Brief Thoughts on Democracy: America or Not
By Joshua O’Brien
Warning: This post contains the mildest of spoilers for a 15-year-old episode of The West Wing.
On Wednesday, September 2, 2020, famed pollster Nate Silver shared a forecast of the probability Joe Biden wins the electoral college, based on how many percentage points he wins over Trump in the popular vote. Journalist Evan Osnos commented “If I read about this system in, say, Turkmenistan, I’d pity them.” I am not sure if this journalist was aware, but they hit an academic issue pretty well—the ideal of what a democracy is and should be on the international stage and at home.
The knee-jerk reaction among Americans is to point to our own system—the oldest continuous constitutional system in the world with all of its checks, balances, and idealistic appeal. Constitutional scholars will detest this, and with good reason. The presidential system is slow, and by removing the need for majority legislative support, lends itself to authoritarian turns in executive functions. Parliamentary systems, with their speed and need for legislative support, might be better suited for countries without deep democratic traditions, though the academic debate makes such a definitive statement difficult. So much so, that the discussion has spilled into television, becoming a plot point of “The Wake Up Call” episode of The West Wing. In this episode, one of the White House staffers in the fictional Bartlet administration gets into heated debate with a group of Belarusian democrats rewriting their country’s constitution. While the Belarusians argue for a strong President, the staffer opposes the idea, labeling the Presidential system as one of America’s “most dangerous exports.”
The tweet just highlights the point of the debate—the American system is not universally understood as the best form of democracy, and depending on the context, might not even be a particularly good one. And some facets of it are criticized even here. Presidents of both parties have made unpopular actions through executive orders that a Parliament would have shot down, with an attached no-confidence motion. Some consider the Electoral College to be a quirky subversion of democracy, rather than a nuanced instrument of state will. While examining democratic functioning honestly can help inform larger global political forces, perhaps it can open a more nuanced discussion on what democracy should be at home, too.