U.S. politicians often lecture other nations about their flawed governance as if American democracy is the gold standard, but anti-democratic measures like gerrymandering belie that self-image, says ex-CIA analyst Paul R. Pillar
The gerrymandering case that is before the Supreme Court this week is especially important in that respect, because it gets directly to the phenomenon of one person, one vote, one time.
That phenomenon is what has occurred in Wisconsin, where the case now before the court originated. Republican legislators, once in power, secretly and aggressively devised new legislative boundaries that have enabled them to retain their grip on power even after, in subsequent elections, losing majority support among the citizens of Wisconsin.
Given the power of those same legislators to draw Congressional districts as well as their own districts, the disconnect between the will of the people and the ideology of representatives extends to the federal as well as the state level.
The methods used may be different from those used by some of the foreign rulers who have transitioned from democratically elected leaders to autocrats using nondemocratic means. The prime method used in gerrymandering in the United States is not brown shirts in the streets but rather computing power used to crunch demographic data and to try out endless variations of how lines might be drawn to gain maximum partisan advantage. But the result is the same: rulers stay in power even after most citizens no longer want them there.
Gerrymandering is not the only such undemocratic tool being used to the same effect. There also are the Republican-sponsored voter suppression laws designed to impede people’s ability to exercise the right to vote, and to do so in ways that fall most heavily on those presumed to be more likely to support the opposition party. These methods are rationalized through unsupported assertions about widespread voter identification fraud. President Trump has even established a commission founded on such a lie, to provide momentum for still more voter suppression measures.…Consortium News
America’s Hypocrisy on Democracy
Paul R. Pillar
1 comment:
I read Greg palast's book on it, and one thing Republicans is to put not that many voting machines in poor areas and to put them way out in the suburbs knowing lots of poor people have no cars and don't drive. Another thing they do is to ban people from voting who have been in prison nut more black people go to prison than whites. Black and Hispanic people tend to have more common surnames and if, say, charley A Williamson went to prison then they ban Charley B Williamson and every other Williamson from voting as well. The Republicans say there is a lot of voter fraud among poor regions but poor people have a massive tendency not to vote at all let alone go and vote several times.
In the Haiti film I put out the US supervised the elections and who towns and regions massively voted for left candidates, then the US army took the votes away and announced that right wingers had one, some of whom been mercenaries who had killed hundreds of people in the villages.
No wonder China takes no notice of US jibes about it not being democratic.
And whatever government you vote for in Western countries you get the same foreign policy with very little change to home policy either. They are all puppet states of the US.
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