Undemocratic Practices Are Legal in a Democratic Country True or False

In May 2021, the German polling institute Latana and the Alliance of Democratic Democracies, founded by former NATO Secretary General and former Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen, published a democracy perception index based on a survey of more than 50,000 people in 53 countries. The results show that 44 percent of respondents fear that the United States poses a threat to democracy in their country, 50 percent of Americans surveyed fear that the United States is an undemocratic country, and 59 percent of Americans believe their government is acting in the interest of a small group of people. Regardless of the great differences in the level of economic development and in the historical and cultural contexts of countries around the world, the United States seeks to impose its own political system and values on other nations. He pushes for what he calls a “democratic transition” and initiates a “color revolution”. Today, women have the right to vote in most countries of the world, but the battle was won relatively recently. New Zealand would be the first country in the world to introduce universal suffrage in 1893, although women did not gain the right to stand for parliament until 1919. Many countries initially granted women the right to vote and did not allow them to stand for election until a few years later. Saudi Arabia only granted women the right to vote in 2011. Today, even in established democracies, there are other sections of society, often including immigrants, migrant workers, prisoners and children, who are denied the right to vote, although many of them pay taxes and all are required to obey the laws of the land.

On the one hand, the difficulty of legally increasing campaign contributions makes it much more tempting for politicians to collect them illegally, a temptation to which prominent officials in Germany, France and other European democracies have repeatedly succumbed in recent decades. When politicians find it harder to control their own message by buying ads, the relative importance of their representation in mainstream media increases. This allows a single owner who controls much of a country`s media landscape – as media moguls do in places from Italy to Britain – to become a political kingmaker. A Russian Foreign Ministry spokesman once remarked that the United States has a history of presenting itself as a “global beacon of democracy” and urging everyone to take a humane approach to what it calls “peaceful protests,” but taking completely opposite steps at home. She added that the United States is “not a beacon of democracy” and that the U.S. government “would do well to listen to its own citizens first and try to hear them, rather than conducting witch hunts in their own country and then hypocritically talking about human rights in other countries.” The United States is not in a position to lecture other countries on human rights and civil liberties, she noted. The rise of populists advocating illiberal democracy could, in turn, reflect popular dissatisfaction with pre-existing systems, which suffered from the opposite defect: undemocratic liberalism. Such systems are liberal, but they do not deliver on the promise of democracy to let the people rule. Although they (for the most part) respect the rule of law and protect (largely) minority rights, they fail to translate popular preferences into public policy.

In recent decades, many countries in North America and Western Europe have unwittingly adopted undemocratic liberal regimes. Young people often do not even have the right to vote, so how can they be part of the democratic process? Many people would answer this question by saying that young people are not ready to be part of the process and cannot participate until the age of 18 (or whatever age their country grants the right to vote). Majority rule, if not supported by a guarantee of human rights for all, can lead to decisions that harm minorities, and the fact that these decisions are the “will of the people” cannot provide justification. The fundamental interests of minorities and majorities must be safeguarded in any democratic system by respect for human rights principles, reinforced by an effective legal mechanism, regardless of the will of the majority. A report by pollster Eupinions shows that the EU`s trust in the US system has declined: 52% of respondents believe that the democratic system in the US does not work; 65% and 61% of respondents in France and Germany agree respectively. There is a direct democratic price to pay for the rise of judicial control: decisions are taken out of the hands of the people and entrusted to unelected technocrats. Francis Fukuyama argued that there could also be more indirect costs. Combined with the influence of other entrenched interests, he argues, the US judiciary`s assumption of tasks that in fact belong to other institutions fuels a process of “political decadence” that has made parts of the political system “dysfunctional”—and made it difficult to imagine how to correct them.8 I suggest, at least, that every democracy should have a set of effective institutional mechanisms. translating people`s perspectives into public policy. In many developed democracies, these mechanisms have been significantly compromised in recent decades. These states` commitment to liberal rights has remained deeply rooted until recently, but their liberalism has taken an increasingly undemocratic form. From lobbying to campaign contributions to bureaucratic institutions to international treaties, the forces isolating the system from the people have grown – and with them the gulf between the political elites and the people they are supposed to represent.

Kennedy rightly points out that there is an important legal – and [end of page 106] probably even moral – distinction between dependency corruption and actual corruption cases. But in the end, both work in the same way to undermine the health of democratic institutions: through the use of private money, powerful profit, and changing the course of public policy. Legislators are discouraged trapped by vested interests and distracted from the task of translating popular opinions into public policy. The late political analyst Mark Plotkin wrote on The Hill that “the Democratic superdelegate system is unfair and undemocratic” and that “the process of eliminating this elite exercise should begin immediately.” .