In a recent letter, Frank Fish notes that the United States is no democracy but a “badly run plutocracy.” He correctly singles out the U.S. Senate as being especially undemocratic, in that it has two seats for each state regardless of population.
But it’s much worse than that.
The presidency is awarded not to the overall top vote-getter but, thanks to the archaic Electoral College, the winner of a small number of swing states. And that same president has the power to appoint Supreme Court justices with lifetime appointments who have the power to declare campaign contributions to be a form of “free speech” (Buckley v. Valeo, 1976), thus enabling wealthy corporations and individuals to effectively buy politicians.
Every two years the Intelligence Unit of The Economist magazine ranks the world’s nations according to how much democracy they have. In 2016 it downgraded the U.S. from a Full Democracy to a Flawed Democracy for the first time, an embarrassment that persisted through the four years of the Trump administration. It culminated in last year’s report with the U.S. getting especially low scores in two categories, “Functioning of Government” and “Political Culture.”
In the first of these, our score was identical to that of Botswana, Bhutan and Malta; in the second it was identical to that of Malawi, Senegal, Sierra Leone and Tanzania — countries famously denigrated by Trump as “s---hole” countries.
Fortunately, we now have a new administration and a functioning government. Things are looking up.
Tom Huckin, Salt Lake City
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