Manuel Suárez Mier
Five columns by our contributor, the late Manuel Suárez Mier, addressed these two relevant questions, reviewed the evolution of the two main political parties, and expressed an insightful concern for democracy in the United States. Given the characters and unfolding events, these texts from four years ago are surprisingly contemporary and relevant today.
Why are US elections complex?
November 13, 2020
It has become commonplace to denounce that the US electoral system is “undemocratic” because it does not have universal and direct suffrage and that it must be changed without understanding the reasons for its existence and how it is an essential element in the genuine federalism that the new country created at its birth.
Unlike other nations, such as those that belonged to the Spanish empire, the United States’ origins go back to independent colonies with different purposes, created by dissimilar companies and individuals who adopted different laws, ways of operating, and even different religions.
The inhabitants of the 13 American colonies were subjects of the King of England, in a much more distant relationship than those who lived in the Spanish colonies. This was due to the presence of a viceroy who incarnated the monarch, dictated laws, ensured that they were complied with, and even imposed customs.
The British crown attempted to control more of what happened in the American colonies, and its determination to levy higher taxes and impose an unbreakable mercantile monopoly, as was the case with the Spanish dependencies, led to the inhabitants’ insurrection.
What followed was the well-known military epic and administrative chaos due to the common bond the colonies gave themselves, the Articles of Confederation, which created an alliance among them, with an assembly of representatives with limited tasks, such as issuing debt, but not the means to collect revenue.
Upon achieving the improbable military victory, the United States began to operate as an autonomous entity in a completely dysfunctional way. Each state pulled its own way, serving only its own limited interests.
The attempt at a free trade agreement among the states at the Annapolis Convention of 1786 failed as they had been adopting seigniorage and other trade barriers, and half of the states didn’t show up. The debt issued by the Confederacy was priced at 1% of its face value, as the hope of repayment was remote.
Growing frustration with the union’s fiasco led to the convening the Constituent Convention of 1789. The leading thinkers of the new country realized that if they did not organize themselves better, their fledgling country was headed for failure and invited civil war and foreign intervention.
That convention had to go to great lengths to gain support for a new constitution that included a hitherto non-existent national government, so the states insisted on adopting mechanisms to preserve their autonomy in the face of that new authority.
The definition of the powers that would integrate the new government, an omnipotent Legislative, a strong but limited Executive, and a Judiciary that would impose the law and watch that the other powers did not exceed their functions, was done with the sovereignty of the states as a priority, the raison d’être of the Electoral College.
The rationale for the US Electoral College
November 20, 2020
Last week, I began discussing why the electoral process in the US to elect a president is so tangled. It all started with the importance that the 13 colonies to confederate in a union gave to their sovereignty and the equality of representation they would have in the new government.
This forced negotiations and a give-and-take process, in which, eventually, a mixed system with the qualified popular vote and that of Congress members was reached, combined in the presidential election. The term Electoral College does not appear in the Constitution, which refers only to “electors.”
The Senate would comprise two senators per state, regardless of the number of inhabitants. Simultaneously, the House of Representatives would do the same for the inhabitants of its territory. Based on their number, electoral districts would be created, whose geography would be defined by the states every ten years.
For this, the obligation of a general population census was instituted every decade to determine the number of representatives corresponding to each state. The state legislatures would then draw up the new electoral districts derived from demographic changes.
It is worth noting that the original design of the system contemplated the number of inhabitants and not the number of citizens, a concept that did not legally exist in the United States until the approval of the 14th constitutional amendment of 1868 and that not all inhabitants could vote since it was restricted only to white men, 21 years of age or older, who owned real estate.
The original design was modified over time. The Civil War formally ended slavery, and blacks, who counted as 3/5 of a white inhabitant for purposes of representation in Congress, even if they did not vote, became full citizens in the law, though not in the rights.
Women would have to wait until almost exactly a century ago, with the approval of the 19th amendment to the Constitution, to have the right to vote, after a struggle of more than 50 years in favor of their incorporation, while Native Indians were finally granted the right to cast a vote in 1924.
The founders of the US avoided a direct and universal voting system because of their fear of a majority tyranny that would threaten minority rights and fundamental freedoms and end in a dictatorship, as defined by the great economist John Stuart Mill (859, On Liberty, John W. Parker & Son, London, England. https://www.google.com/books/edition/On_Liberty/AjpGAAAAcAAJ? Hl = en & gbpv = …).
Over 700 proposals to eliminate the Electoral College have been brought to Congress in the past two centuries. They have not progressed for the simple reason that the many sparsely populated states, seven of which have only one representative, refuse to budge their overrepresentation.
And that will not change in the foreseeable future because the procedures to amend the US Constitution are devilishly complex, precisely so that it does not happen, as in many banana republics, which change the fundamental law every day at the whim of the kinglet in turn.
Political parties in the United States
July 29, 2021
My readers asked me to elaborate on the evolution of political parties in the United States and, based on that historical vision, examine what will happen today with extreme polarization between and within parties.
The first governing body in the United States was the Continental Congress (CC, 1774-89), which was the only authority agreed upon by the 13 colonies and from its declaration of independence in 1776 of the new country.
The War of Independence demonstrated the urgent need to improve this arrangement since the Continental Congress had the power to borrow and spend but not to impose levies or prevent the states from imposing duties on trade among themselves.
Thus, the convention that drafted the Constitution in 1787 was born, but to achieve its endorsement, an intense campaign was necessary between those who supported it, the Federalists, with Alexander Hamilton at the head, and those who opposed it, led by Thomas Jefferson.
This is the origin of the political parties: the Federalist, which produced the first presidents, Washington and Adams, and the Democratic-Republican, which wanted the United States to be a pastoral Eden with strong states and a weak federation and rejected industry, commerce, and banking.
After losing the presidency in 1800 and Hamilton’s untimely death, the Federalist Party faded away. The Jeffersonians dominated the political scene until 1824 when they split. The “modern” Democratic Party was born in support of Andrew Jackson, with the remainder creating the Whig Party.
Jackson injected radical populism into his government and party, culminating in his country’s worst financial crisis. He overturned the party’s principles in favor of a strong Executive and an apoplectic Congress while supporting Manifest Destiny, with which the United States sought to extend its dominance throughout America.
In the background of this story is the original sin of the extermination of the Indians, in which Jackson participated with ferocity and the slavery that increasingly divided the country and was emerging as the problem that would split it in two.
When Jefferson’s party split with the schismatic figure of Jackson and the grating over slavery, the KnowNothing* party was born, which came from a secret society with a racist and anti-immigrant ideology because of the fictitious damage it caused to the economy, which sounds like Trump a century and a half earlier!
Between Jackson’s departure and the beginning of the Civil War, when Abraham Lincoln found the Republican Party, the Democratic and Whig parties dominated, with few substantive differences, except on the increasingly pressing issues linked to slavery. This put an end to the Know-Nothing, whose primary mission was to stop immigration.
After the Civil War, the Republican Party consolidated against slavery in favor of a modern, industrialized, and thriving country as envisioned by Hamilton, and the Democratic Party, backward and all-powerful in the South, sought that the end of slavery would lead to a racist and segregated society.
I will continue this story in future installments, making it easier to glimpse what may happen in America’s future with divided and conflicting parties.
* Being a secret society, its members could not agree to belong to it, so they alluded to “Know Nothing” when asked about it.
Democracy in the United States is in danger
July 22, 2021
The U.S. Republican Party, hijacked by its most ignorant and radical segment of white supremacists, is a huge political threat, as it is a carbon copy of the Know Nothing Party, which emerged in 1853 to group those who wanted Anglo-Saxon and Protestant racial purity and rejected everything foreign.
The opposite extreme is equally dangerous: intolerant political correctness and radical identity politics that exalt “original” and mixed races, dissident sexual preferences, and solidarity among subjugated classes that, united, proclaim their oppression and demand a sharp change in the social order.
The extreme political polarization in the United States, which prevents civilized dialogue between political opponents, who are no longer political opponents but enemies to the death, implies high risks for democracy in the country that saw its rebirth and which may die at the ballot box in 2024 with accepted and legal rules.
Unlike a hurricane, Donald Trump did not arrive only to sweep away everything in his path and then disappear, for his corrosive figure remains and managed to make the Republican Party, which he took by storm and to which he had never belonged, become anti-democratic, like him, which portends grave dangers.
Last year, for the first time in U.S. history, a sitting president refused to accept his defeat and tried to overturn the election result. Instead of opposing this coup attempt, party leaders cooperated with it openly or tacitly by refusing to acknowledge their defeat publicly.
In the period between the election and the Three Kings Day uprising, the vast majority of legislators and party officials refused to denounce the extremist groups that were spreading conspiracy theories calling for armed insurrection and executions, culminating in the brutal assault on the Capitol.
According to the authors of How Democracies Die (Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, 2018, Penguin Random House), the Republican Party violated the three fundamental principles that define a democratic political party: 1) accept electoral defeat; 2) avoid violence; 3) refrain from having ties with extremist fanatics.
As the authors cited above point out, the political system depends on the self-control of those who operate it. This includes voting that requires qualified majorities, processes to remove officials, financing of the treasury, and judicial nominations.
This complex system of checks and balances works only when politicians of all parties deploy their institutional prerogatives prudently.
Contemporary democracies collapse when the leader plays dirty with the existing rules, as Putin, Chavez-Maduro, Ortega, Erdogan, and many more have done, destroying the democratic essence behind a screen of legality and respect for the wishes of the “people”, which they embody.
This is what may happen in the next elections in the United States, as Republican Party operators are already laying the necessary legal infrastructure, with 216 initiatives in 41 states of the Union, to change the rules of the game of who can vote, how and when, and allow local legislatures dominated by themselves to manipulate the results.
October surprises
October 8, 2020
In U.S. politics, the column title applies to unforeseen acts or events that decide an election. The term was created in 1980 when Iran announced it would release the 50 U.S. hostages it captured until after the vote. This decision heavily skewed the outcome against President Carter, but more stale precedents exist.
In 1884, a prominent Protestant minister accused the Democrats of being the party of “rum, Romanism, and rebellion,” thus insulting Catholics, who turned out en masse to reject the Republican candidate, James Blaine, who failed to repudiate the offensive attack in time.
In 1956, the Soviet incursion into Hungary on October 23 and the Israeli invasion of the Sinai Peninsula on October 29 helped fortify the reelection of General Dwight D. Eisenhower against Democrat Adlai Stevenson, who based his campaign on his pacifist yearnings.
In turbulent 1968, Lyndon Johnson decided not to seek reelection and announced on October 31 the end of the bombing in Vietnam to boost the candidacy of his vice president, Hubert Humphrey. Richard Nixon responded with a secret deal with the Vietnamese, promising to end the war if they withdrew from talks with Johnson and thus winning the vote.
Four years later, and two weeks before the election, Nixon’s advisor, Henry Kissinger, declared that “peace (with Vietnam) was within reach”, which distracted the electorate from the scandal that had just emerged from the raid of the opposition election headquarters by White House agents, the famous Watergate.
The 1992 election, in which George Bush Sr., Democrat Bill Clinton, and independent Ross Perot, who used his opposition to NAFTA to win the support of protectionists and anti-Mexicans, were competing, looked very close.
Four days before the election, it was announced that an independent prosecutor had decided to prosecute for perjury in the investigation of the Iran-Contra scandal the Secretary of Defense in the Reagan administration, of which Bush was Vice President and Clinton narrowly defeated him.
In 2012, the race between Barack Obama’s re-election against former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney tightened in the last days of October because of Obama’s poor debate role when Hurricane Sandy hit the northern states on the Atlantic coast with unusual force, preventing the Republican from campaigning there and allowing Obama to look more “presidential.”
In the case of Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump 4 years ago, the revelation that the FBI was reopening the case against Hillary days before the election for using her personal and vulnerable mail to deal with state business overshadowed the nascent Russian interference scandal in Trump’s favor and gave him the victory.
There was speculation that Trump’s contracting COVID-19 was a surprise, but it hasn’t worked out for him. The question now is, what will he do in the 24 days until the election?
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