IN A NOT entirely paranoid piece about the two biggest autocrats in the world, Putin and Xi making common cause to attack democracy Ron Elving at NPR notes the Chinese government is redefining "democracy" to mean their autocratic, one-party system. That wouldn't be worth bothering with, the word "democracy" is as abused as the word "socialist" has been, both used for some of the worst anti-democratic and anti-socialist regimes in human history.
What is worth noting are the three devastating and true criticisms the Chinese government is making of Western, especially American democracy, devastating because they are accurate and baked into the Constitution and the civic mythology of the country, the common received wisdom of the educated classes in, especially, English speaking countries.
The U.S. comes in for particularly sharp comment as the paper makes three indictments against American democracy. First, the U.S. model is now entirely driven by money that dominates elections and all the processes of government that follow. The accompanying artwork shows a rather grey-looking Uncle Sam bearing an armload of sickly green $100 bills.
Responsibility for that can be laid directly in the lap of the Supreme Court. When the Congress, members of both parties and the presidents after the Nixon scandals tried to fix that through campaign finance reform the "civil liberties" industry teamed up with lawyers for the autocrats of the kind who had supported Nixon and his corruption got the Supreme Court to re-corrupt our system through money by declaring money is speech, giving the oligarchs unlimited "speech" magnified through the mass media to lie us into oligarchy and, in the fullness of time the danger of autocracy. They did it through the words of the First Amendment, which, in our idiotic civic culture that can't even protect democracy from such a blatant attack, is sacrosanct and it is not allowed to criticize it, its authors or the way it has been used to guarantee corrupt government.
Second, the paper says the U.S. model of democracy empowers the elite, the wealthy and well-educated who dominate both political parties and then use the parties to dominate the common people and subordinate their needs. Here, the cartoon that accompanies shows the letters WASP emblazoned on the dome of the U.S. Capitol, with "white" and "Anglo-Saxon" and "Protestant" spelled out in the windows and columns below.
That is as true, as modified to include other groups of white people as they gained wealth and, so, prestige and were able to enter the training grounds of the rich and powerful, the Ivys, the Ivy equivalents and to dominate the controlling professions of finance and propaganda, what is quaintly called "journalism." Though entertainment is and always has been a far more effective means of propagandizing the public. Which gets us back to the Supreme Courts interpretation of the First and other Amendments to the Constitution to enable the knee-capping of democracy through well financed lies.
Third, the paper says that when two nominally different parties divide the offices of political power they devote themselves to frustrating each other. This results in a "vetocracy" where Democrats block (or "veto") everything Republicans want to do and vice versa. Accordingly, nothing gets done. The results are failure and futility. The people are the poorer for it.
Finally we find some measure of inaccuracy, no doubt known to those who came up with this list of criticisms but, no doubt, their "both-siderisim" is waged for similar reasons to that of the American media, to enable the opponents of democracy and, especially, equality. Democrats are not the same as today's Republican-fascists and the Republican-fascists of today are not uniformly in line with Republicans of the past - so many of whom have fled that party as it turned hard white supremacist and overtly fascist. There would be not a single Republican vote for the kinds of anti-corruption laws that were passed in the 1970s, today. Even if they didn't use the excuse that the gods of the Supreme Court have spoken on that and Jemmy Madison wouldn't like it (which is, itself probably a lie, and you know how much I despise the Founders fetish).
The Democratic Party is a target of the oligarchs in Moscow and Beijing because the last thing they want is true, egalitarian democracy anywhere and Democrats in the United States are the party of inclusion, the party of egalitarian democracy in the majority.
I would certainly agree that a minority of Democrats are insufficiently egalitarian, they certainly are not what I am, an economic leveler who would destroy the concentrations of vast wealth into individual and family hands, a guarantee of an effective attack on equality and equal justice, economic justice and a level of personal freedom consistent with the equal access to those. But that is largely an artifact of the inequalities and corruptions baked into our system by the Constitution, Supreme Court corruptions put on top of those and other effects of government of, by and for the wealthy, something which our Constitution aids instead of prevents.
Many American critics of the current U.S. democracy – in both parties and outside of them — might agree at least in part with some of these sentiments. But they would probably propose a cure composed of their own favored reforms rather than a one-party system with a single ruler "at the core" of that one party.
The habits of both-siderism are the house policy at NPR, which I hardly listen to anymore and which I don't generally trust much because they are such corporate shills and part of the DC Press Corps, probably the most reflexively pro-Republican-fascist media entity in America outside of Trump-state TV.
I may try to find the original and may go through some of it. No doubt the Chinese Communist effort to attack American Democracy will be a formidable challenge, as they have proved over and over again, they are able to discern the things that weaken us white-supremacist racism is certainly one they have understood, a self-imposed weapon our elites have given them to use against us. They will certainly use the corrupt nature of our elites too, appealing to the greed of our wealthiest and the media that serves them and itself.
I have no illusions that the current American democracy is likely to survive, certainly it won't in the form the Courts and the common received wisdom hold it to be, it certainly won't hold in the form of government set up by the Constitution, corrupt to start with, the Senate, the Electoral College, the power given to sparse populations in largely rural states, the regional differentials in power those were set up to create, empowering the conservative few over the more diverse many. Any time you hear the pious declarations about those you may as well be hearing the propaganda coming from the Chinese oligarchs because those are also their tools, now. They as well as their fellow billionaires and millionaires have learned how to game all of its inherent weaknesses and they may play them almost as cynically. The Rehnquist and Roberts Courts, using the First Amendment have opened us up to even direct manipulation through dark money as they were warned they were doing. They didn't care as long as Republican-fascists won through lies carried through the freest press money can buy.
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