Atlantic Sentinel

Tag: Better Democracy

  • Where Is the Party of Middle America?

    United States Capitol Washington
    Workers clean the steps of the United States Capitol in Washington DC in the early morning of January 8, 2021 (Victoria Pickering)

    59 percent of Americans believe Democrats will “open the US-Mexico border” if they win the election on Tuesday. 53 percent worry they will cut police funding.

    They won’t. Nor will they step up border enforcement or raise police budgets, and they should: illegal border crossings and violent crime are rising. But only far-left extremists believe in open borders and defunding the police. Few have been nominated by Democrats. Even fewer will win elections.

    The other half of the country sees Republicans as the extremists: 56 percent believe a Republican Congress would ban abortion and overturn democratic elections.

    There is more justification for those beliefs. Many Republican candidates support a federal ban on abortion. Many were complicit or silent when Donald Trump tried to steal the 2020 election. But the party is divided on both questions.

    More than anything, the results of the CBS poll reveal that Democrats and Republicans believe the worst about each other.

    What about the 40 percent of Americans who identify with neither party? (more…)

  • Northern Ireland’s Political System Will Need to Change

    Northern Ireland parliament Belfast
    Parliament Buildings of the Northern Ireland Assembly in Stormont, Belfast (iStock/Niall Majury)

    The republican Sinn Féin has become the largest party in Northern Ireland for the first time. Although mostly as a result of the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) going down. In elections this week, Sinn Féin defended their 27 seats in the Northern Ireland Assembly with a 1.1 percent increase in votes. The DUP went down from 28 to 25 seats.

    The winner was the nonsectarian Alliance party, which doubled its seats from eight to 17.

    The results call the longevity of Northern Ireland’s obligatory power-sharing between Catholics and Protestants into question. (more…)

  • Two Parties May Be Better Than Three

    Louvre Paris France
    The Louvre in Paris, France, February 9, 2020 (Unsplash/Louis Paulin)

    I once hailed the French voting model as an alternative to America’s. Unlike the first-past-the-post system, which encourages voters to sort into two major parties lest their vote go wasted, France’s two-round voting system encourages temporary, not permanent polarization. Multiple parties thrive in the first round. Voters choose between two finalists in the second.

    Until 2017, third parties seldom made the runoffs. But they played an important role by conditioning their support for one of the two major parties on policies or cabinet posts.

    Under François Hollande, several members of the Radical Left and Greens served in a Socialist-led government. Nicolas Sarkozy had ministers from small centrist and center-right parties who backed him in the presidential election.

    But what if the major parties don’t qualify for the runoffs at all? That has now happened in two presidential elections in a row, and it calls the stabilizing effect of the two-round voting system into question. (more…)

  • What Sánchez Should Do Next for Catalonia

    António Costa Pedro Sánchez
    Prime Minister António Costa of Portugal greets his Spanish counterpart, Pedro Sánchez, in Lisbon, July 2, 2018 (Governo da República Portuguesa/Clara Azevedo)

    Spanish prime minister Pedro Sánchez has pardoned the nine Catalan separatists who were imprisoned for organizing an unsanctioned independence referendum in 2017.

    The pardons fall short of an amnesty. Former regional vice president Oriol Junqueras and the other politicians who were convicted to between nine and thirteen years in prison for “sedition” against the Spanish state and misuse of government funds are still barred from holding public office.

    “Sedition” remains a crime. (Although Sánchez’ government is looking into revising the arcane statute.) A vote on Catalan independence would still be illegal. It’s why I argued a month ago a pardon was the least Sánchez could do.

    Here’s what he should do next. (more…)

  • Europe Doesn’t Need a Biden

    Joe Biden
    American president Joe Biden boards Air Force One at Joint Base Andrews, Maryland, February 5 (White House/Adam Schultz)

    European leaders are “weak”, the American president is “bold”. It’s a trope so old, at this point it tells us more about the people who perpetuate it than about elected officials on either side of the Atlantic.

    Romano Prodi was “weak“. José María Aznar was “weak“. François Mitterrand was “weak“. His successor, Jacques Chirac, lacked “gravitas“.

    A year before the election of Donald Trump, Robert Kaplan disparaged the “grey, insipid ciphers” who wandered Europe’s halls of power. An article in Foreign Affairs accused the continent’s “cowardly” leadership of rendering the EU “irrelevant”. A 2005 op-ed in The New York Times lamented the “weakness” of European leaders at the very time President George W. Bush called for a “renewal” in transatlantic relations. (The same George W. Bush who two years earlier had created the deepest crisis in transatlantic relations since the end of the Cold War by invading Iraq.)

    Here we go again. Jef Poortmans, a commentator for Belgium’s Knack magazine, compares Joe Biden’s “zeal” with Europe’s “washed out” leadership. Timothy Garton Ash, whose expectations the EU has never met, argues the bloc faces “one of the biggest challenges of its life” (again). Philip Stephens contrasts Biden’s “ambition”, “audacity”, “energy” and “resolve” with the “defensive incrementalism” of his European counterparts, in particular Angela Merkel.

    The “real significance” of Biden’s agenda, writes Stephens in the Financial Times — a $1.9 trillion coronavirus rescue program and a $3 trillion education and infrastructure bill — “lies in a bold reassertion of the responsibilities of government.”

    His mistake is to assume America and Europe are starting from the same point. (more…)

  • Spanish Tribulations in Multiparty Democracy

    Pablo Iglesias
    Spanish Podemos party leader Pablo Iglesias speaks at a rally in Madrid, May 20, 2017 (Podemos)

    The rise of new parties on the left, right and center has created new opportunities in Spain: a left-wing minority government that usually relies on the support of Basque and Catalan separatists in Congress, but on rare occasions takes votes from the far-right newcomer Vox (Voice).

    It has also created crises, currently in the regions of Madrid and Murcia, where the once-dominant People’s Party (PP) has called snap elections in a bid to shore up the right-wing vote. (more…)

  • Be Careful About Bringing Back Big Government

    Union Station Washington
    South Front Entrance of Union Station in Washington DC, July 4, 2019 (Unsplash/Caleb Fisher)

    Big government is back.

    Massive rescue programs have prevented business failures and unemployment on the scale of the Great Depression, even though last year’s economic contraction was nearly as bad. The European Union agreed a €750 billion recovery fund, financed, for the first time, by EU-issued bonds. The money comes on top of national efforts. The United States Congress passed a $2.2 trillion stimulus, worth 10 percent of GDP, in March and added $484 billion in April. An additional $900 billion in relief was included in this year’s budget.

    Joe Biden, the incoming president, wants to spend $2 trillion more over the next four years to transition the United States to a greener economy and create a public health insurance program. Corporate tax would go up from 21 to 28 percent.

    In Spain, a socialist government has introduced the biggest budget in Spanish history — partly to cope with the impact of coronavirus, but also to finance digitalization, electric cars, infrastructure, renewable energy and rural development. Taxes on income, sales and wealth are due to increase.

    In the United Kingdom, the ruling Conservative Party is building more social housing and thinking about renationalizing rail. Unlike during the last economic crisis, it does not propose to cut spending even though tax revenues are down.

    Same in the Netherlands, where all the major parties agree the government needs to do more to reduce pollution and prevent people at the bottom of the social ladder from falling through the cracks.

    I’m not opposed to more government per se. I’ve argued the United States should imitate the policies of Northern Europe to improve child care, health care and housing.

    But let’s be careful not to throw more government at every problem. Sometimes government is the problem. (more…)

  • Democratic Recriminations Argue for Switch to Multiparty System

    United States Capitol Washington
    Skyline of Washington DC at night (Shutterstock)

    Democrats in the United States were hoping for more than a simple victory over Donald Trump. Polls had suggested they could win in a landslide.

    That didn’t happen. Joe Biden decisively beat the president by more than six million votes, or a margin of 4 points, but Democrats lost seats in the House of Representatives and failed to take the majority from Republicans in the Senate.

    Democrats also lost seats in state houses, giving Republicans control of redistricting in most states; a power they could use to make it even more difficult for Democrats to win a majority of the seats even when they win a majority of the votes. (Districts are withdrawn every ten years following the Census.) (more…)

  • How to Restore American Democracy After Trump

    United States Capitol Washington
    United States Capitol in Washington DC (Shutterstock/Brandon Bourdages)

    Donald Trump’s presidency has exposed and exacerbated fundamental weaknesses in American democracy. He must be voted out in November, but that won’t be enough.

    If Democrats gain power, they must make five reforms to restore fairness, restore balance between the three branches of government and reverse the polarization that has made it impossible for the two parties to compromise on everything from climate change to gun laws to health care to immigration:

    1. Abolish the Electoral College.
    2. Add states.
    3. Put Congress first.
    4. Make it easier to remove the president.
    5. Abolish the two parties. (more…)

  • Democrats Should Give Caribbean and Pacific Islands Statehood

    San Juan Puerto Rico
    San Juan, Puerto Rico (Unsplash/Wei Zeng)

    Donald Trump is disliked by so many Americans that Democrats could win not just the presidency but the Senate in November.

    Longer term, however, Republicans have baked-in advantages that make Democratic control of the upper chamber elusive.

    The solution: turn America’s overseas dependencies into states. That would give 3.5 million Americans the federal representation they deserve and add ten more seats to the Senate, most of which would lean Democratic. (more…)

  • A Better Way for Democrats to Elect Their Presidential Candidate

    Elizabeth Warren
    Democratic senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts gives a speech in Bloomfield Township, Iowa, January 19 (Phil Roeder)

    Democrats in the United States need to rethink how they elect their presidential nominees.

    The problem with the current system is not just that two of the first four contests are caucuses, in which few voters can and want to participate; the first two states, Iowa and New Hampshire, are so rural and white that they hardly represent the Democratic electorate nationwide.

    Iowa’s Democrats needed days to tabulate their votes this year, undermining confidence in the process. Nevada’s did better, but they still needed a full day to incorporate the results of four days of early ranked-choice voting into the outcome of the in-person caucuses.

    The result: talented politicians of color, notably Cory Booker and Kamala Harris, felt they had to end their presidential bids before the first votes were even cast. Center-left candidates with little chance of winning the nomination, such Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar, did reasonably well in Iowa and New Hampshire and are now making it harder for more viable moderates to break out.

    By the time eighteen states and territories will have voted next week, on Super Tuesday, and 1,499 of the 1,991 delegates needed to win the nomination will have been allocated, the socialist Bernie Sanders, the top choice of one in four Democrats nationally, could be close to unbeatable.

    Surely there is a better way? (more…)

  • It’s Too Hard to Remove an American President

    Donald Trump James Mattis
    American president Donald Trump and his defense secretary, James Mattis, arrive for a NATO summit in Brussels, July 12, 2018 (NATO)

    If Donald Trump’s allies in the Senate vote to acquit him next week, they will prove it has become too hard to remove a president in the United States.

    Trump withheld congressionally mandated aid from Ukraine to coerce the country into investigating the son of his Democratic rival, former vice president Joe Biden. Trump broke the law and abused his power to help his reelection.

    Yet not a single Republican member of Congress voted to impeach him. Not a single Republican senator is expected to vote to remove him from office. (more…)

  • Don’t Try to Take Politics Out of Important Decisions

    Washington DC
    View of Washington DC with the United States Capitol in the distance, February 17, 2015 (Matt Popovich)

    When politics becomes dysfunctional, there will be a temptation to remove it from important decisions.

    This only makes the dysfunction worse.

    Politics is what we call decision-making in a democratic society. Taking politics out of some decisions falsely suggests there is a consensus for a certain policy or delegates the decision to technocrats. Either is undemocratic. (more…)

  • America’s Rigid Two-Party System Is What Its Founders Feared

    United States Capitol Washington
    The United States Capitol in Washington DC, December 10, 2019 (Unsplash/Julien Gaud)

    Lee Drutman, a political scientist, argues in The Atlantic that America has become the rigid two-party system its founders feared.

    The authors of America’s Constitution wanted to make it impossible for a partisan majority to ever unite and take control of the government, which it could then use to oppress the minority.

    The fragile consent of the governed would break down, and violence and authoritarianism would follow. This was how previous republics had fallen into civil wars and the Framers were intent on learning from history, not repeating its mistakes.

    They separated powers across competing institutions to prevent any one faction from dominating others. But they did not plan for the emergence of political parties, let alone just two parties. (more…)

  • Election Shows Britain Needs Electoral Reform

    British parliament London
    Westminster Palace in London, England (Unsplash/Matt Milton)

    The outcome of Britain’s general election on Thursday underscores the need for electoral reform.

    Support for the Conservatives rose from 42.4 to 43.6 percent, but in terms of seats they went up from 317 (48.7 percent) to 365 (56.2 percent) out of 650.

    Martin Sandbu of the Financial Times argues this hardly qualifies as a landslide. Boris Johnson “played the electoral system better” better than his predecessor, Theresa May. (more…)