The End of US Democracy and the Implications for International Relations
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Trump's illiberalism will leave the world with three dominant military powers that are all non-democratic: China, Russia and the US.

Over about a decade of teaching a course on “U.S. Politics and Foreign Policy” at the University of Sydney I posed a question each year to my 200+ undergraduate students: What is the ultimate guarantor of U.S. democracy? In other words, what is the single factor that safeguards US democracy from collapsing into authoritarianism? The answer I was fishing for from them was not “the Constitution” or “the Supreme Court” or even “free and fair elections,” it was “political culture” – a political science term for shared political norms, values, and practices that, while they might not be written down as formal rules, potentially play a fundamental role in explaining behavior. In particular, I asked them to consider what might happen if the (power-seeking, fiercely competing) US political elite no longer considered the liberal-democratic system to be normatively important or no longer held basic democratic values themselves. Without a “culture” that values democracy, the system’s essential laws, rules, norms and processes could be corrupted or ignored, as has happened in many other instances of democratic reversal or backsliding. Elites in pursuit of power in the short-term may undermine democratic institutions for the long-term, in the absence of some fundamental beliefs that make this unthinkable, or at least unacceptable.

    • gravitas_deficiency@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      8·
      4 hours ago

      Nobody here, nor is the article, claiming that the US is or was perfect. We have done a lot of fucked up shit, but I’m not out to write a dissertation on the wrongheaded and imperialistic things done by the US. But the evaporation of Pax Americana is going to create a lot of chaotic and unpredictable situations all over the world, and my government has flipped the switch from mostly pushing against chaos to actively and openly pushing things towards it.

      It’s frankly fair to gloat if you’re Iranian, or Afghani, or Kurdish, or from… well, most of the countries in South America. But when you’re done gloating, you’ll find Putin and Xi and Trump at your front door door trying some combination of sweet-talking and strong-arming you into being their vassal state, because that’s where geopolitics is right now. I know there’s an inclination to dismiss what I’m saying simply because I’m an American, but I do think this is a situation where the devil you know is better than the devil you don’t.

      • fantoozie@midwest.socialEnglish
        1·
        26 minutes ago

        I would say your argument necessarily assumes that American hegemony has been a net good for the Global South, when in fact it has not. Foreign aid and development funds have created incremental progress in vital areas such as treatment for certain infectious diseases and emancipation of women globally (which is important; I’m not arguing that it’s ALL bad), but the countries on the receiving end of those funds have unequivocally stated that they’d rather engage with the West as equal partners in trade and economic integration rather than be subject to asymmetrical policies that only perpetuate their status as cheap wells of natural resources and labor. The fact that the current Administration is rescinding that aid without considering the repurcussions gives immense weight to their arguments, in my opinion.

        I think an unrecognized issue is that Pax Americana was good for living standards in the West, but its implementation necessitated the creation of an underclass to subsidize that growth; much in the same way that domestically, we have an underclass of wage-earners, incarcerated laborers, and immigrants that subsidizes the outsized wealth of a few individuals. I think, given the circumstances, it’s not unreasonable that people living in the periphery would rather take ANY change than continue living under the boot of American neoliberal economic ideology.

        While the devil you know could possibly be better than the one you don’t, the world is ripe for a transformation that recognizes the shortcomings of the West. Without having that conversation, I don’t see how you can expect people to sign in to the notion America should remain at the top of the international order. The argument that ‘it could be so much worse’ is actually quite condescending.