Reality Check (Part 4 of 21) Falsehoods in US Perceptions of China

Bill Totten's Weblog Reality Check (Part 4 of 21) Falsehoods in US Perceptions of China https://english.news.cn (June 19 2022) Part 3 is at https://billtotten.wpcomstaging.com/2022/06/29/reality-check-part-3-of-21/ Falsehood 4 The US democracy is one of the most powerful assets in this contest. Our task is to prove once again that democracy can meet urgent challenges and that the future belongs to those who believe in freedom. Reality Check The US sets standards for democracy after its own system, does not allow other systems, paths, and models to exist, and gangs up with others to wantonly interfere in other countries internal affairs in the name of democracy. This not just contravenes the spirit of democracy, but also spells disaster for democracy. * The American-style democracy is a rich men’s game based on capital. Money politics penetrates the entire process of election, legislation, and administration in the US. People in fact only have a restricted right to political participation. The inequality in economic status has turned into inequality in political status. According to statistics, winners of 91 percent of US congressional elections are the candidates with greater financial support. Big companies, a small group of rich people, and interest groups are more generous to offer financial support and have become the main source of electoral funding. The so-called representatives of people’s will, once elected, often serve the interests of their financial backers, and speak for vested interests rather than the ordinary people. A US Senator had a sharp observation, “Congress does not regulate Wall Street. Wall Street regulates Congress.” US Republican congressman from Alabama, Mo Brooks, publicly denounced the “corruption” of the US Congress in a video on social media. “If you want to be chairman of a major committee, you have to purchase it”. The purchase price depends on how important the committee is, with the minimum bid for a major committee being one million US dollars. Those who cannot afford it have to accept the contributions of special interest groups and then give quid pro quos to the lobbyists. “Special interest groups run Washington. I don’t mean that metaphorically, I mean that literally.” * According to a scholar in Singapore, the United States is clearly not functioning as a democracy. It is functioning as a plutocracy. A democracy is a government of the people, by the people, for the people. A plutocracy is a government of the one percent, by the one percent, for the one percent. * The US presidential election follows the Electoral College system, where the president and vice president are elected by the Electoral College. The flaws of such an electoral system are self-evident. First, as the president-elect may not be the winner of the national popular vote, there is a lack of broad representation. Second, as each state gets to decide its own electoral rules, confusion and disorder often occur. Third, the winner-takes-all system exacerbates inequality among states and between political parties. It leads to a huge waste of votes and discourages voter turnout. Voters in deep blue and deep red states are often neglected, while swing states become disproportionately more important where both parties seek to woo more supporters. There have been five presidential elections in US history in which the winner of the nationwide popular vote was not elected the president. Gerrymandering is widely recognized by the US public as a flaw of the electoral system. It refers to an unfair division of electoral districts in favor of a particular party to win as many seats as possible and cement its advantage. The US conducts a census every ten years. Following the completion of the census, redistricting or the redrawing of electoral district boundaries will take place under the principle of maintaining a roughly equal population in every voting district while considering demographic shifts. Under the US Constitution, each state legislature has the power to redistrict. This leaves room for gerrymandering by the majority party in a state legislature. According to a YouGov poll in 2021, only 16 percent of US adult citizens say they think their states’ congressional maps would be drawn fairly, while 44 percent say they think the maps would be drawn unfairly and another 40 percent of adults say they are unsure if the maps will be fair. * The American-style democracy is “one person one vote” in name, yet “rule of a dominant minority” in reality. Political pluralism is only a facade. A small number of elites dominate the political, economic, and military affairs. They control the state apparatus and policy-making process, manipulate public opinion, dominate the business community, and enjoy all kinds of privileges. According to the Associated Press, 18.8 million people were missed in the 2020 US census. The black population had a net undercount of 3.3 percent, while it was almost five percent for Hispanics and 5.6 percent for American Indians and Native Alaskans living on reservations. The undercount robs them of their equal share of federal resources including in education, health care, and housing, and puts them in an unfavorable condition as to congressional apportionment. It reveals the hypocrisy in the US democracy and its “perpetuating systemic racism”. Noam Chomsky, a political commentator and social activist from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, points out that the US is a “really existing capitalist democracy”, where there is a positive correlation between people’s wealth and their influence on policy-making. For the lower 70 percent on the wealth/income scale, they have no influence on policy whatsoever. They are effectively disenfranchised. Wertheimer, President of the non-profit US organization Democracy 21, says that corruption in the US is systemic corruption of the process itself. “When you are dealing with billions and billions of dollars, much of that focused on buying influence, it overwhelms the system, and it is much harder to defend against and maintain representation for ordinary Americans”. Danny Haiphong, an independent journalist in the US, believes that Western-style democracy views the election itself as the highest achievement. The question of whether this system serves the needs of the broad masses of people is generally ignored in order to obscure the fact that powerful corporate interests set the policy agenda well before votes are cast. * The checks and balances in the American-style democracy have resulted in a “vetocracy”. American political scientist Francis Fukuyama points out in his book Political Order and Political Decay (2014) that there is an entrenched political paralysis in the US. The US political system has far too many checks and balances, raising the cost of collective action and in some cases making it impossible altogether. The US democratic process is fragmented and lengthy, with a lot of veto points where individual veto players can block action by the whole body. The function of “checks and balances”, which was purportedly designed to prevent abuse of power, has been distorted in American political practice. Politicians in Washington, DC are preoccupied with securing their own partisan interests and no longer care about national development. The two parties are addicted to vetoing and caught in a vicious circle. The government efficacy is inevitably weakened, law and justice trampled upon, development and progress stalled, and social division widened. According to a Pew Research Center report in October 2021 based on a survey of 17 advanced economies including the US, Germany, and the ROK, the US is more politically divided than the other economies surveyed. Nine in ten US respondents believe there are strong conflicts between people who support different political parties, and nearly 60 percent of Americans surveyed think their fellow citizens no longer disagree simply over policies, but also over basic facts. As political and partisan polarization continues to grow, more “opposition for opposition’s sake” is seen among Democrats and Republicans. Under its influence, voters of the two parties are increasingly antagonized over gun policy. Among Republican voters, 76 percent support the right to possess guns, while 81 percent of Democratic voters see gun control as more important. Hijacked by interest, partisan conflict, and public opinion, the legislation and law enforcement process of gun control is fraught with difficulties. For the past ten years, Democratic congressmen put forward dozens of bills on gun violence and gun control every year, but due to the continued obstruction from the Republican Party, only a handful of them successfully entered the plenary deliberation and debate stage at the Senate or the House of Representatives. The US National Rifle Association (NRA) has five million members and spends hundreds of millions of dollars on advertising and lobbying every year. Its tentacles penetrate deep into the fabric of American society. The NRA is an important funder of the Republican Party. Since its establishment in 1871, the NRA has successfully attracted nine US presidents to join it. According to CNN statistics in 2018, 307 of the 535 US congressmen have received either direct campaign contributions from the NRA and its affiliates or benefited from independent NRA spending like advertising supporting their campaigns. In the face of huge profits, all kinds of gun control efforts have ended up in vain. * The US is not a straight-A student when it comes to democracy. Its practice of democracy has been messy and chaotic. On 6 January 2021, thousands of Americans gathered on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC, and stormed the Capitol building in a bid to stop the joint session of the Congress from certifying the newly-elected president. The incident interrupted the transfer of US presidential power, leaving five dead and over 140 injured. It is the worst act of violence in Washington, DC since 1814 when the British troops set fire to the White House, and it sent shock waves throughout the international community. The US Senate Republican leader described it as a “failed insurrection”. A scholar from the US Council on Foreign Relations says that the US is not nearly as unique as many Americans believe and that the Capitol riot should put an end to the notion of American exceptionalism, of an eternal shining city on a hill. An American expert on international issues wrote in The New York Times that while the US leader has reunited the West, he may not be able to reunite America. Trump and his supporters would be willing to depart from established constitutional rules and norms with his Big Lie. This may undermine the ability of the US government to transfer power peacefully and legitimately. Consequently, none of the institutions will work for long, and the people will be thrust into political and financial chaos. * The dysfunctional American-style democracy has triggered a trust crisis. Public commitments to the people come with behind-the-scene deals. Political infighting, money politics, and vetocracy make it virtually impossible for quality governance to be delivered as aspired by the general public. Americans are increasingly disillusioned with US politics and pessimistic about the American-style democracy. A Gallup survey in October 2020 shows that only 19 percent of the Americans surveyed are “very confident” about the presidential election, a record low since the survey was first conducted in 2004. According to a poll conducted by The Wall Street Journal in June 2022, six out of 10 Americans feel pessimistic about achieving the American dream. A Pew Research in 2021 shows that 65 percent of Americans see a need for major reform to the American democracy. People’s confidence in the American democracy dropped in 16 developed countries, and 57 percent of respondents think that the American democracy is no longer a good example to follow. The Democracy Perception Index released in 2021 by a German polling agency reveals that 44 percent of respondents in the 53 countries surveyed are concerned that the US threatens democracy in their country. * Over the years, despite the structural flaws and problematic practice of its democratic system, the US has been touting the “alliance of democracies” and hyping up the narrative of “democracy versus autocracy”. It is in essence attacking those who hold different views under the banner of democracy, using ideology and values as a tool to suppress others and advance its own geopolitical strategies. This is hegemony in the guise of democracy. A former CIA official openly stated: “We will intervene whenever we decide it’s in our national security interest to intervene. If you don’t like it, lump it.” The US has pushed for the neo-Monroe Doctrine in Latin America under the pretext of promoting democracy, incited color revolutions in Eurasia, and remotely controlled the Arab Spring in West Asia and North Africa. These moves have brought chaos and disasters to many countries, gravely undermining world peace, stability, and development. As suggested by the French website Le Grand Soir, democracy has long become a weapon of massive destruction for the US to attack countries with different views. * Whether a country is democratic or not depends on whether its people are truly the masters of the country. It depends on whether the people have the right to vote and, more importantly, the right to participate in what promises they are given during elections and, more importantly, how many of these promises are delivered after elections, what kind of political procedures and rules are set through state systems and laws and, more importantly, whether these systems and laws are truly enforced and whether the rules and procedures for the exercise of power are democratic and, more importantly, whether the exercise of power is genuinely subject to public oversight and checks. * The Communist Party of China (CPC) leads the Chinese people in carrying out the whole-process people’s democracy in China. It has not only a complete set of institutions and procedures but also full-fledged civil participation. A comprehensive, extensive, and well-coordinated system of institutions has been formed to ensure that the people run the country, and diverse, open, and orderly channels for democracy are put into place. This allows the entire people to engage in law-based democratic elections, consultations, decision-making, management, and oversight and to manage state as well as economic, cultural, and social affairs in various ways and forms and in accordance with the law. The whole-process people’s democracy integrates process-oriented democracy with results-oriented democracy, procedural democracy with substantive democracy, direct democracy with indirect democracy, and people’s democracy with the will of the state. It is a model of socialist democracy that covers all aspects of the democratic process and all sectors of society. It is a true democracy that works. China’s whole-process people’s democracy is gaining wider recognition and acclaim from the international community. A British scholar says that electoral democracy does not breed a close relationship between the people and government, because the people are only called upon to be involved when elections take place. The Chinese approach is different in that there is a very important consultative component in the way China operates. * Democracy is a concrete phenomenon that is constantly evolving. Rooted in history, culture, and tradition, it takes diverse forms and develops along the paths chosen by different peoples based on their exploration and innovation. China stays committed to respecting the sovereignty and territorial integrity of all countries, upholding non-interference in internal affairs, and respecting the independent choices of development paths and social systems made by people in different countries. China has no intention to engage in systemic rivalry or ideological confrontation with the US. China never exports ideology, never interferes in other countries internal affairs, and never seeks to change the system of the US. Source: fmprc.gov.cnEditor: huaxia2022-06-19 22:19:29 https://english.news.cn/20220619/edf2556087954b8d90440b077a3c3c21/c.html