The Tribune

“IN every region of the world, democracy is under attack by populist leaders and groups that reject pluralism and demand unchecked power to advance the particular interests of their supporters, usually at the expense of minorities and other perceived foes.” – Freedom House.

The threats to democracy have always been myriad and often complex. Today, as in the past, these threats include authoritarians encouraging and helping to radicalize extremists, who share the authoritarian’s goals.

There are antecedents to authoritarian leaders such as India’s Narendra Modi and his Hindu nationalism, and the Philippines’s Rodrigo Duterte, both democratically elected and widely popular.

People like strongmen leaders, who employ machismo and bellicose rhetoric. A recent news report described the admiration by many female voters for Modi.

Countries like The Bahamas, which enjoy the benefits of democracy, should never take for granted how easily and quickly these benefits can be eroded, just as we are witnessing around the world.

Freedom House further warned: “Incumbent leaders and ruling parties are corrupting governance and spreading antidemocratic practices across the region that stretches from Central Europe to Central Asia.

“These actions are opportunistic, but are often cloaked in an ideological agenda. And as they become increasingly common, they are fueling a deterioration in conditions that will have global implications for the cause of human freedom.”

Given the tremendous, perhaps innate, fragility of democracy, viable institutions and practices, and democratically committed political leaders and a responsible citizenry are essential for democratic resilience and survival.

“Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide,” suggested US President John Adams.

Adams, like other democratic theorists and politicians, deeply appreciated the inherent weakness of democracy and the need for countervailing measures and forces to arrest its potential decline and suicidal instincts.

More pessimistic than many other philosophers and practitioners of democracy, Adams, the second American president, offers useful caution about the threats to democracy. What would Adams and other American Founders think of the current moment in America?

The extremist forces on the right, including media personalities and politicians, have been entering the mainstream for a number of decades. The election of Donald Trump was a kind of apogee, with his re-election quite possible.

The next congressional election cycle this November will bring more extremists to Congress, with the Republican Party likely to have majorities in both chambers. More Republicans in Congress will have to even more obsequiously appease their base and Trump.

What are we witnessing in America? How cancerous is its politics and at what stage?

Those in The Bahamas who perpetually and often blindly rush to fetishize American democracy would do well to reflect on and appreciate the genesis and history of our system of government.

Experiments in democracy over the centuries and in different locales have yielded myriad results, with certain parliamentary democracies proving resilient, though not without the need for reform, deepening and modernisation.

Our purposefully designed system of contestation exemplifies Benjamin Disraeli’s adage: “No government can be long secure without a formidable opposition.”

Political power easily corrupts humans and institutions in every form of government. Democracy survives or falters, fades or revives, depending on those who defend its core values of rights and freedoms, restraint of power, tolerance for difference, the rule of law and other principles.

Democracy demands a shared civics. An understanding of or lack therefore of this civics in citizens and leaders is determinative of democratic health. What constitutes a shared civics in The Bahamas, in the United States, and in other countries in the second decade of the 21st century?

Suppose a shared civics fractures or can no longer be agreed in a polity? What happens when we no longer share common values? Or even basic agreement on constitutional precepts such as handing power over to the victor of an election?

The lack of basic civic education in many of Bahamians and the general ignorance of our democratic heritage and constitution by a new generation of politicians over the past two decades is more than worrying. It is chilling! It is frightening!

When one does not grasp nor appreciate basic norms, rules, conventions, history, practices and principles, one’s unfettered egoism and the temptations of power are breeding grounds for the abuse of power and the seemingly never-ending lowering of standards in every branch of government.

The perennial threats to democratic well-being are today ubiquitous, including in countries with long-held democratic heritages, such as India the United States of America, as well as in Brazil, all among the world’s largest democracies.

Writing recently on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s website, Stan Grant, Vice Chancellor of Australian/Indigenous Belonging at Charles Sturt University, and formerly the ABC’s international affairs analyst, proposes:

“The 21st century will be defined by the struggle of democracy and autocracy. Faith in progress is not enough. History does not run in a straight line. Tyranny is always laying in wait for justice and freedom.

“Power corrupts democracy. Power is to politics what atoms are to matter. The laws of politics are like the laws of physics. As esteemed Australian historian Christopher Clark – who has written extensively of Germany and World War I – said: ‘As gravity bends light, so power bends time.’ “

One of the grave threats to democracies has always been extremist ideologies, which typically utilises violence to meet certain ends. Across the globe, extremists are in full march, often with the full-throated, obvious nod and blatant wink, or other support of mainstream politicians, media houses and activists.

The 2011 mass killing of 77 young people in Norway and the 2019 attacks on Muslims at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, were extremist attacks, which researchers like JM Berger have tracked in order to understand the base motivations of such individuals.

Berger continues to chronicle the “rising tide of extremist movements [that] threaten to destabilize civil societies around the globe.”

His definition of extremism, as noted by Elizabeth Neumann, a former US Department of Homeland Security official, is “any time an in-group believes an out-group poses a threat to you or to the in-group’s success or survival.

“And they think that hostile action is necessary. Hostile action can be bullying, it can be intimidation, it can be hate crimes. It can be terrorism. It can be war. There’s the whole spectrum of it.”

The young man who brutally killed ten African Americans last week in Buffalo, New York State, is an ethnonationalist determined to preserve white culture from what he deems the existentialist threat of non-whites.

There are many layers of tragedy, including that of those killed and the brutal pain felt by their families and loved ones. There is another tragedy: the killings are not going to stop in America, especially given its gun culture and the inability to enact more common sense gun laws.

Just as there have been previous mass killings of Jews, Asians and African Americans, we are going to continue to be horrified for decades to come. Let us not forget the 2015 mass shooting of nine African Americans at Emmanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina.

The killings by these white supremacists are a blood-soaked part of the violent determination to preserve white so-called purity and privilege in America amidst changing demographics. Such “purity” is based upon a master false myth about America’s founding and history.

Marine Le Pen and her far right party in France continued to improve their electoral prospects in the country’s recent presidential elections. In both countries, the white privilege battle cry against immigrants, Muslims and non-whites is now mainstream.

How far will the supremacists go in America? For a white supremacist worldview that inflicted genocide on native peoples, and sustained and fought a brutal war over slavery, the manipulation and upending of democratic institutions and traditions to save its economic, political and social privileges, is near child’s play.

Those like Republican Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, who believed he could appease and outwit an authoritarian like Trump, and manipulate and circumvent democratic norms in judicial appointments, might live to see the consequences, intended and unintended, of his craven actions.

Are the words of John Adams reverberating in 21st century American history? “[Democracy] soon wastes, exhausts and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide.”

Is American democracy committing suicide at the hands of its own leaders as it continues to be beset by extraordinary inequality? Stan Grant laments: “Gross inequality is a cancer eating American democracy alive. In the richest nation on earth, life expectancy has been decreasing amidst what has been called an epidemic of gun violence, suicide, substance abuse, poverty and despair.”

America should not be naïve. Just like other authoritarians around the world, Donald Trump pays only lip service to the US Constitution and to democratic norms.

Given another chance at the presidency, he will continue to belligerently lead a white supremacist and Christian nationalist movement capable of more than a failed insurrection to secure and to maintain power. The conceit that certain things cannot happen in America is a dangerous one.

Karl Hess, something of an anarchist and a libertarian, was Barry Goldwater’s speechwriter for his 1964 Republican presidential nomination acceptance speech. Hess placed these infamous words in Goldwater’s remarks: “I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice!”

Approximately 60 years later, how might Donald Trump and the supremacists use similar language to defend their narrow concept of liberty? Stan Grant once more: “We are democracy: the demos, the people. As we bend to tyranny so do our institutions.”