The cartoonish elements of what’s happening in the United States shouldn’t blind us to the very real threat to its democracy.
It is very likely only a matter of time before the Trump administration openly refuses to abide by court orders. Then the country will be in a bona fide constitutional crisis.
Donald Trump himself is utterly unmoored from the norms that have governed presidential behaviour since the foundation of the republic, when its first president fretted about the quasi-monarchical status of his office. His modern successor seems frequently frustrated at his lack of absolute power, at the checks and balances so carefully built into the system by the United States’s founding fathers. His senior staff have freely advertised their hostility to the idea that the courts can restrain the executive in any way.
It is possible that the financial markets – and in particular the need for stability in the debt markets through which the US finances its gargantuan deficit – will temper Trump’s instincts to undermine US democracy and the rule of law. That is what has happened with his trade policy, and both democracy and the rule of law, after all, have been rather good for US business.
But this is not a column about Trump; rather about what lessons we can take from observing him.
Back home, as we watch the US National Guard on city streets, it should prompt us to mind our democracy. Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty, and all that.
As a recent report by the Electoral Commission attested, our democracy is actually in reasonable shape. People believe elections are fair, that their votes matter and by and large trust the institutions of State. They have a decent knowledge of the system and are engaged in politics because it affects their daily lives.
But it would be foolish to get complacent. The small but vociferous far right is a new reality in Irish politics, eager to use disinformation and outright mendacity to blame people not born in the Republic for all of the State’s woes. They are not numerous, but they are not insignificant either. The way the far right tried to use the tragedy of the Carlow shooting for their own political ends shows they are relentless and unscrupulous in seeking to undermine decency and democracy.
We hear a lot about the threat the far right poses. We hear less about the far left. But the attachment of some of the far left to the norms of our parliamentary democracy, despite having a parliamentary presence, unlike the far right, is sketchy enough.
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This week, a group called Red Network split from People Before Profit because they feared PBP would support a Sinn Féin government which would inevitably “coalesce with the establishment and leave untouched the real government, the permanent government – the State bureaucracy, army chiefs and head guards”.
The reaction of many people is to giggle at this in a People’s Front of Judea vs The Judean People’s Front sort of way. But the programme of the group is explicitly antiparliamentary democracy. As Ronan McGreevy reported, the group rejects the “fake democracy of the Dáil, or Stormont for that matter” and seeks for it to be replaced by a 32-county workers’ republic where “assemblies of workers in workplaces and communities elect delegates, who are recallable, to a workers’ national assembly”.
It wants a “working-class revolution – mass protests and strikes leading to workplace occupations and a challenge to the old state”.
This is quite in keeping with People Before Profit’s theology, which regards “people power” as expressed by the “working class” on “the streets” as inherently morally and politically superior to the bourgeois complacency of parliamentary democracy.
As Mick Barry told the Dáil a few years ago, “what the parliament does, the streets can undo”.
People Before Profit are of course entitled to their views of how the State should work, though it sounds rather similar to mob rule. But why does nobody bother to challenge them on any of this during their numerous media appearances?
Across the world, the challenge to democratic norms is led by populist actors, parties and movements. You can find them on both the far right and the far left. And they are gaining ground. A notable international survey recently published by Ipsos found that a “profound pessimism” is settling in across 31 large democracies, driven by three things: economic discontent; a sense that there is a gap between elites and ordinary people; and opposition to immigration. None of these are especially strong in the Republic right now, but it’s not hard to imagine how they could be.
In this way, the greatest threat to Irish democracy comes from a sense that it is not delivering materially for people. In the US and elsewhere, too many people have lost faith in politics as usual because they believe it has stopped working for them. Here, that manifests itself in two principal issues – housing and the cost of living. There was worrisome news on both fronts this week.
The Government announcements on housing – and the tacit admission that rents will rise – show that things are likely to get worse before they get better. And there is no guarantee they will get better.
News that child poverty has surged reminds us that the cost of living is eating up steady increases in average incomes and that the pinch is, as ever, felt most acutely at the bottom.
On neither issue does the Government inspire confidence that it is equipped to meet the magnitude of the challenges that face the State. If that remains so, dire political consequences will be inevitable.
