of them had reversed the cuts, and virtually every local politician associated with this period and the defund the police rhetoric (as well as DA’s and city councilmen) were swept out of office. The reaction wasn’t enough to restore previous levels of safety and most of those localities are still mired and corruption and confusion and high levels of crime but it is a reminder that democracy works. Unfortunately it works best and fastest when problems have gotten seriously bad and their challenges achieve a new degree of unity among the voters. This is always a possibility unless the voters are so deranged by ideology and disconnected by privilege that the problems are not real for them. To be sure, there are millions of progressive voters in the U.S. today who meet those descriptions.
The Oakland Mayor and DA have had to answer for their city’s surging crime rates and while the city is far from safe or flourishing this is a reassuring reminder that elections CAN fix problems once they become bad enough or the leaders become radical or unrealistic enough
This is not a specific prediction about any issue or election, but it’s a reminder that sometimes problems become so glaring and difficult that they provoke a strong response from the electorate. Those responses are often sudden and dramatic and they can remake national governments in the space of a month.
Here are some national examples of democratic resilience:
El Salvador in addressing its gang and murder problem
Guatemala in addressing its corruption
Argentina in addressing its catastrophic social welfare state and financial mismanagement, for decades
Canada… (soon?); I hope I can add Canada to my list within a few years, after Pierre Poilievre is elected to the office of Prime Minister in that country
Please note that national reconstruction is a long and arduous process. It’s far too early to celebrate in any of these countries yet. Still, there is hope: sometimes the voters become so fed up with the status quo that all of the media manipulation is tossed to the side and elite monopolization of power levers is broken. This is the release valve of a functioning democracy, and I believe that our country is not so ill or dysfunctional that it can’t happen here. I’m praying for it.