Friday, 28 May 2021

The decline of Western democracy. 

Recently in Britain a self-centred, would-be political genius, Dominic Cummings, denounced the Health Secretary for his lies and for both Secretary Hancock and the Prime Minister, Johnson, for their mistakes that meant 'tens of thousands' had died unnecessarily in the Covid 19 pandemic. Cummings had run the Brexit campaign, which brought Johnson and the Tories roaring into government and placed himself, for a month or two, as the guru of British politics. The guru rapidly discovered his plummeting fate. Johnson had fitted up his own holy man - himself. The 'political genius' therefore finally decided to become a rich(er) nobody - for now. Funny, if it was not so dangerous.

Here is another advisor. This one, Paul Krugman, is, unlike Cummins, the genuine article. He won the 2008 Nobel Prize in economics. He is a sustained 'New Keynesian' economist and supports Biden so far. A few days ago he published 'The banality of democratic collapse' in the New York Times. 

Cummings attacked Hancock as a complete disaster and Johnson as an 'unfit Prime Minister'. That was the main issue for the media. More interesting was Cummings's version of the three failures of the state and government that he also proscribed in his 7 hour prattle to a Parliamentary Committee. The failures were -  not accepting outside genii to run things; basing a government in peril because of its chopped up parts that ran separately under the civil servants; - and allowing the single horror of the PM to have the power to decide everything. (Both Johnson and Corbyn were called 'donkeys controlling lions'.)

Cummings sees the weakness and errors of Britain's state and government from the platform of his own brilliance (now swept away) and the dominating bureaucracy (which also stood in his way.) His main reform in answer to Britain's crisis was to set up combined leadership groups, led by a scintillated leader like himself (not elected) to 'get it done', managing the organisation over everybody's head!  

Krugman's essay offered a quite different study of western politics in the US. The incipient role of the Good Old Party, the (new) Republicans in particular, were dismantled and explained as a warning in respect of the US democracy. 

Essentially, Krugman exposed the new Republican Party as a turning point in the US. The example of this turn was the continued maintenance of Trump's central role, not just among a public layer but in the continuing leadership of the Republican Party. That leadership now overwhelmingly supports Trump's political direction, and, most significantly, the obviously hysterical notion of the so-called theft of Trump's presidential vote. It is patently obvious that the vote was not 'faked'. Yet all of the major leaders of the GOP maintain the fake. This amounts to a clear shift in the US's party structures.

The Democratic Party remains a coalition of various parts of the US (no doubt mostly directed by New York and the West Coast wealth). The GOP also retains parts of the US's capital and wealth but is doing something new. It is continuing to build a cult. And the cult subordinates the (albeit dubious) public democracy up to now in order to fuse together a permanent social block, based on racism and patriotism. The block will undoubtedly be manipulated. Today it is the fantasy horror of the Democrat's socialism. Yesterday over 40 states already reduced the franchise under the screen of 'sly immigrants' and criminal, read African-Americans. Tomorrow something else. Texas has just destroyed abortion tights. These initiatives flow into the cultist construction, setting up the 'Good Old' America that will be run by the GOP. 

What is this? It is the systemic narrowing of what previously stood for western democracy. Of course the developed West has never actually used democracy to manage and run the place. Most of the important decisions rarely found their way via the franchise from the 1920s onwards. Capital determined the flow of decisive politics. Since WW2 certain shibboleths were set up to 'manage' what certainly could not and would not be managed by any western type democracy. In the UK, first Empire, then the City of London coupled with 'there is no alternative' ran the show. In the US, world capitalist domination was promoted with anything other than a vote. In Europe, the EU and the German Banks decided europeans' fates. 

But here is today's paradox. Even Cumming senses something shifting about what Covid 19 and the new type of PM that now, apparently, stands for britishness. Krugman spells out that the republican leadership, half of republican America, are openly deciding to dump even their dubious democracy in the US, in favour of changing their main political machine. 

The paradox in the so-called democratic West is that the West has discovered that it is now that it has to find a real role in the new decade for their parliaments and senates. Global capitalism is faltering. And if the parliament and senates cannot be seriously controlled, a la Trump or the EU, then they will need to be replaced. We see the fringes of that across Eastern Europe, in Macron's mini Napoleonic domination, the shift of the British Tory Party, plus the new set of curbs on voters and the increased police powers against real democratic, public, action. One way or another states in the West will have to recoup in the fading light of international capitalism and the global successes of the past. And accept their previously carefully managed democracies, which are under greater strain than anytime since the revolutions in the early 20th Century. 

The direction is clear for the West's apparent democracy. As globalisation subsides so state measures will be needed to maintain economics via politics. If the politics do not work, what democracy remains will be shaved, dictator by dictator, to the bone. The alternative is a deep and real democracy, starting with the economy we need and want.