‘Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.…’
Sir Winston Churchill
Societies must, from time to time, review their laws and authority structures to adjust them according to an objective image of the country to which they aspire, taking into consideration models of social organization in line with their nature and their collective will to replace those that have proven to be worn out to the point of being ineffective. Everywhere, we see dysfunctional political systems to varying degrees: Libya, Lebanon, Iraq, Afghanistan, Israel, Cuba, Bolivia, Nicaragua, Venezuela, Poland, Hungary, Turkey, France, Italy, the United Kingdom, Spain, Bangladesh, Haiti, and the United States, to mention a few.1_/
Politics, the public thing, has now become a business dominated by a few parties, controlled by merchants of favors and privileges, far from the active and creative participation of an absent citizenry in collective decision-making that impacts their daily lives, supported by the manipulation of the masses through effective propaganda mechanisms, which they combine with entertainment characters and handouts that buy votes. The bureaucratization of politics contributed to the generalized loss of meaning in collective life.
Culture has been trivialized by making celebrities of stupid people who exhibit their artificial lives on social networks, or even criminal characters from TV series who become models to be emulated, and their “achievements” become models to which their followers should aspire. Collective values lack ethics and substance, driven by fictional characters who pretend to be happy and fulfilled but, in reality, are filled with emptiness, loneliness, and resentment. Success is measured by the number of followers who follow someone who is not as happy as he makes them believe.
Can we generate legitimate values that are widely shared and serve as a guide for a collective life that is not limited to the search for immediate gratification, for the temporary and superficial, for the distraction of our reality? Can we conceive and build a more meaningful future that is less vulgar than the present system headed by those who do not deserve to do so? Where are those models of a country to replace these decaying systems of authority that have evolved into disposable products? Are we capable of reinventing and creating new collective pacts, revitalizing new social practices and ways of living together that will eradicate the vices of the systems governing us?
Citizens feel disillusioned and disconnected from political processes, perceiving them as irrelevant or manipulated by corporate interests and elites; this disillusionment leads to widespread apathy, a weakening of civic engagement, and a collective distrust in their leaders and in the effectiveness of the social contract. A transformation of society should enable the community to conceive and establish forms of organization and coexistence that are more just, efficient, equitable, and functional. The term democracy should be reviewed to evaluate how well it fulfills its purpose in today’s reality and how much it has been manipulated to justify attitudes, regimes, and leaderships that are precisely the opposite of the concept of democracy.
“Democracies today die with votes. We have seen it in many parts of the world: democratically elected governments use constitutional resources to dismantle counterweights and impose unrestricted rule.”… “The route is quite clear: a symbolic war is waged against those who are painted as enemies of the nation, control bodies are nullified, criticism is harassed, instances of neutrality are colonized, the opposition is delegitimized.” 2_/ There is Russia, Venezuela, Nicaragua, and most probably Mexico in a few days, once the trampling of the Constitution is consummated to give a qualified majority in Congress to the ruling party with its allies; and the United States of America in case Donald Trump wins the election.
There is much to learn from recent history, successes, and failures. The rise, evolution, and decline of fascism in Italy and Nazism in Germany. The geopolitical transformations of the 20th century, with two world wars, the Cold War, which, besides representing a threat to the human species due to the possibility of a conflagration with nuclear bombs, involved the struggle for the adoption and promotion of one of two models in their territorial spheres: capitalism led by the United States, which displaced the British Empire from Western leadership, and communism driven by Soviet Russia, to the East of Berlin.
The model of international arbitration conceived at the end of World War II, which became the United Nations, worked until it stopped working when its main members decided to ignore resolutions they did not like. The rescue of Europe with the Marshall Plan, the Bretton Woods agreement that created the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, and the establishment of NATO. 9/11 marked a turning point in global security. A global culture is driven by technological innovations conceived and developed by Americans, and an economy is expanding around the planet, following and emulating their business models.
The world changed almost without realizing it. Female leadership emerged, with 135 women at the helm of their countries’ governments, including Indira Gandhi, Golda Meier, Margaret Thatcher, and Angela Merkel, and soon, in addition to Claudia Sheimbaum in Mexico, perhaps Kamala Harris in the United States. 3_/ The fall of the Berlin Wall was the beginning of the disintegration of the Soviet Union, the emergence of new, more or less democratic regimes, and the birth of a new plutocratic class and savage capitalism that took advantage of the dismantling of Soviet industry in complicity and connivance with Yeltsin and Putin; the transformation of communist China into an industrial power through a sui generis capitalism called socialist market economy, initially promoted by Deng Xiaoping, and governed by the Chinese Communist Party.
Countries, referents, values, migratory flows, international alliances forming blocks, criminal organizations, attires, everything changed; the emergence of online shopping or e-commerce that gradually replaced stores in shopping malls; the traditional means of access to news and information that were forced to transform to their digital versions and then overwhelmed by social networks and online news services also changed; the major television networks succumbed first to the multiplicity of content options on cable and satellite television and then to the emergence of online content services such as Netflix and the like, and to the phenomenon that captures the attention of billions of eyeballs several hours a day, becoming the world’s leading television network called YouTube, which competes in viewership with another phenomenon called TikTok.
What for many years was one of the most profitable services for telephone companies -long distance-, disappeared overnight first with the emergence of services that allow users to make phone calls and other audio, video, and text communications over an Internet connection (VOIP) and these in turn replaced by free voice, video, and data services to everyone through messaging services such as WhatsApp, Signal, Telegram, and others. The risks and opportunities posed by the development of pattern recognition and information gathering and summarizing software, commonly known as artificial intelligence, never cease to amaze and evolve.
The human capacity to conceive and create new models of coexistence within and among nations must be put into practice. It is necessary to question the established norms, values, and structures, the models of political organization, the bureaucratic structure full of useless patches and complex and dysfunctional co-government arrangements, many of which arose to solve problems that no longer exist but the bureaucratic organization that was created for it is still there, alive and kicking, or constitutions conceived centuries ago for an era that no longer exists, as in the case of the thirteen colonies that gave rise to the most powerful country on earth, which has little in common with that of 1789 that justified disproportionate representation in favor of less populous states in the Electoral College.
Adopt successful models (such as Singapore) and eradicate the vices and systemic errors that only lead to society’s impoverishment (Sudan, Burundi, Madagascar, Haiti, Honduras, Cuba, Venezuela, …) and to a backwardness that becomes exponential when compared to the progress of prosperous countries in all senses of the word.
To this end, it is a priority to rethink education: where is school education oriented to memorize dates, places, names, and meaningless formulas? It is true that one only learns what one understands; the rest, if anything, is remembered. What should students learn, distinguishing between learning (acquiring knowledge of something through experience or study) and memorizing (fixing something in memory, even if one does not know or understand what it is)? The most valuable thing they can learn is to think, question, investigate, explore, innovate, wonder, and use the tools made available by technology to satisfy an intellectual curiosity increasingly asking more and more questions.
The primary purpose of school education, besides stimulating curiosity and creativity, should be an invitation and an impulse to become the most capable person in the subject of one’s choice according to one’s inclination and abilities. The other part of education, which comes from their home, consists of providing principles (the fundamental rules that guide behavior and decisions) and values (beliefs and convictions considered important) with which they should grow and develop in life.
Populist rulers get their mouths full when they use concepts they do not understand but which sound attractive to them. They talk about sovereignty without thinking or understanding that this term denotes the capacity of a State to carry out its national project, not the right to decide and implement policies and actions that only ensure to keep its population in misery. They exalt a primitive nationalism that ignores the geopolitical reality of a globalized and interdependent world. They are sellers of illusions who offer what the people long for, knowing that they will not be able to deliver it, but they will blame their predecessors and deceive them again with new promises. Their speeches are full of myths, lies, and superstitions to denigrate opponents, often reaching the point of vileness, all to eliminate pluralism, norms, and autonomies, especially those that would have the capacity to demand accountability.
The imminent farewell attack of the Mexican president against his people consists of ending the separation of powers, a fundamental element of democracy, which, most likely, will provoke the cancellation of the Trade Agreement with the United States and Canada, given this would violate the core structure of the Agreement and the premise of complying with due process and the separation of powers to guarantee them. From the preamble and several articles, Mexico committed itself to “establish a clear, transparent and predictable legal and commercial framework …”. It obliged itself to establish and abide by the resolutions of independent tribunals that guarantee rights and ensure the opportunity for defense and compliance with judgments: “Each Party shall establish or maintain judicial, quasi-judicial or administrative tribunals … Such tribunals shall be impartial and independent…”. 4_/
Since the main engine of the Mexican economy is foreign trade with the United States and Canada, we may expect a collapse in economic activity of such proportions that its immediate, medium, and long-term consequences are unpredictable. This is without adding or considering the deterioration of security due to the expansion of geographic areas controlled by organized crime with the complacency and complicity of the federal and local governments, the high level of corruption in the government, the growing fiscal deficit caused by populist programs, and the ineffectiveness and ineptitude of the leadership.
Another example is Lebanon. The country is prone to political stagnation due to its complex power-sharing system, and the level of corruption among the political elite is hopeless. Its failure should not be surprising, considering that it has been ruled since independence by a group of sectarian elites who used its resources and dominated its politics. 5_/
What to say about Donald Trump’s bluntly expressed intentions, which asks people to vote for him on November 5 so that they will not have to vote again. Does he intend to become a monarch and make Americans his subjects? Will the division of powers end, or does he intend some resemblance to Canada, which is a federal parliamentary democracy under a constitutional monarchy, with him as monarch? His conception of the State may not reach such sophistication. Not to mention his intention to remove all types of legal and institutional limitations that prevent him from exercising power as he pleases.
Finally, the European transcultural phenomenon caused by the massive migration of Muslims is beginning to affect some countries, such as France, Spain, Belgium, Holland, and Germany, among others. It is not a minor or temporary issue; they came to stay and expand, with effects on culture, politics, economy, and social coexistence, altering the social pacts that had prevailed for generations. It will be interesting to observe its evolution, which is beginning to be reflected in these countries’ daily coexistence and electoral processes.
NOTES:
1_/ Dysfunctional Government at Home and Abroad, Graham K. Wilson, Boston University Law Review [Vol. 94:971],” …the system is so structurally weak and so controlled by money and power of people that are not voted for office that it feels like a non-representative, non-democracy to large numbers of Americans who no longer share the values that America was founded on. They don’t see that the country reflects that.” Ian Bremmer, The US is the world’s most dysfunctional major democracy, June 24, 2024 https://www.gzeromedia.com/quick-take/the-us-is-the-worlds-most-dysfunctional-major-democracy
2_/ Jesús Silva Hérzog Márquez, Cambio de Régimen on Reforma, July 28, 2024
3_/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_elected_and_appointed_female_heads_of_state_and_government
4_/ Article 4 of Chapter 29, quoted by Luis Fernando de la Calle on “Plan C: violaciones T-MEC y otros tratados, complica revisión 2026” El Universal, June 17, 2024
5_/ Lebanon: The Death of a Country, Hilal Khashan November 2, 2022, on geopoliticalfutures.com
SEPGRA Political Analysis Group.
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