Democracy left behind

The Democrats are working hard to portray President Donald Trump as a threat to democracy, citing his undermining of the rule of law, use of federal forces against peaceful demonstrators and refusal to commit to a peaceful transition of power. This diagnosis is not wrong. But it fails to address the deeper problem, one that will not go away even if Trump is defeated.

The democratic failings of the American political system do not primarily result from the machinations of bad politicians. They are instead located in the very institutions of government itself. Only by reforming these institutions can we create a truly democratic system of government.

The problem is that the United States is the country that democracy left behind.

At its founding, we were on the cutting edge of democracy. Our Constitution rejected rule by kings and pioneered democratic innovations like civil liberties. But in the 200 years since, democratic institutions have continued to evolve — with improvements in legislatures, elections, the judiciary, party systems, and so on. Other Western nations, with more modern constitutions often adopted in the 20^th century, have taken advantage of these institutional advances and made their democracies fairer, more representative and more accountable to their citizens.

For example, besides Denmark, no other advanced democracy appoints Supreme Court justices for life. All now have mandatory term limits or age limits for justices. These countries will never face our current situation, where Americans will be fated to live under Trump’s ultra-right Supreme Court for many decades after he leaves office.

Other Western countries do democracy better in several other ways:

A None use an Electoral College that allows a minority of voters to choose its chief executive.

A Most use proportional representation voting that makes gerrymandering impossible and creates more representative multi-party legislatures.

A None have anything like our misrepresentative Senate that gives the 40 million voters in the 22 smallest states 44 seats, while giving 40 million Californians two seats.

A Nearly all have rejected our conflict-prone separation-of-powers model of government and have chosen instead a more cooperative parliamentary system that avoids the legislative gridlock that prevents our government from being responsive to the public.

A And all rely much more on public money, not private money from rich organizations and individuals, to fund their election campaigns.

Our political system, with its antiquated 18th-century constitution, has become outmoded and less democratic than it could be. Americans like to brag that we have the oldest constitution in the Western world. But this is like bragging that your phone has the oldest operating system. Democracy has moved on and improved, but we have not.

Falling behind in democracy has meant that the United States has fallen behind other major countries in responding to public demands to tackle the pressing challenges of our age. For instance, the governments in most other leading Western democracies do a much better job of reducing poverty, providing retirement security, enacting climate change controls, delivering affordable and universal health care, enacting reasonable controls of firearms, offering affordable higher education, investing in vital infrastructure, reducing economic inequality and raising minimum wages.

A majority of Americans say they want to see their government do more in all these areas. But it is unlikely they will get the policies they desire as long as the U.S. has outdated political institutions that are crippled by gridlock, plagued by minority rule, and dominated by special interests instead of the public interest.

Given all this, it is not surprising that a 2020 global survey by the Centre for the Future of Democracy found that the U.S. ranks 34^th in public satisfaction with our democracy, trailing most other advanced Western democracies and even some countries in Africa and Latin America. Over half of Americans are now “unsatisfied” with our democracy.

But we need to stop simply blaming politicians for our democratic failures. We must face up to the systemic sources of our political problems, and recognize that institutional problems require institutional solutions.

We need to adopt the National Vote Plan to ensure the president is elected by the popular vote. We have to pass amendments putting term limits on Supreme Court justices and allowing strict regulation of campaign financing. We should embrace voting system reforms like ranked-choice voting. The filibuster must go. And we have to make the Senate more representative, or render it relatively powerless like the House of Lords in Great Britain. Such changes may sound radical, but they are already in place in other developed countries, where they are viewed as business as usual in a real democracy.

Of course, this kind of institutional change is not easy and will require the support of daring leaders and widespread political movements. But we have to try — otherwise the U.S. will be doomed to remain a flawed and second-rate democracy.

▶ Douglas J. Amy is professor emeritus of politics at Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, Mass., and creator of SecondRateDemocracy.com.