Friday, June 23, 2017

The Conservative Party's circumventing of electoral law is a step in a dark direction

Notwithstanding Theresa May’s hand in had walk with Trump and her hostility towards immigration she is clearly not a Trump. But Trump did come out of the blue. Packing of the supreme court has ensured that the normal election expenses rules that is essential to the functioning of normal democracies have been outlawed. This has ensured that elected representatives are so beholden to their donors that they have little legitimacy. The gutting of the voting rights act, the great achievement of the civil rights movement of the sixties, has opened the way to a myriad of voting suppression tactics. All it needs is to look at maps of many states with grotesque voting districts to see that crude gerrymandering of the kind that in a real democracy would result in prison terms to realize that American democracy was flawed well before Trump.

The election fraud revealed by channel four is not on the scale that is normal in the USA. But the threat to democracies today is not from crude military coups but a gradual process of democratic backsliding in which the path to authoritarian rule is taken in baby steps.