Will The Oligarchy that owns the US eeeevvvvveerrrrrr be slightly reined in?

[lpetrich]

Home | V-Dem

Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) is a new approach to conceptualizing and measuring democracy. We provide a multidimensional and disaggregated dataset that reflects the complexity of the concept of democracy as a system of rule that goes beyond the simple presence of elections. The V-Dem project distinguishes between five high-level principles of democracy: electoral, liberal, participatory, deliberative, and egalitarian, and collects data to measure these principles.

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• Autocratization – the decline of democratic traits – accelerates in the world: for the first time since 2001, autocracies are in the majority: 92 countries – home to 54% of the global population. Almost 35% of the world’s population live in autocratizing nations – 2.6 billion people.
• EU has its first non-democracy as a member: Hungary is now classed as an electoral authoritarian regime.
• Major G20 nations and all regions of the world are part of the “third wave of autocratization”: autocratization is affecting Brazil, India, the United States of America, and Turkey, which are major economies with sizeable populations, exercising substantial global military, economic, and political influence. Latin America is back to a level last recorded in the early 1990s while Eastern Europe and Central Asia are at post-Soviet Union lows. India is on the verge of losing its status as a democracy due to the severely shrinking of space for the media, civil society, and the opposition under Prime Minister Modi’s government.
• Pro-democracy resistance grows from 27% in 2009 to 44% in 2019 amidst the autocratization surge. During 2019, citizens in 29 democracies mobilized against autocratization, such as in Bolivia, Poland, and Malawi. Citizens staged mass protests in 34 autocracies, among them Algeria, Hong Kong, and Sudan.

That's rather obvious for the rule of Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, though Donald Trump's Presidency fits very very well.

Online Graphing | V-Dem - Interactive Maps | V-Dem

 

[lpetrich]

Frank DiStefano | The Next Realignment - "Americans are worried about what’s happening to our nation’s politics. They should be. American politics has fallen into turmoil for a reason. America is heading into its next political realignment."

Frank DiStefano explains in detail how realignments work in his book "The Next Realignment".

he book connects the tumult of our present moment to America's history--from the rise and fall of Hamilton’s Federalists and Jefferson’s Democratic-Republicans, through Jackson’s Democrats and Clay’s Whigs, through Lincoln’s Civil War parties, to the Populist and Progressive parties of William Jennings Bryan and Teddy Roosevelt, and then to our New Deal parties of today.

Will the US suffer something like the collapse of the Whigs and the Civil War? Or will the nation have a successful reorganization of the two parties?

He argues that US party systems emerged in bursts and kept going even after the issues that provoked their formation became resolved in some way or other. Some other issues emerge and force the emergence of a new party system. He identifies five of them:

During America’s First Party System Alexander Hamilton’s Federalists battled Thomas Jefferson’s Democratic-Republicans over what sort of republic America would be—a commercial great power to rival those of Europe or a nation of independent farmers dedicated to republican simplicity. In it’s Second Party System, Andrew Jackson’s Democrats and Henry Clay’s Whigs fought over how to bring the people into the republic’s politics as America spread into the frontier. In the Third Party System, a Republican Party based around the North fought with a Democratic Party based around the South over the resentments of the Civil War and the work of post-war Reconstruction. In the Fourth Party System, William Jennings Bryan’s populist Democrats fought with Teddy Roosevelt’s pro-business progressive Republicans to reform America’s institutions in light of industrialization during the Populist and Progressive Era.

We forged the Republicans and Democrats we know today in this Fifth Party System during Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. America’s Fourth Party System parties effectively crumbled during the horror of the Depression. Roosevelt, in responding to the crisis, empowered a brain trust of advisers to develop innovative policies, ones that ultimately pulled from both traditional Republican progressive ideas and populist Democratic ones. Those who opposed Roosevelt and his New Deal, however, saw this new agenda as dangerous . They believed it threatened American liberty and undermined the republican virtues a democratic republic like America needed to thrive.

By the end of Roosevelt’s presidency, the Democrats had a new ideology combining populism and progressivism. It held that Democrats could use expertise to plan a better society benefiting working people and the least well off. We call it New Deal liberalism. The Republicans had a new ideology too, one drawing on the principles of liberty and national virtue. It opposed the excesses of the Democrats’ New Deal liberalism as “big government” that threatened American liberty and the virtues necessary for national success. We call it modern conservatism.

Unlike some others, he thinks that the US is still in its fifth party system. But I think that there is reason to think that the US is in a sixth party system, though the transition to it was gradual, over roughly 1960 - 1990. Its biggest feature has been the Dixiecrats, as they may be called, moved from the Democratic Party to the Republican Party, making it the party of Jefferson Davis. Along with that, the Republican Party has dwindled in its former stronghold, the northeastern states.

When the great debate of a party system ends, American politics always goes into corruption and decline. That was true of the Federalist Party collapse, ending America’s First Party System and ushering in the corrupt Era of Good Feelings. It was true of the Whig collapse that brought the Second Party System to its end leading to the years of political chaos that ended in a civil war. It was true when the Third Party System’s debate over the Civil War decline, creating the corrupted Gilded Age. It was true when the Populist and Progressive Era reforms turned into the drift and hedonism of the Jazz Age. Eventually, after years of drift, when the right force strike hard enough, those parties collapse clearing the way for something new.

That seems to be happening now.

 

[lpetrich]

Frank DiStefano has made some videos about his book: Frank DiStefano - YouTube

The Cycle of Political Realignments! | How American Political "Party Systems" Actually Work - YouTube - introducing his series

Why Third Parties Don't Win, Until They Do! | Why America Has (Only!) Two Political Parties - YouTube - I don't think that he gave Duverger's law the attention that it deserves. But he pointed out about proportional representation that parties often join up into blocs, usually two of them, making a sort of two-party system. He also argues that the two parties have nearly equal size because when one party wins and the other loses, the loser tries to recruit new supporters, while the winner does not try hard enough to keep all of its supporters content. He also proposes that there are no permanent majorities, that a party that gets big will start to lose supporters.

The Left-Right Political Spectrum is a Myth! - YouTube -- arguing that lots of issues are hard to place, and that previous parties often had platforms that cross the present-day political spectrum.

 

[lpetrich]

America's Five Political Eras: What America Has Been Actually Fighting About Throughout the Republic - YouTube -- party systems as great debates.

Originally, the US was to have no political parties. But when the politicians got to business, they broke up into parties.

1st system:
What was the new nation to be?
Federalists - wanted great-power features: banks, standing armies, etc.
Democratic-Republicans - wanted agrarianism without big businesses or big government

2nd system:
How to be a big democracy?
Democrats - Andrew Jackson was an extreme populist, gave gov't positions to his supporters
Whigs - modernization, education, infrastructure
We did both Democratic and Whig things. Then slavery became a big political issue. Especially with the admission of western states.

3rd system:
Slavery, Reconstruction
Democrats
Republicans
Industrialization became a big issue.

4th system:
Rise of the Populist Party, taking over the Democrats
Rise of the Progressive movement, taking over the Republicans
Reforms implemented, but couldn't cope with the Great Depression

5th system:
Democrats - New Deal liberalism: applying expertise to social problems
Republicans - Conservatism: anti-New-Deal

America in Crisis - Covid, Economic Trauma, Riots, and Realignments - YouTube - describing the problems, but without considering what might be done

A Better World is Possible | Full Video | Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez - one of her campaign ads. The coronavirus, unemployment, policing and race issues. I'm mentioning this because she also has a long perspective, something unusual among prominent politicians.

 

[lpetrich]

Opinion: I predicted 2020 would be a mess for the U.S. Could that help prevent a second civil war? - The Globe and Mail

Ten years ago, I predicted that 2020 would mark “a new peak of violence” in the United States and Western Europe. It may have seemed like an unusual call, at the time; Western countries had actually been enjoying more stability prior to 2010.

But even I didn’t imagine that things could be as bad as they’ve gotten.

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Granted, some degree of inequality is probably unavoidable, and may not even be bad; for example, most human beings agree that those who work harder should be rewarded for their efforts. The problem arises, we theorized, when inequality increases beyond the level that most people would consider fair.

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During the past four decades, while the U.S. economy has grown very substantially, wages of most Americans stagnated and even declined. If we look at the median wage – how much a “typical” worker makes – and divide that by the GDP per capita, this indicator has been declining for decades; it has now fallen to historically low levels. This means that economic growth is not benefiting the majority of the American population. And it’s not just economic well-being that has been declining: Life expectancies of large swaths of the American population have started to decline, as well. Is it surprising that a feeling of pessimism now pervades our society?

Yes, the U.S.‘s economy grew significantly over the past four decades, but one outcome of that is the creation of three to five times as many millionaires, billionaires. Many – including the new millionaires, naturally enough – don’t see this as a problem. And they could have a case, had the wealth of the top 1 per cent grown in parallel with the wealth of the median earner. But that’s not what happened.

He then discusses a consequence of this "elite overproduction", as he calls it elsewhere. These rich people may want to get the top leadership spots, either directly, by running for office, or indirectly, by financing the political careers of others.

But the number of top spots is fixed: 1 President, 100 Senators, 435 Representatives, and 9 Supreme Court Justices.

Ultimately, increasing numbers of those who cannot get ahead by legitimate means feel abandoned by the institutions, often becoming radicals and revolutionaries who aim to overthrow the unjust regime, as they perceive it, by any means necessary.

This was our theory of how revolutions are made – in ancient Rome, medieval France and now, the modern-day U.S. It requires high levels of discontent among the masses, but also leaders – and now there are many, thanks to the abundance of intra-elite competition and conflict, perhaps expressed most clearly by President Donald Trump, who spun his personal wealth into a divisive presidency.

But some societies have avoided revolutions, like the US in the 1930's as a result of FDR's New Deal, and Britain in the mid 19th cy., adopting reforms under pressure from the Chartist movement, and avoiding the revolutions of other European countries in 1848 and 1849.

So one can learn from the experience of societies that have successfully done so.

 

[DBT]

The situation has gotten out of hand. Reform is sorely needed. Hopefully Covid can become the catalyst of reform, if so, at least some good may come out of the crisis.