Last week, a small group of women confronted Republican Senator Jeff Flake as he boarded an elevator. Cornered, he was forced to listen impassively as they recounted their experiences of sexual assault and asked him to justify his support for Supreme Court nominee, Brett Kavanaugh. The confrontation, which was later broadcast on CNN, felt like a scene from a morality play. Flake remained judiciously silent throughout, which was tactful, but his demeanour also conveyed a hint of indifference, of the tribal disdain that he himself has condemned in U.S. politics.
Not only have the Kavanaugh hearings revived America’s culture wars, they have underscored the dysfunctions of its democracy. They have become an object lesson of what happens when a society can no longer settle its differences reasonably. In a recent New York Times column, Thomas Friedman traces the origins of the current zero-sum outlook to the moment when GOP legislators set their priority for the next four years as restricting the newly elected President Obama to a single term of office. It was not a principled decision, it was an act of sabotage. This, in turn, produced the party’s hysterical opposition to a healthcare bill that was drafted largely on Republican principles, and it eventually led to the unprecedented decision to simply deny Obama the appointment of Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court.
Friedman concludes, “That was a turning point. That was cheating. What McConnell did broke something very big. Now Democrats will surely be tempted to do the same when they get the power to do so, and that is how a great system of government, built on constitutional checks and balances, strong institutions and basic norms of decency, unravels.” Once the conventions that enable these norms have been violated often enough, democratic governance is supplanted by a Hobbesian war of all against all.
In many ways, the Trump presidency is the logical outcome of these decisions. Trump has a completely zero-sum worldview and treats any criticism as a personal attack, rather than an opportunity for dialogue, and his authoritarian instincts have revived – metastasised might be a better word – a conspiratorial GOP mindset. Consider, for instance, Kavanaugh’s outlandish claim that the allegations against him were “revenge on behalf of the Clintons.” And although much of Trump’s overheated rhetoric can be attributed to his lack of education and manners, the real danger of having a president, or congressional leaders, or a Supreme Court nominee discuss democracy as though it were a sham, is that their palpable contempt often turns into a self-fulfilling prophecy.
What might Latin America and the Caribbean learn from the current crisis of U.S. democracy? Most importantly, that functioning democracies require assumptions of good faith, a willingness to consider opposing points of view, and to absorb criticism, rather than simply dismiss it. Also, perhaps, that a hostile political climate can quickly undermine basic civility and that once democratic norms and institutions have been broken, they are extremely difficult to reassemble.
