The U.S. a Democracy? That’s bullshit - its fast becoming an Open Anocracy
It’s time to say that America’s full democracy is rapidly degenerating into an anocracy. The Polity IV Project, based at the Center for Systemic Peace, continues the Polity research tradition of coding authority characteristics of states in the world system for purposes of comparative, quantitative analysis. The “Polity Score” captures this regime authority spectrum on a 21-pont scale ranging from -10 (hereditary monarchy) to +10 (consolidated democracy). The Polity scores can also be converted into regime categories in a suggested three part categorization of “autocracies” (-10 to -6), “anocracies” (-5 to +5 and three special values: -66, -77 and -88), and “democracies” (+6 to +10).
How is a democracy typically defined?
1) Has institutions and processes that allow citizens to effectively express their political preferences and to combine these preferences into a package of alternatives from which they can choose. This is bullshit right now in the U.S. because we have single party rule (even though the majority of citizens voted for a member of the opposite party to be President).
2) Has institutional constraints on the executive. There are currently few restraints on the executive because he blatantly lies and his fellow Republicans don’t correct him. In addition they allow him to break important anti-corruption rules like not divesting himself of his business interests or making his tax returns public.
3) Guaranteed civil rights and liberties for all citizens of the state. Who knows how long that will last with a ban on Muslims entering the country and a Muslim registry in the making, and felony charges against journalists covering acts of civil disobedience.
Let’s consider one of the foundation stones of American Democracy- all opinions are considered to be worth the same. And that means that the opinions of those of the politically educated are equivalent to those who are ignorant of the facts. For democracy to work properly one must assume that everyone in the country is able to reach a rational informed decision on whom they vote for, based on mutually agreed upon facts, (excluding religious texts which are historically inaccurate and are based on faith). Well that certainly didn’t happen in the US. In the last election, voters were cynically barraged with alternative facts by Trump and his ally Putin.
It’s also a fact Populist leaders, which the US is prone to produce as a result of our democratic system, generally have bad ideas by the multitude, ones which they will defend to the death regardless of whether or not they benefit the nation they represent or the people in it. E.g. the Iraq War, and now from Trumpochio a stream of endless bullshit bad ideas, including banning Muslims from countries that did not take part in 9/11, and a posturing war with China.
Oh and heck let’s throw human nature into this democracy mix as well. We can all agree that hasn’t evolved much since the stone age. Ergo -it takes a huge effort on our part to love and honor the other -both in ourselves and in our fellow human beings. Oh and here it comes, humans taking part in a democracy operate within a tribal mentality and a religious ideology which ensures they will always vote for their team, despite the fact that their rational mind is telling them that it is not in their best interest to do so.
Now I would exclude from the factually unaware those who voted for Trump because they wanted to see jobs returning to the US. These are the people who have lost faith in our corporate-dominated system of government and are desperate. They’re willing to try anything and consider anybody for President, even a badass lunatic. A badass lunatic I might add who is willing to blow up the whole godamm global economy in order to bring their jobs back.
I would therefore ask the folks at Polity to consider that the US is now rapidly moving away from the top end of a full democracy towards anocracy. Now y’all will ask me what kind of bullshit idea is that? Well anocracy is a government regime that features economic and political instability and an incoherent mix of democratic and autocratic traits — sound familiar? Okie dokie I’ll take another stab at defining it for you and for myself — pure dictatorships can repress civil conflict, and pure democracies can accommodate civil disagreement peacefully, but anocracies are caught in the middle — they can neither repress nor accommodate civil strife and are thus the most susceptible to civil disobedience, civil war and economic downfall on a massive scale.
Most importantly policy forged by single party rule in a democratic institutional setting nowadays does not in the US include compromise with the other side. Democracy in the US is now rather like a pig with lipstick, it’s dressed up as something it isn’t. In addition, since we are operating under a one party system, which is trying its damndest to control the flow of information to the voting public, we’re in for a ball-buster of a crash landing.
I would propose to the Polity Project that the current one party government we have in the US has no idea how to accommodate or encapsulate any democratic opposition to it. In fact there is a body of research which exists compiled by you that accurately portrays an anocracy of the type the US is rapidly heading towards, one which has no intention of giving the opposition a voice, and is prone to massive civil disturbance. Let me just drop this thought in your ears -gerrymandering and voter suppression reduce competitiveness, and regulate political participation and the openness of recruiting office-holders. These tactics which the Republican Party is now using without hesitation, do not belong in a country Polity has so solidly put in the fully democratic government column.
Oh boy wait a minute, perhaps I made a mistake in suggesting the US is heading towards an anocracy like Russia, but that we are instead heading towards is an autocracy like China. Autocracies are defined by non-competitive, repressively regulated political participation by undemocratic, non-competitive recruitment of political leaders and by an executive with a great deal of leeway for action.
I ask you folks, isn’t it time for the researchers who make up Polity to reclassify the US as an anocracy, and do so pronto before we become an autocracy? To do so quickly so people understand and recognize what is really happening here under the guise of adhering to the US Constitution?
Let’s recap why I think Polity should take this action.
The core assumptions that undergird the complex societal-systems analytic framework of its unique system of scoring and which categorize the US as a full democracy are:
1) Humans are social creatures that naturally organize themselves into self-actuating, self-organizing, self-regulating and self-correcting social identity groups that occupy a (more or less well) territorially-defined “political space.” Let me say that when humans are bombarded with fake news and lies (alternative facts) by their elected government the political space they occupy is highly suspect.
2) Authority within the group can be based on either instrumental (coercive) or sociational (cooperative) strategies or some combination of those strategies (this is the foundational assumption of the Polity scheme. Okay here in the US our elected officials as a strategy of control intentionally spread fake news and lies, which makes our government coercive and not cooperative.
3) Individual humans occupying a particular political space will form linkages (networks) with other individuals and may adopt multiple group identities and shift their loyalty or investment in those groups as a rational function of the group’s perceived value to their personal interests and aspirations (i.e., pluralism). When alternative facts and lies become an integral part of the government propaganda machine, then the supposed rational functionality of pluralism is compromised.
4) The number of social linkages and groups formed within a particular political space is a function of the general level of societal-system development which is, in turn, a function of prevailing technologies. When prevailing technologies are used to spread disinformation, propaganda and lies, societal development takes a giant step backward from democracy to anocracy and then to autocracy.
5) Sociational strategies are superior to instrumental strategies of authority over the longer term because they are economically efficacious and associationally conducive (the basis for systemic complexity and resilience). Sure they are but what happens when authoritarian strategies are presented by Trump, Spicer, Conway and Bannon to the masses as sociational ones— something Orwell called “doublespeak?”
6) The use of instrumental strategies may be viewed as either symptomatic of a lack of sociational development or essentially problematic as a form of systemic disintegration. Back to my original point, I think the US government is currently showing symptoms of a lack of sociational development, and is thus rapidly falling into systemic disintegration!
The number of anocratic regimes has steadily increased over time, with the most notable jump occurring after the end of the Cold War. During the period from 1989 to 2013, the number of anocracies jumped from 30 to 53.
Polity I’m confidently predicting your researchers are soon going to have to make the US number 54 on that list! And sadly that’s no bullshit!
