In contemporary U.S. politics, there's bad news and really bad news ...

It has only recently struck me that, if Trump were to defeat Clinton in the presidential election, not only would America's "liberals" --what passes for a political Left in the U.S.--not understand the great gift they'd been handed with the defeat of the Clinton Borg, they'd completely waste the opportunity it presents to thoroughly rid the party of this tumor.

They're too stupid to understand the significance for themselves and for others of a Trump victory and this means that the real harms of his tenure in the White House should be suffered for absolutely nothing at all in return rather than what that suffering could otherwise be: though a very stiff price to pay, the now-unavoidable price of having stupidly allowed the Clintons and their Democratic Leadership Council types to fester in U.S. politics since 1992.

Instead, the country's going to have the worst of both: the suffering-- and nothing learned from it, the suffering-- and nothing gained in exchange. Useless, pointless suffering--until now the specialty of British politics.

That's why I'm posting this now, in advance. If a Trump victory happens, you so-called "liberals"--those who could have voted for Sanders but didn't--will bewail your fate and stupidly waste your opportunity, being unable to recognize it.

That's the stuff of genuine tragedy. Politically, Americans' stupidity is nothing short of tragic.

And if Hillary wins? Obviously, Hillary's naive supporters shall fail to understand their rotten luck, how they'd been supremely suckered and how they were going to continue to be suckered again and again.

The circumstances in which we find ourselves call for a little counter-intuitive thinking. And Americans cannot manage that.

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... “ 'After every election where there’s a seismic loss on one side; it shatters the power structure and rebuilds it,' said a top Republican strategist intimately involved in such discussions both in Washington and among the GOP’s biggest donors. 'There’s a void that exists. And if you’re not prepared to fill it, the chances are the same people who brought you this disaster will.' "

Read more: http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/07/rnc-2016-gop-republican-party-lea...

That's as true for Democrats as it is for Republicans.

OPINION + VOICES

Four threats to American democracy
Jared Diamond | February 18, 2014

The U.S. government has spent the last two years wrestling with a series of crises over the federal budget and debt ceiling. I do not deny that our national debt and the prospect of a government shutdown pose real problems. But they are not our fundamental problems, although they are symptoms of them. Instead, our fundamental problems are four interconnected issues combining to threaten a breakdown of effective democratic government in the United States.

Why should we care? Let's remind ourselves of the oft-forgotten reasons why democracy is a superior form of government (provided that it works), and hence why its deterioration is very worrisome. (Of course, I acknowledge that there are many countries in which democracy does not work, because of the lack of a national identity, of an informed electorate, or of both).

"The Measure of a Nation" Challenges Illusions of American Superiority

Sunday, 07 October 2012 08:18
By Arthur Goldwag, Truthout | Book Review

Book Review:

...
In his new book "The Measure of a Nation: How To Regain America's Competitive Edge and Boost Our Global Standing" (Prometheus, 2012), Howard Steven Friedman, a statistician and health economist for the United Nations and an adjunct professor at Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs, compared the US' standings on a variety of metrics concerning health, safety, education, democracy and income equality to those of 13 carefully chosen competitor nations: Australia, Belgium, Canada, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Japan, Portugal, the Netherlands, South Korea, Spain and the UK. All of them are members of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD); all have populations of at least ten million, and mean GDPs per capita of at least $20,000.
Using the lingo of the Boston Consulting Group (where Romney worked before he came to Bain (Consultants) ), Friedman rated the top-performing countries as Stars, the worst-performers as Dogs, and the middling performers as Middle Children.

Is Democracy in Trouble?

Dissatisfaction & The Erosion of Engagement

E. J. Dionne Jr. / May 20, 2013 - 9:26am

We know American politics are dysfunctional. But after a week of scandal obsession during which the nation's capital and the media virtually ignored the problems most voters care about -- jobs, incomes, growth, opportunity, education -- it's worth asking if there is something especially flawed about our democracy.

Our circumstances certainly have their own particular disabilities: a radicalization of conservative politics, over-the-top mistrust of President Obama on the right, high-tech gerrymandering in the House, and a Senate snarled by non-constitutional super-majority requirements.

Still, while it may not be much of a comfort, the democratic distemper is not a peculiarly American phenomenon. Across most of the democratic world, there is an impatience bordering on exhaustion with electoral systems and political classes.

Citizen dissatisfaction is hardly surprising in the wake of a deeply damaging economic downturn. That doesn't make the challenge any less daunting. We should consider whether democracy itself is in danger of being discredited.

June 14, 2016 11:38 a.m.

Why Peter Thiel Wants to Topple Gawker and Elect Donald Trump

By Park MacDougald

...

...But while it’d be easy, and not incorrect, to cast him in the role of a latter-day Charles Foster Kane — à la Frank VanderSloot, the Republican donor who’s offered to fund any lawsuits against Mother Jones — Peter Thiel is more interesting than your run-of-the-mill rich guy. Some of his eccentricities, like his plan to live forever, are to be expected from a high-powered tech entrepreneur. But he’s known for odd politics as well: He’s a big Republican donor in a Valley dominated by Democrats. Though a self-described libertarian, he’s advocated for monopoly and argued that companies should be structured like monarchies. He’s funded idiosyncratic “political” initiatives, such as the Seasteading Institute’s project to create floating libertarian city-states. Famously, in a 2009 essay for Cato Unbound, he declared that he “no longer believe(s) that capitalism and democracy are compatible.” ¹ (Thiel has since said that he was wrong to think America was a democracy, calling it instead a “state dominated by very unelected, technocratic agencies”).

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Some of the articles referenced in this article:

Peter Thiel :

"The Education of a Libertarian,"
By Peter Thiel / Response Essays
April 13, 2009 (www.cato-unbound.org)
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Andrew Sullivan : New York Magazine / Daily Intelligencer :

"America Has Never Been So Ripe For Tyranny" May 1, 2016 / 09:00 p.m.
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The New York Times (OP/ED)

"Across the Globe, a Growing Disillusionment With Democracy"

By ROBERTO FOA and YASCHA MOUNK
SEPTEMBER 15, 2015
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Salon Magazine (Online)
Sunday, May 8, 2016 / 4 PM UTC

"Andrew Sullivan is wrong again" His mainstream liberalism has become scarily anti-democratic

by ALEX TRIMBLE YOUNG

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Gallop.com / Politics
/ September 28, 2015

"Americans' Trust in Media Remains at Historical Low" by Rebecca Riffkin
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The New Yorker Magazine

Profiles September 28 2011 Issue

NO DEATH, NO TAXES : The Libertarian future of a Silicon Valley Billionaire by George Packer

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¹ (Emphasis added) In fact, the quote is mistaken and the actual remark is much more troubling in character. Mr. Thiel actually said:

... " Most importantly, I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible." ...

(emphasis added here)

The New York Times
Opinion

OP-ED CONTRIBUTORS

Across the Globe, a Growing Disillusionment With Democracy

WIN MCNAMEE / GETTY IMAGES
By ROBERTO FOA and YASCHA MOUNK
SEPTEMBER 15, 2015

Signs of democratic dysfunction are everywhere, from Athens to Ankara, Brussels to Brasília. In the United States, the federal government has shut down 12 times in the last 35 years.

According to the political scientists Christopher Hare and Keith T. Poole, the two main American political parties are more polarized now than they have been at any time since the Civil War. Meanwhile, a Gallup tracking poll shows that trust in the presidency and in the Supreme Court stands at historic lows — while faith in Congress has plummeted so far that it is now in the single digits.

Some citizens of democracies have become so unhappy with their institutions that — according to disturbing new studies of public opinion around the world — they may be tempted to dispense with partisan politics altogether. Would it not be better to let the president make decisions without having to worry about Congress — or to entrust key decisions to unelected experts like the Federal Reserve and the Pentagon?

According to a growing share of Americans, the answer is yes. Back in 1995, the well-respected World Values Survey, which studies representative samples of citizens in almost 100 countries, asked Americans for the first time whether they approved of the idea of “having the army rule.” One in 15 agreed. Since then, that number has steadily grown, to one in six.

To be sure, that still leaves five out of six Americans who would rather not have a military coup. And of course, not every American who tells a pollster that he would rather have the army in charge would actually support a coup. But the willingness to countenance alternative forms of government, if only by a small minority, reveals a deep disillusionment with democracy, one that should concern everyone living in an advanced democracy, including those in Europe and Asia.

The generational differences are striking. When the World Values Survey asked Americans how important it was for them to live in a democracy, citizens born before World War II were the most adamant. On a scale of one to ten, 72 percent assigned living in a democracy a ten, the highest possible value. Among many of their children and grandchildren, however, democracy no longer commands the same devotion.

A little over half of Americans born in the postwar boom gave maximum importance to living in a democracy. Among those born since the 1980s, less than 30 percent did.

Political scientists are well aware that poll after poll shows citizens to be more dissatisfied than in the past. Yet they resist the most straightforward conclusion: that people may be less supportive of democracy than they once were.

Ronald Inglehart and Pippa Norris, for example, argue that expectations of citizens have grown rapidly in recent decades, leading to disappointment with the performance of individual politicians and particular governments. But while government legitimacy may have taken a hit, regime legitimacy — that is to say, faith in democracy as such — is as strong as ever, they say.

Worryingly, though, questions in the World Values Survey that directly speak to regime legitimacy no longer support that optimistic interpretation. In countries from the United States to Sweden, and from the Netherlands to Japan, citizens over the last three decades have become less likely to endorse the importance of democracy; less likely to express trust in democratic institutions; and less likely to reject nondemocratic alternatives.

This raises a question that would have seemed strange, even preposterous, to us until we started to embark on our current research: Could the political system in seemingly stable democracies like the United States be less imperturbable than meets the eye?

Interactive Feature | Timeline: Democracy in Recession Charting the rise, and stall, of democracy in the last 40 years.

Scholars have long believed that democracies are stable once they have, in the words of Juan J. Linz and Alfred C. Stepan, become “the only game in town.” In such “consolidated” democracies, where an alternative system of government no longer seems like a possibility, an overwhelming majority of the citizens believes that the only legitimate form of government is democratic. Mainstream political actors refrain from subverting the rules of the democratic game for partisan advantage. And political forces that seek to dismantle the main aspects of the democratic system, like an independent judiciary, are weak or nonexistent.

Until recently, all of these statements described countries like the United States. Today, it is far from obvious that they still do.

It is not just that citizens like democracy less than they once did: Respect for the rules of the democratic game is also eroding. While most Americans still have a deep emotional attachment to the Constitution, the informal norms that have kept the system stable in the past are increasingly disregarded in political practice. Parliamentary procedures long reserved for extraordinary circumstances, for example, are used with stunning regularity.

It is not uncommon to threaten impeachment, or to use the filibuster to block legislation — not because the bill is especially transformative, but simply because a legislative minority disagrees with it.

The rise of parties that are critical of key aspects of liberal democracy, like freedom of the press or minority rights, is even more disconcerting. Since the early 1990s, votes for populists have soared in most major Western democracies, whether the National Front in France or the People’s Party in Denmark.

It is no foregone conclusion that such parties will one day take over the government, nor that they would dismantle liberal democracy if they did. And most citizens say they still want to live in a democracy. But the democratic consensus is more brittle than it was. Scholars who long ago concluded that postwar Western democracies have “consolidated” must reckon with the possibility that a process of what we call “democratic deconsolidation” may be underway.

In our view, there are three main explanations for this development.

First, most Americans still have materially comfortable lives, especially by international standards. But a long period of stagnating incomes for average citizens has led to a shift in perspective.

For two centuries, most Americans knew they were better off than their parents — and expected that their children would be better off still. Occasional surges of populist discontent were cushioned by their fear of upsetting a system that had served them well, and was expected to continue delivering tangible benefits. That optimism is gone.

Second, rising income inequality has transformed the views of the rich more radically than the views of the poor. In egalitarian societies, elites identify with the middle class, and believe that uncorrupted democratic institutions serve their own economic interests. In oligarchic societies, economic elites share few material interests with ordinary people, and have much to lose from policies that would improve their lot.

Even though economic policy has, by virtually any objective metric, treated wealthy Americans favorably over the past decade, for example, many of them genuinely believe they are the victims of a “war on the rich.”

This helps to explain the seeming paradox that the rich are now more likely to be critical of democracy than the poor.

According to the World Values Survey, less than 20 percent of wealthy Americans (those in the top income quintile) approved of having a “strong leader who doesn’t have to bother with Congress or elections” back in 1995. Today, more than 40 percent do.

The less comfortable the wealthy are with the democratic process, the more inclined they are to invest in influencing electoral outcomes, via lobbying legislators or funding campaigns.

The greater the role of paid influence and campaign spending, the more ordinary citizens feel that the political system no longer listens to them. That is the third reason for democracy’s loss of legitimacy.

Consider a recent study by the political scientists Martin Gilens and Benjamin I. Page, who analyzed who has been most successful in determining policy making

in the United States over the past 30 years. It found that economic elites and narrow interest groups were very influential, while the views of ordinary citizens and mass-based interest groups had virtually no impact.

Citizens are aware of this disconnect. When asked by the World Values Survey to rate how democratically their country is being governed on a 10-point scale,

“When the preferences of economic elites and the stands of organized interest groups are controlled for,” Mr. Gilens and Mr. Page write, “the preferences of the average American appear to have only a minuscule, near-zero, statistically nonsignificant impact upon public policy.” Their takeaway: “In the United States, the majority does not rule.”

a third of Americans now tend toward the end — “not at all democratic.”

Paradoxically, the solution to democracy’s ills will have to involve daring more democracy. The Harvard law professor Lawrence Lessig, who recently announced that he will run for president unless other candidates get serious about reforming the electoral process, is right: To restore democracy’s promise, we need ambitious institutional overhauls to curb the political power of the rich.

Strict limits on campaign finance contributions are essential. The influence of corporate lobbyists has to be curtailed. The revolving door between Washington and Wall Street needs to be jammed. And, given that most members of Congress are now millionaires, a more economically diverse generation of politicians needs to take over the reins.

Institutional change, however, is only the first step toward the real goal: redistributive policies that improve the standard of living of citizens.

In times of slow growth like the present, the rapidly rising fortunes of the rich are being purchased at the price of material stagnation for everyone else. If we want the bulk of ordinary citizens to remain invested in democracy, we need to channel a much greater share of our economic output to them.

Never in modern history has a rich and long-established democracy collapsed. Recent public opinion data may be worrying, but it hardly proves that doom is imminent. Most citizens still support democracy.

Yet the warning signs are clear enough that it would be folly to ignore them. Democracies are not as consolidated as they once were, in good part because citizens no longer enjoy the material advances they once took for granted.

There is no historical precedent that can tell us what happens to established democracies when most citizens go years, even decades, without an improvement in their standard of living.

The future of democracy is uncertain. In the West, democratic systems have proved strong enough to weather the disappointments of the last decades. It’s perfectly possible that they can weather more. But to put off serious change because it is so easy to assume that democracy is here to stay is to put at risk the very stability of democratic government.
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Roberto Foa is a doctoral candidate in government at Harvard University and a principal investigator of the World Values Survey. Yascha Mounk is a lecturer in political theory at Harvard University and a Carnegie Foundation Fellow at New America, a think tank.

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