One year after MAGA rioters swarmed the Capitol, yesterday's news programming featured a bevy of democracy-saving appeals. President Biden gave a remarkable, pointed speech. The speech was about 12 months late, but better late than never.
I had just one issue with all of the "democracy on the brink" rhetoric. What democracy was everyone talking about? The United States, to my mind, is a pseudo-democracy. It waves its alleged democratic leadership in the face of the world while its governmental design is anything but one man/one vote.
I went into all of this back in my October 30, 2020 "My Case for Trump." The presidency is determined by an electoral college that is rigged against non-whites. The Senate features a two-per-state representation that no third grader would consider fair, and that is (surprise, surprise) rigged against minorities. The House comes closest to actual democratic principles if you ignore all of the gerrymandering that mostly is rigged against minorities. And the Supreme Court is filled by people recommended by the president and vetted by the Senate, the least democratic of these government institutions.
So how a government designed to circumvent democracy can call itself a democracy is beyond me, but it does, and on a very regular headline basis. Evidently people besides the usual academics are coming around to my way of thinking. The fashionable word right now is "anocracy." Anocracy means a blend of democratic and autocratic government. Palatable junior varsity authoritarianism; a kind of proto-fascism.
The Center for Systemic Peace downgraded the U.S. system of government from a democracy to an anocracy in 2020. The United States lost its status as the world's oldest continuous democracy, which is now Switzerland. The curious thing is that I don't remember the U.S. change of status being announced from the rooftops. I guess pseudo-democracies try to keep the pseudo part quiet.
Anocracy, however, has recently become front-page fashionable. When CIA advisory panel member, Barbara F. Walter, defined the U.S. as an anocracy, and decided to write a book about it, our non-democracy status made the news cycles. Meanwhile, three retired generals wrote a Washington Post op-ed not only agreeing with the anocracy label, but warning of a civil war in 2024. It turns out that anocracies are much more likely to have civil wars than democracies or autocracies.
I'm sorry to say that I didn't really know the word "anocracy" until the recent publicity. Not being politically fluent, all I had to offer was "pseudo-democracy," which is still true enough.
We should all be shocked, shocked I tell you, to find that a government utilizing Rube Goldberg machinations to evade actual democracy should find its built-in hypocrisies coming home to roost. No need to save a democracy these days, despite yesterday's headlines. Those timbers rotted a long time ago. It's time, rather, to try to destroy an anocracy. And then see what emerges in its place.
Bob Dietz
January 7, 2022
