The spectacle of the last month or so of UK politics has been something else. Liz Truss becomes prime minister, is immediately put on hold for a couple weeks because of the Queen’s death and mourning, and then sends her handpicked Chancellor out to deliver a budget that looks like the wet dream of a Mises Institute freshman at Auburn – and naturally, the markets reacted as any moron would expect. Massive tax cuts financed by borrowing at a time of runaway inflation – for the second time in as many decades, the Tories have looked at an economic crisis and run 180 degrees the wrong way with it.
And now, after a round beating, the much-reviled Jeremy “Rhymes With” Hunt (as he is known to half of Parliament) ones on as the new Chancellor, basically to serve as Acting Prime Minister while Truss sits quietly in the corner, saved only by the fact that yet another leadership contest – the second in a year and third in three – would be a calamity. Projections right now suggest that if there were to be a general election tomorrow, it would be an extinction-level event for the Conservative and Unionist party, with a real risk that Labour would have over 500 members and that the official opposition would be either the LibDems or the SNP, numerically speaking. In short, Liz Truss has shat the bed so hard and fast that it created a sonic boom.
And yet, there is no accountability for at least one year and maybe two. No general election is required before the end of 2024, and by rule, the Tories can’t challenge the leadership for twelve months – although that rule can certainly be changed. Which points up the fact that Truss was chosen not by the electorate, but by the membership of the Party – which is to say, a country and economy the size of California had its new leader selected by the population of Sunnyvale.
This is no way to run a democracy. Which is a Hell of a thing to say coming from a country where the Senate is inherently undemocratic – a place where 41 Senators from states with a combined population of maybe a fifth of the country can sink anything they don’t like beneath the waves, where 58-42 is a loss for the 58, where a state with a smaller population than San Jose can have more Senators than Representatives. Never mind the ways the Senate has been used to corrupt the Supreme Court almost beyond recognition, or roadblock the policies of a duly elected administration – the only window in which the Democrats have been able to work their will in the last two decades without resorting to reconciliation was a tiny window in autumn 2009 when they had sixty Senators. And even then, you’re limited by what will pass one guy from Nebraska.
This is no way to run a democracy. The rules are supposed to be “one person, one vote”, and that is what the 14th amendment more or less dictated and the Voting Rights act tried to enforce. The enthronement of the states as individually sovereign facilitated gerrymandering for centuries, and as it becomes apparent that the current model of bigotry-defending-wealth Christian nationalism does not enjoy popular support, we are watching in real time as its adherents in the South and elsewhere work to openly bend the rules to preserve their power in the face of popular opposition.
The late Jean-Bethke Elshtain, who I had the privilege of studying under at Vanderbilt however briefly, wrote a book while I was there called Democracy On Trial in which she decried the evolution of politics from opponents to enemies. Once can practice politics with opponents, she argues, but only war with enemies. The events of the last 30 years have basically served to put American – indeed, global – democracy on trial, as everyone from China to Russia to Hungary to Donald Trump makes a case for oligarchy, for prejudice and racism harnessed in the defense of the wealthy and powerful, and we are losing that fight. Badly.
There is only one issue on the ballot. Do you want to live in a democracy or not? If you do, vote for a Democrat. Vote for all the Democrats. Any other choice, in 2022, is a white flag in the face of the enemies of democracy.