The American election continues to be a subject of conversation more than a week after ballots were cast. Aside from the hysterical behaviour of some of the people involved, the American process is proving resilient in a time of historic divisions in American society. Of course, the people who want to have power over others will complain about the American system; it mostly achieves deadlock.
The voting process is the preoccupation of everyone now, but the truth is the American voting process has been riddled with fraud from the beginning. America survived and prospered in spite of democracy, not because of it. The important thing about American democracy is that power is divided in such a way that there are different electorates for different aspects of this power, including in the same state.
Up until the 20th century, it had been common for campaigns to bribe voters with alcohol and food, not to mention the large-scale attempts under reconstruction and then Jim Crow to suppress black voters. It took at least two amendments to the US Constitution as well as numerous court cases, and legislation such as the Voting Rights Act, to thwart attempts to limit the right to vote of black people.
The problem comes in the discretion that governments have in setting requirements for their own electors. You might think setting the voting age at eighteen is an obvious thing to do, but there are serious people trying to lower it to sixteen and possibly even fourteen. Of course to me, the rational and obvious requirement is a property qualification, since governments have to fund themselves by taxing the property owners.
Putting that aside, America didn’t get to where it is because of democracy. Americans got to where they are because they were allowed to keep more of their liberty. This was possible because the government cannot get things done quickly or efficiently (anything that is done is a compromise that generally waters down everyone’s original aim). This is why the question of this election is not whether the intentions of eligible voters have been captured accurately in the final result, but whether the Constitution and the federal and state electoral laws as well as past cases have not been violated.
Democracy in and of itself is not a value. The process of choosing a leader is the thing that must have validity. If the process worked according to the rules laid out to everyone and expected by everyone before the election, then there’s no problem, even if this means either including or excluding certain votes. The inclusion of all votes is not the point, the point is that valid votes according to a predetermined process are counted. (An election is not just the ballot, but how the ballot is cast)
Therefore the current delay in announcing an election winner and a concession by President Trump, is good. We can safely ignore anyone who compares the USA to African countries where elections and election delays often mean the difference between civil war and peace, prosperity and property rights or Marxism and poverty.
In fact the strength of the American system has been highlighted by the fact that even though Democrat Joe Biden is the likely winner of the presidential election, his party has simultaneously lost power in Congress (in a relative sense, i.e. a decline in seats). And the Congress has its own reserved powers distinct from the powers of the Presidency.
This is an impossible situation to imagine in South Africa with our Constitution (supposedly the best in the world). That Constitution gives the prerogative of appointing the president exclusively to the National Assembly. The National Council of Provinces, which is the only constitutional body representing provinces at the national level, does not have to give its assent.
In effect, the Constitution centralises executive and legislative power in one group of voters. This also comes with the possibility of changing the composition of the judiciary through the influence given to these voters in the Judicial Services Commission, which has a majority of its members appointed by the legislature and executive. Therefore, all three branches of South Africa’s national government are controlled by one group of voters at a specific point in time for at least five years.
Contrast this to the situation in America where Congress is made up of the House of Representatives and the Senate. The Senate is appointed by state-wide elections, with the same number of senators (two) for each state. The House is determined by constituency elections in districts within states. A state’s number of representatives is proportional to the population in that state. For example, California, with nearly 40 million people, sends 53 people to Washington, while Wyoming, with a population of about 600 000 has one delegate in the House of Representatives. Some state legislatures can draw congressional districts to improve the chances of a particular party controlling the state delegation in the next Congressional elections (known as gerrymandering), meaning that the Senate electorate is different from the House electorate, which are both different from the Presidential electorate.
In fact, up until the 17th Amendment was passed and ratified in 1913, the Senate was appointed by state legislatures. Therefore the House was appointed directly via constituency elections, while Senators were appointed indirectly via state representatives. This helped restrain some of the popular tendencies of democracy, but obviously not to a sufficient degree. The 17th Amendment passed because it was sufficiently popular among Americans to overcome the constitutional barrier for amending the Constitution.
Regardless, Americans still live in a freer country than much of the rest of the world. Their Constitution does not give them any rights not contained in some other constitutions, their political leaders and judges are not wiser than other political leaders and judges, they simply had the good fortune of having men like Thomas Jefferson, and the foresight to listen to them back when the country was being founded. South Africa also had great thinkers going into our constitutional convention in 1991, people like Leon Louw who had already proposed the form a constitution should take through the book South Africa: The Solution.
This would have allowed all the private entities that have been vying for power in South Africa to get a piece of that power. The current political parties are the latest form that these ideological organisations have taken and it is not the only form, you also have local power within communities with their own common law (customary law). Centralising power in the name of democracy will always bring about the opposite of freedom, prosperity, and happiness. A precondition of happiness is that man must choose.
This is the only way to guarantee freedom in the context of a state: to create a state that is as paralysed as possible. Of course, a thinking person might ask: why not just go further, and rid yourself of the state? If liberty requires a state that does as little as possible, surely taking the path of returning as much of an individual’s liberty as possible to its logical conclusion, you might ask why we need a state at all?
The answer is that those who take responsibility for themselves and their own lives don’t need a state. Having said that, it is possible that some people would not be able to survive without a state. It only becomes a question of whether it is moral to oppress some in order to keep some others alive.
Democracy itself becomes almost insignificant alongside the deeper issues of legitimacy. Living as we do in the 21st century, with all that has come before us, it is clear that blind faith in majority rule with a Bill of Rights attached, does not do much good if power is centralised. The only way forward now is to assert the supremacy of the individual. This starts by allowing individuals to govern themselves by voluntarily contracting with private organisations to provide any services the government currently provides.
The American Constitution serves as a warning that even the best attempt at creating a government that respects individual liberty, eventually fails. The mob will always have the advantage by virtue of its size, yet we can even the stakes somewhat by allowing the individual to defend himself. This cannot happen with a government; at the very least we need a healthy questioning of the premise that assumes government is a necessary part of human society.
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR
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