Michael Harris writes that western democracies are in crisis:
Prime Minister Liz Truss held office for just 45 days, the shortest tenure of any PM in British history. The country that once prided itself on having the fifth largest economy in the world is now in post-Brexit chaos. Standard and Poor’s has downgraded the country’s debt, and savage cuts in public spending appear inevitable. Even the return of Boozing Boris, the PM who partied at Number 10 while Britains were under COVID lockdown, isn’t out of the question. The only certainty seems to be that no matter who the Conservatives choose as leader, the party will be trounced by the Labour Party in the next election.
With recession in Europe, and a cold winter looming without Russian gas, the situation is not much better on the continent. Italy just elected a far-right prime minister infamous for praising Italian dictator Benito Mussolini. Amongst other things, Giorgia Meloni is anti-immigrant. Even in Sweden and France, the far-right has made advances in recent elections. Just as William Butler Yeats predicted in his great poem, The Second Coming, the centre does not seem to be holding in many democracies.
In Canada, new Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre is pushing a right-wing agenda, featuring tax cuts, smaller government, and the amorphous promise of more “freedom.” And oh yes, hating Justin Trudeau. The man who stood with the “Freedom Convoy” during its slovenly and self-interested occupation of Ottawa appears to mean what he says. In a stunning example of abdication on the environment file, Poilievre recently told Quebecers that a Conservative federal government would not interfere in any of the province’s major developments on environmental grounds.
And there is a vile cauldron boiling in the United States:
The star basket-case of democracy in retreat is the United States. Britain may be in a mess, but the U.S. remains the most indebted country in the world. The national debt stands at an irredeemable $30-trillion, a significant portion of which was run up by Donald Trump’s unfunded and permanent tax cut for the rich.
If you count state and municipal debt, and Washington’s unfunded liabilities, like social security and Medicare, some debt clocks place the real number at $130-trillion in the red. The only thing that keeps things careening along is that the U.S. can still borrow the money to pay the enormous annual interest on its debt.
But government-by-credit card is not America’s greatest problem. Faced with bigger bills for gasoline and groceries, an inflation rate Americans have not seen in decades, the country seems poised to elect the ethically bankrupt Republicans to run the House of Representatives, and maybe the Senate, as well.
Why is this happening? There are lots of reasons:
A painful COVID hangover, hard economic reality, and the search for scapegoats has created a public mood where the worst thing for a politician to be is not a liar, a cheat, or a scoundrel, but an incumbent. History provides a caution. As Thomas Jefferson so famously, and ominously, put it: “The government you elect is the government that you deserve.”
It all comes down to how smart we, the voters, are. It appears that we're not very bright.
Image: Flickr
