America: Tyranny of the Minority, and Rogue Nation Status

Watching Donald Trump - in my view, the most morally bankrupt and dangerous narcissist to ever occupy the White House - wreak havoc on the world order, igniting a trade war that will cost American consumers dearly, shredding long standing alliances, and even seeking to over through the current government in the United Kingdom (all of which likely thrills Vladimir Putin) makes it hard to reach any conclusion other than America is a rogue nation.  Disturbingly, many of Trump's tactics both domestically and internationally mirror the conduct of Adolph Hitler in the early 1930's.  Meanwhile, Trump's rural base cheers as the destruction takes place and the eunuchs in the Congressional GOP do nothing to rein in or remove an unfit occupant of the White House.  How did we reach this point where ignorance and racial hate and bigotry are celebrated by the party controlling the federal government?  A piece in The Economist - one of the few things currently stable in the UK - blames a design flaw in the United States Constitution which now allows a tyrannical and toxic minority of rural voters/states to negate the wishes of the majority of citizens. Even with massive Democrat turnout, it will prove difficult to alter the downward spiral of American politics and, I would argue, morality.   Here are article highlights:

EVERY system for converting votes into power has its flaws. Britain suffers from an over-mighty executive; Italy from chronically weak government; Israel from small, domineering factions. America, however, is plagued by the only democratic vice more troubling than the tyranny of the majority: tyranny of the minority.

This has come about because of a growing division between rural and urban voters. The electoral system the Founders devised, and which their successors elaborated, gives rural voters more clout than urban ones. When the parties stood for both city and country that bias affected them both. But the Republican Party has become disproportionately rural and the Democratic Party disproportionately urban. That means a red vote is worth more than a blue one.

The consequences are dramatic. Republicans hold both the houses of Congress and the White House. But in the three elections in 2012-16 their candidates got just 46% of the two-party vote for the Senate, and they won the presidential vote in 2016 with 49%. Our voting model predicts that, for Democrats to have a better than 50% chance of winning control of the House in November’s mid-term elections, they will need to win the popular vote by around seven percentage points. To put that another way, we think the Republicans have a 0.01% chance of winning the popular vote for the House. But we estimate their chance of securing a majority of congressmen is about a third.

This imbalance is partly by design. The greatest and the smallest states each have two senators, in order that Congress should represent territory as well as people. Yet the over-representation of rural America was not supposed to affect the House and the presidency. . . . America has one party built on territory and another built on people.

By having elected politicians appoint federal judges, the American system embeds this rural bias in the courts as well. If Brett Kavanaugh, whom President Donald Trump nominated this week, joins the Supreme Court, a conservative court established by a president and Senate who were elected with less than half the two-party vote may end up litigating the fairness of the voting system.

[T]he built-in bias is obviously bad for Democrats. But in the long run it is bad for America as a whole, including Republicans. When lawmaking is paralysed, important work, such as immigration and entitlement reform, is too hard. The few big laws that are approved, like Barack Obama’s health-care reform or Mr Trump’s corporate-tax cuts, pass on party-line votes. That emboldens the opposition to reverse or neuter them when they take power. Meanwhile, the task of resolving the most divisive political issues often falls to the courts. The battle over Mr Kavanaugh’s confirmation will be a proxy war over issues, like abortion and health insurance, better suited to the legislature.

[R]ancorous political disputes—over guns, abortion and climate change—split so neatly along urban-rural lines that parties and voters increasingly sort themselves into urban-rural tribes. Gerrymandering and party primaries reward extremists, and ensure that, once elected, they seldom need fear for their jobs. The incentives to take extreme positions are very powerful.

Bitter partisanship, ineffective federal government and electoral bias poison politics and are hard to fix. Changing the constitution is hard—and rightly so. Yet the voting system for Congress is easier to reform than most people realise, because the constitution does not stipulate what it should be. Congress last voted to change the rules in 1967.

Voting reform is not the whole answer to partisanship and built-in bias, but it would help. It is hard, but not outlandish. To maintain the trust of all Americans, the world’s oldest constitutional democracy needs to reform itself.

I agree with the piece.  Wyoming with slightly less than 600,000 residents should not have two U.S. Senators. Ditto for other small, least educated, mot reactionary states.   The Electoral College - which utterly failed its purpose in 2016 - likewise needs to go.

GOP Bellicosity is a Threat to the World

America still has not extricated itself or the Middle East from the instability and chaos triggered by the Bush/Cheney invasion of Iraq and an utter mishandling of Afghanistan (assuming, of course, anyone can fix the mess that has been Afghanistan for centuries).  Now, Republicans are quick to condemn the Iran nuclear arms agreement and seem ready to rush America into another ground war in the Middle East that America cannot win, squandering American lives and billions, if not trillions, of dollars in the process.  Part of the GOP's bellicosity stems from the Christofascist base of the party that has near orgasms at the thought of killing Muslims and non-Christians.  Another part comes from GOP ties to the so-called defense industry that needs unending war to maximize profits - think Halliburton and Dick Cheney.  The last part comes from today's GOP and its detachment from objective reality and the fantasy world in which it exists.  A piece in Salon looks at the danger the GOP poses to the world:

Throughout the world there is great relief and optimism about the nuclear deal reached in Vienna between Iran and the P5+1 nations, the five veto-holding members of the U.N. Security Council and Germany. Most of the world apparently shares the assessment of the U.S. Arms Control Association that “the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action establishes a strong and effective formula for blocking all of the pathways by which Iran could acquire material for nuclear weapons for more than a generation and a verification system to promptly detect and deter possible efforts by Iran to covertly pursue nuclear weapons that will last indefinitely.”

There are, however, striking exceptions to the general enthusiasm: the United States and its closest regional allies, Israel and Saudi Arabia. . . . Prominent sectors of U.S. power and opinion share the stand of the two regional allies and so are in a state of virtual hysteria over “the Iranian threat.” Sober commentary in the United States, pretty much across the spectrum, declares that country to be “the gravest threat to world peace.”

The current Republican primaries illustrate the proclaimed reasons. Senator Ted Cruz, considered one of the intellectuals among the crowded field of presidential candidates, warns that Iran may still be able to produce nuclear weapons and could someday use one to set off an Electro Magnetic Pulse that “would take down the electrical grid of the entire eastern seaboard” of the United States, killing “tens of millions of Americans.”

The two most likely winners, former Florida Governor Jeb Bush and Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, are battling over whether to bomb Iran immediately after being elected or after the first Cabinet meeting.  The one candidate with some foreign policy experience, Lindsey Graham, describes the deal as “a death sentence for the state of Israel,” which will certainly come as a surprise to Israeli intelligence and strategic analysts — and which Graham knows to be utter nonsense, raising immediate questions about actual motives.

Keep in mind that the Republicans long ago abandoned the pretense of functioning as a normal congressional party.  They have, . . . become a “radical insurgency” that scarcely seeks to participate in normal congressional politics.

Since the days of President Ronald Reagan, the party leadership has plunged so far into the pockets of the very rich and the corporate sector that they can attract votes only by mobilizing parts of the population that have not previously been an organized political force.  Among them are extremist evangelical Christians, now probably a majority of Republican voters; remnants of the former slave-holding states; nativists who are terrified that “they” are taking our white Christian Anglo-Saxon country away from us; . . .

Israel, of course, is one of the three nuclear powers, along with India and Pakistan, whose weapons programs have been abetted by the United States and that refuse to sign the Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT). . . . .  The NPT, in turn, is the most important arms control treaty of all.  If it were adhered to, it could end the scourge of nuclear weapons.

Repeatedly, implementation of the resolution has been blocked by the U.S., most recently by President Obama in 2010 and again in 2015, as Dhanapala and Duarte point out, “on behalf of a state that is not a party to the NPT and is widely believed to be the only one in the region possessing nuclear weapons” — a polite and understated reference to Israel. 

A nuclear-weapons-free Middle East would be a straightforward way to address whatever threat Iran allegedly poses, but a great deal more is at stake in Washington’s continuing sabotage of the effort in order to protect its Israeli client.  After all, this is not the only case in which opportunities to end the alleged Iranian threat have been undermined by Washington, raising further questions about just what is actually at stake.

There is also a world outside the U.S. and although its views are not reported in the mainstream here, perhaps they are of some interest.  According to the leading western polling agencies (WIN/Gallup International), the prize for “greatest threat” is won by the United States.  The rest of the world regards it as the gravest threat to world peace by a large margin.  In second place, far below, is Pakistan, its ranking probably inflated by the Indian vote.  Iran is ranked below those two, along with China, Israel, North Korea, and Afghanistan.

The authoritative SIPRI review of global armaments ranks the U.S., as usual, way in the lead in military expenditures.  China comes in second with about one-third of U.S. expenditures.  Far below are Russia and Saudi Arabia, which are nonetheless well above any western European state.  Iran isscarcely mentioned. . . . . the Gulf Cooperation Council states — Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE — outspend Iran on arms by a factor of eight, an imbalance that goes back decades. . . . When it comes to Israel, of course, the imbalance is even greater.

The United States, as is well known, holds the world championship title in regime change and Israel is no laggard either.  The most destructive of its invasions of Lebanon in 1982 was explicitly aimed at regime change, as well as at securing its hold on the occupied territories.  The pretexts offered were thin indeed and collapsed at once.  That, too, is not unusual and pretty much independent of the nature of the society — from the laments in the Declaration of Independence about the “merciless Indian savages” to Hitler’s defense of Germany from the “wild terror” of the Poles.

Who, then, would be concerned by an Iranian deterrent?  The answer is plain: the rogue states that rampage in the region and do not want to tolerate any impediment to their reliance on aggression and violence.  In the lead in this regard are the U.S. and Israel, with Saudi Arabia trying its best to join the club with its invasion of Bahrain (to support the crushing of a reform movement there) and now its murderous assault on Yemen, accelerating a growing humanitarian catastrophe in that country.

For the United States, the characterization is familiar.  Fifteen years ago, the prominent political analyst Samuel Huntington, professor of the science of government at Harvard, warned in the establishment journal Foreign Affairsthat for much of the world the U.S. was “becoming the rogue superpower… the single greatest external threat to their societies.”
“In the eyes of much of the world, in fact, the prime rogue state today is the United States.” As we have seen, global opinion supports this judgment by a substantial margin.

Furthermore, the mantle is worn with pride.  That is the clear meaning of the insistence of the political class that the U.S. reserves the right to resort to force if it unilaterally determines that Iran is violating some commitment. 

These are among the critical matters that should be the focus of attention in analyzing the nuclear deal at Vienna, whether it stands or is sabotaged by Congress, as it may well be.