COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE BY CAS MUDDE IN THE GUARDIAN
It's fashionable to
say western democracies are dying. Don't buy it (yet)
The claim that
everything is getting worse is in part the consequence of egocentric bias among
liberal commentators
What Western democracies?
America or Britain or France cannot be called democracies by
anyone with some history and political understanding.
They have democratic trappings, but they are not remotely
democracies.
America is run by money, by those who have vast amounts of
it aided by those organizations designed to help and assist them.
I see no evidence things are very much different in Britain
and France.
The British system for example is rigged so that someone
with about 35% of the national vote can form “a majority government,” a
majority of parliamentary seats, that is, from gerrymandered electoral
districts.
A prime minister then, supported by a minority of actual
voters, can freely and secretly go to war or, indeed, do almost anything he or
she pleases because a so-called majority government becomes something pretty
close to a dictatorship with few if any constraints.
In America's last election, it took a multi-billionaire to
defeat the woman who spent an unbelievable amount of money to be defeated. Hillary
spent somewhere in the neighborhood of 1.2 to 1.8 billion dollars, money
collected from special interest groups and plutocrats just as is the case for
the great bulk of all American campaign contributions.
It is not ordinary people who supply the funds to either
party, funds used literally to flood the public with advertising and staged
rallies and all kinds of phony nonsense right down to gigantic imperial
American flags carefully mounted behind every stage where a candidate briefly
appears. Funds used to buy experts in manipulating people’s perceptions, to buy
tracking polls, to buy barrages from telephone call centers, to buy writers for
slogans and ghost-written books, to buy everything from voice coaches to
make-up artists and even to guest appearances by pop singers.
Anyway, if you call that a choice for Americans, you have a
problem with words.
