United States: a long-term crisis | Opi …

What happened is unprecedented in the history of the United States. A whole ancient and enormous institutional framework designed by the founding fathers to avoid the risks of occlocracy – the government dreaded by the mob – has collapsed like a house of cards in the face of the incessant harangues of Donald Trump Trump mobs overwhelmed security forces and stormed the Capitol. The result: The Senate had to go into suspension, with Vice President Mike Pence quickly evacuated by the Secret Service a band of belted fascineros and some of them armed sat their members of the royal family in the chambers of the Senate and the House of Representatives. The goal: to prevent Congress from certifying Joe Biden’s victory in the November 3 presidential election.

Trump’s responsibility for these incidents is unquestionable. Part of the Republicans brought theirs. More than a hundred were ready to propose the annulment of Biden’s victory, and must also be seen as instigators of the uproar. But it would be a mistake to believe that what happened was the sole responsibility of Trump and his henchmen. This episode marks the gravity of the legitimacy crisis that has long plagued the North American political system.. Electoral absenteeism is a chronic obstacle to a system that proclaims itself a democracy when it is not. Abraham Lincoln defined it as “the government of the people, by the people and for the people.” Today, not only left-wing intellectuals like Noam Chomsky, but even mainstream academics like Jeffrey Sachs and, before him, Sheldon Wolin argue in their oral and written interventions that The American political system is a plutocracy and not a democracy as it is the government of the rich, by the rich and for the rich. This explains the plaintive reflection made a few months ago by a collective editorial in the The New York Times when checking that the richest 1% accumulates more wealth than the poorest 80% in the country. In other words, a pseudo-democracy which, applying neoliberal policies, decreed the funeral of the “American dream” and made this country the most unequal in the developed world.

In the very serious events of Wednesday, typical of the “populist anarchies” that Washington sees – and insults – everywhere in the countries of the periphery, there is an indisputable co-responsibility of the two parties.

The outbursts of Trump and his political criminals, inside and outside the United States, were fueled for four years by the reluctance of Democrats to end policies that benefited the richest 10% (and in particular to the 1% of the super-millionaires) of the country and to make an effort even minimal to truly democratize the political system. It is useful to remember in the face of the violent incidents of this Wednesday that It was never in the minds of the founding fathers to create a democratic system: indirect election via electoral colleges, the optional nature of the vote, suffrage on working days are the brakes of a system that has become constituted as a republic but not as a democracy.

It is no coincidence that the US Constitution itself does not mention the magic word “democracy” in one place. And faced with a society that has changed as much as the United States over the past fifty years, from a fairly homogeneous society to a multicultural and unequal society, and faced with the stupidity of a party system that does not reflect at all these changes, the appearance of a demagogue like Trump and his inflammatory rhetoric could end up opening the gates of hell and freeing all demons. This is what has happened now. And it will last and will not be resolved without fundamental social, economic and political reforms, which Joe Biden will hardly want to promote.