Is American democracy dying, and is it worth saving anyway?
By 
Paul Krugman’s new SubStack is terrific, not surprisingly. Yesterday he was planning to talk about energy policy, but Trump’s pardons of the 1/6 insurrectionists altered his plans:
Donald Trump’s second inaugural speech was as vile as expected, but also surprisingly dull.
OK, I guess his promise to take back the Panama Canal was a bit exciting. But nobody took him seriously. And I was ready to write a fairly long, workmanlike post about what seemed like the most substantive part of his speech, his declaration of a national energy emergency.
But then came his flurry of post-speech announcements, above all a mass pardon of people who tried to overthrow the government four years ago. Basically, American democracy may just have died.
Under the circumstances, I can’t focus on energy policy, and neither, I suspect, can most of my readers. Nor do I have any special insight into this awful moment. So this will be a short post. . .
For now, however, it all seems insignificant beside the reality that the president of the United States has thrown himself fully behind political violence.
Krugman’s dismay is a useful corrective to the reflexive tendency to just accept this as the way we live now.
There are no conditions to which a person cannot grow accustomed, especially if he sees that everyone around him lives in the same way.
Anna Karenina
As to Krugman’s suggestion that American democracy may have just died, Donald Trump was elected by swing voters, who either didn’t vote in 2020 or voted for Joe Biden. These swing voters seem on the whole to have voted to make Trump president again because they believe doing so will lower the price of eggs, or they want to pare back the 45% of the federal budget that’s spent on foreign aid, and so forth.
What I’m saying is that, especially under current information and media technology conditions, American “democracy” consists of total idiots deciding elections for reasons that are some combination of flat-out delusional and utterly random.
That such people put a flagrant con man who tried to overthrow the government back in the White House isn’t surprising, really, because nothing such people do can be surprising, given the delusions and the randomness.
235 years is a long run for any governmental system, and this one may well, as Krugman suggests, be flat-lining right before our eyes. Under the circumstances, it’s hard to see how this outcome is either avoidable or even particularly undesirable, given what it has now become.
As for what rough beast is slouching toward us to replace it, your guess is as good as mine.