It should surprise no-one that the US is in a mess. Many reasons have combined to make the current festival of foolishness almost inevitable. Viewing the mayhem from Canada, an outside vantage point, but nonetheless close at hand, and with a smattering of shared cultural elements, one can see a plethora of causes. In what follows, I shall focus on only five, and of those five, four have received a fair bit of public comment, but the fifth has received almost no attention at all. I shall reserve that surprise for last.
Cause #1:
There is a profound democracy deficit in the United States of America.
As far back as I can remember, my American friends have celebrated their democracy, extolled their version of it, and tried to export it. But, in truth, it is a most imperfect democracy, in that some votes count vastly more than others. And I’m not talking about minor differences, like the ones we have in Canada, where some constituencies have one and a half or even twice the number of voters of some other constituencies, thus diluting the votes of those casting their ballots in the more populous ones. No, I’m talking about imbalances on an almost unimaginable scale.
Take, for example, elections for the US Senate, which is the most powerful of their two federal legislative bodies. Each state elects two members to the Senate. Wyoming has a population of about 585,000, and California has a population of about 39,529,000. Hence one vote for a Senate candidate in Wyoming equals 67.5 votes in California. Want to increase your political influence by almost two orders of magnitude? Just move from California to Wyoming.
This effect spills over into the presidential elections as well, because of the makeup of the Electoral College, which selects the President. The Electoral College has one member for every Senator or Member of the House of Representatives. Constituencies for the House of Representatives are not nearly as disproportionate in population as those for the Senate, so in the actual vote for President in the Electoral College, Wyoming has three votes and California has 54. Thus, California’s vote count in the Electoral College is only 18 times as great as that of Wyoming, so even when voting for a President, a vote in Wyoming is worth 3.75 votes in California.
The overall impact of these imbalances is to dramatically weaken the political power of more populous states, which usually means effectively reducing the value of votes in large urban areas. Hence two branches of the US government will always have a massive rural bias.
In virtually any democracy in a developed state other than the US, these levels of disenfranchisement would lead to widespread demonstration, and probably (if uncorrected by such pressure) to revolution. In the US, those who are steeped in the political process seem to treat it as a historical curiosity that has produced a quaint feature of the political furniture. But for much of the population, these power imbalances and effective disenfranchisement evoke deep cynicism of the political process and provide fertile ground for endless wacky conspiracy theories.
Nor is the disenfranchisement of the cities and larger states the only democratic deficit of the US system. There are many, but two are of particular note. First, gerrymandering of district boundaries to suppress representation of the opposition party or parties is rife, as the redrawing of electoral district boundaries is done by the party in power in each state legislature, rather than by a neutral and independent commission. That technique has been used in the past and still continues to be used to some degree to disenfranchise minority populations, and has been a favoured tactic of racist politicians. Secondly, money talks. The Citizens United decision by the US Supreme Court on January 21st, 2010, effectively removed limits on electoral campaign spending by deciding that limiting the ability of individuals or corporations to contribute to “political action committees” created to support specific individual candidates was tantamount to limiting free speech. Hence the money spent on campaigning in US elections is so great that it effectively blocks the rise of any new party and hugely favours candidates who will do the bidding of the very wealthy.
Cause #2:
The opposition party remains leaderless for years after a defeat.
In virtually every democracy in a developed country, political parties normally have leaders. An election defeat may or may not trigger a leadership review, but in most cases it does. That review either sees the leader confirmed or a new leader is selected by some sort of vote within the party. To proceed for years at a time without a confirmed leader is normally seen as tantamount to dissolving the party.
Not so in the United States. Following a defeat in a presidential election in the US, the defeated party neither formally confirms the failed candidate as the party leader, nor does it move to select a new party leader. This situation persists for roughly 3.7 years, and then, with what seems like only days to go before a general election, the party picks a presidential candidate who is then the party leader. This is a bizarre sequence which has many harmful effects. First, in the absence of a leader, the defeated party cannot have a consolidated platform for the 3+ years after a general election. Its many tiny spokespersons may differ from one another in their views and emphases, shredding its political impact. This leaves the party in power with very much the same advantages as the government of a non-democratic autocracy. Furthermore, selecting a party leader only moments before a general election means that there is almost no time for that new leader to unify the party and put their stamp on it, and certainly very little time for a new leader to evolve their brand and develop a competent and publicly recognized leadership team.
Consequently, the electorate does not get to watch leaders develop over time, before deciding whether to give them the highest office, which is an important aspect of the popular assessment of leaders in most democracies. The last-minute selection of a leader militates against choosing promising leaders who still need a bit of development, and favours insider stalwarts who are unlikely to bring much new to the table. In those rare instances when the last-minute selection process does pick a true outsider, the long normal slog of doing politics for a few years before a general election is not available to the party to weed out an infelicitous choice. In most democracies, a party leader who performs poorly for a couple of years may well be replaced by the party even if a general election is looming on the horizon, but, in the US, another disadvantage of having a leaderless party between elections is that the time to watch, vet and possibly even replace a mistaken choice of leader is wasted.
It need not be this way. There is no requirement in the US Constitution to handle party affairs in this way. The political parties are essentially private membership clubs, and can set up their procedures in any way they wish. There is no impediment of substance to prevent the Democratic Party in the US from choosing a party leader now, and no impediment, if they wish, to choosing a different leader to run for President in 2028. The party is following a rule set of its own devising, and is too steeped in the history of this wacky approach to change its club rules.
As for the Republicans, had they selected a new leader right after Donald Trump’s defeat in late 2020, either they would not have selected him, or, if they had selected him, they would have had many years to change their minds by seeking a leadership review, as they watched him sink deeper into goofiness and corruption.
Cause #3:
Most Americans are fairly clueless as to how their system actually works.
It has become mundane to bemoan the decline of primary and secondary education in both the US and Canada. Curmudgeons like me are certain that curricula have been dumbed down and that expectations of performance have diminished sharply. It might be true. Most of my university teacher colleagues, on both sides of the Canada/US border certainly think so, when they feel pressure to dumb down their first- and second-year university courses because of the inadequate preparation of the new entrants arriving after having finished high school.
But not everything is worse. Of late, some emphasis on STEM subjects has alleviated some of the fears in the experimental disciplines. But not in civics (or whatever it is called now). The problem is especially acute in the US, where the politicians have, of late, tended to meddle (to varying degrees) in what is taught. There’s been a bit of that too in Canada.
I recently wrote a piece in this magazine about how to build better citizens. It was prompted by my recent experience of being the presiding official at a ceremony in which I got to confer Canadian citizenship on a large group of immigrants to Canada. On reviewing their study materials, and in discussion with many of them at the subsequent reception, I found myself quite impressed with the level of knowledge of our systems of government that they were required to have to qualify for our citizenship. I wrote the magazine piece after reflecting upon that experience; it contains a possible interesting suggestion for the broader society, and can be found here.
In my extensive travels in the US, since 2008 (about 1800 days over the last 17 years) I have been struck by the remarkable variation of knowledge of Americans about political processes in their own country. I did encounter quite a few Americans who were well informed and exceptionally knowledgeable and erudite about their politics and governance, and very keen to share the knowledge. But the vast majority that I met knew dramatically less about their own country, its polity, history, and machinery of government than a foreigner like me did. What they did “know” was the collection of myths, tropes, oversimplifications and slurs which were especially widely circulated in their region or within their social, economic, racial or ethnic groups. Consequently, they were (and are) constantly at risk of being persuaded to vote for something which is very much not in their interest, without realizing that they are doing so.
Cause #4:
Most Americans have almost no real knowledge about the rest of the world.
That Americans are mostly ill-informed about the world outside of their country is not entirely their fault. It has long been observed that citizens of a relatively self-sufficient great power do not routinely have to take into consideration what goes on outside their borders. That is natural. On the other hand, the educated citizens of a small nation which relies on many things from its neighbours are usually very well informed of attitudes, issues, tensions and political trends in the countries around them, and even quite a bit about others far afield that they may rely upon.
Thus, we are faced with an America which is a hegemon or near-hegemon that expects to have the major say in what goes on pretty much anywhere in the world, while most of its citizens do not even have a framework for understanding the actions that their country is taking on the international stage. This can make for some pretty weird foreign policy choices, especially when the motivation for many of those choices is often the effect that those choices might have on domestic politics in the US. The history of US relationships abroad is littered with bizarre choices that have backfired, including a few in this hemisphere, where they pretend to have a historic special role and have, on occasion, boasted of special knowledge.
Thus, we should be unsurprised when their handling of especially difficult files, like the Russian war against Ukraine, the status of Taiwan, or the now 77-year-long war in the Middle East, does not produce the result they predicted.
Historically, though, the United States did well (though often with a late start) when drawn into major world conflicts where the ideological rifts and geopolitical origins of the conflicts were baked into the matter long before the US joined the efforts of its allies. The US role in helping to bring the two world wars to a conclusion inevitably comes to mind. Much less successful, however, have been attempts to pressure or persuade other very different cultures to do things “the American way”. That has led to embarrassing failures in many parts of the world. Vietnam, Cuba, Afghanistan, and Iraq spring to mind, of course, but there are lots of other settings too where the “one size fits all” approach ended up costing blood and treasure, to no permanent useful purpose. Thus, a lack of depth in their understanding of the broader world gave the American people unrealistic expectations of many of their international initiatives, and the subsequent failures of their foreign policies has made a considerable portion of the US polity cynical about engagement abroad, and has encouraged the rise of an ill-informed variant of isolationism.
Nor has the situation been improved by having a chief executive who sees all diplomacy as an analog of a slightly dicey commercial real estate transaction.
And now for the real shocker! Cause #5, which comes next, is really the third rail issue in US politics. It is the incontrovertible fact that Americans dare not speak of.
Cause #5:
American residents and companies are woefully undertaxed.
When I was growing up, if someone ate too much, and then felt ill afterwords, it was said that their “eyes were bigger than their stomach”. A somewhat related, but more generic expression to describe people who had taken on something too large, challenging or complex for them to complete was that they had “bitten off more than they could chew”.
For the United States, this is standard practice. The nation wants all the things that a democratic developed state and a great power ought to have. These include a strong defence capability, modern and safe infrastructure, effective government services, a decent social safety net, adequate health care, good public safety, and a whole host of other bells and whistles that we have come to see as part of a modern, wealthy nation. But they very much balk at paying for it, and it shows.
Let’s take a look at taxation, meaning personal and corporate income taxes, sales taxes, property taxes, inheritance taxes and even tariffs, all combined. In the countries of the European Union, where most members have a quite extensive social safety net, the taxes collected average 39.9 percent of GDP. Unsurprisingly, in the four Nordic nations, well known for both their advanced social safety nets and their reported high levels of happiness, the number is a between 41 and 44 percent, as is France, at 43.8 percent.
If we look at the list of the 38 members of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), a club of relatively developed nations, of which only 23 are in Europe, the OECD average taxation is 33.9 percent of GDP. Canada finds it self at 20th out of the 38 in the OECD, at a level of overall taxation that is just above the OECD average. The Canadian number is 34.8 percent of GDP, less than 1 percent above the OECD average and about 5 percent below the EU average.
The United States, however, comes in at 32nd out of 38 in the OECD, with taxes collected being much lower, at 25.2 percent of GDP. Of the six countries below the US, five would probably not rate on most Canadian’s calibration as highly developed, being Costa Rica, Türkiye, Columbia, Chile and Mexico. The only country below the US on taxation that most of us would see as “developed” is Ireland, but Ireland has a special trick. By being a small economy, and a nice place to live, it set its corporation tax rate low enough to attract many headquarters of large multinational corporations, which then save money by paying Irish corporate taxes on economic activities and profits made elsewhere, and hence avoiding the higher corporate taxes in those jurisdictions where they actually carry out the bulk of their work. This “tax haven” behaviour generates tax income on activity which was not part of the Irish GDP, and allows the nation to tax its own citizens at a low rate.
So, simply put, the US is collecting only about 75 percent of the tax revenue that it would need to collect to satisfy its appetite for the things that powerful developed states want. It has been customary in progressive circles to blame this on the ultra-rich Americans paying much too little tax. While this is doubtless true, a quick calculation shows that even by closing the armada of loopholes that allow the billionaires to pay very little tax, the gap would still only be partly closed. In fact, the whole middle class in the US is also not paying enough tax.
Yes, the US tax code is complex, and is replete with exceptions, loopholes, and carve-outs. It is the Swiss cheese of tax codes. But the overall rates are also not enough to pay for what the nation wants.
The effect of this is that to have what it wants, it must borrow, and borrow it does. Looking at the debt numbers for the advanced countries of the G20, the US has debts equal to about 124 percent of its GDP.
Even Canada, frequently castigated for its profligacy, is only at 111 percent. Only Italy, Singapore, and Japan exceed the US in this unenviable statistic, and, in the case of Italy, not by much. The UK is at 95.9 percent, Germany at 62.5 percent. Even Argentina is only at 83.2 percent. And Australia, interestingly, is at 43.8 percent.
The Trump tax bill, if it makes it through the reconciliation process between the House of Representatives and the Senate, will further worsen the situation. For how long can the largest economy on earth (by a wide margin) continue not to pay its bills by kicking the can down the road? Nobody knows, but it would be damned uncomfortable to find out. Far better would be a bit of admittedly awkward truth-telling to the American people. You’ve got to pay for the things the country needs in order to keep it functioning as you expect, and, right now, you aren’t paying your bills. And if you really don’t want to pay at the rates that most advanced nations have found they need to pay, welcome to the giant North American version of Columbia. (Note: Columbia collects about 22.2 percent of its GDP in taxes.)
Concluding thoughts:
Is there a way out?
The five causes that I cite are not exhaustive, but they are the five that seemed most glaring to me. No doubt other observers would have a somewhat different top five.
But if one poses the question, “Can those top five problems be fixed?”, the answer is desperately complicated. Clearly, the easiest one to fix is #2, because it only requires that the two principal political parties change their internal rules for party leadership and governance. And, as I have pointed out, parties are essentially private clubs, and entirely free to change their internal rules if they wish to do so.
At the other extreme, #1 is the hardest to fix, because the democratic deficit is a feature of the US Constitution, and any attempt to amend the Constitution is a herculean task likely to take many decades, and has a low chance of success. However, the portion of the democratic deficit related to the imbalanced allocation of votes in the Electoral College might be fixed by an interesting non-constitutional mechanism, and that fix is already partly underway. It is an initiative called the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, or NPVIC . The scheme encourages state legislatures to pass acts that would compel the Electoral College representatives of their state to vote for the candidate receiving the highest number of votes nationally, with the understanding that this rule (for those states that pass such an act) would only come into force when states with at least 270 votes in the 540-seat Electoral College has passed such an act. If that were to come to pass, the candidate for President who gets the most votes nationwide would automatically win the Presidency, without needing a constitutional amendment to have the President elected by direct popular vote.
The initiative was launched in 2006, and, thus far seventeen states and the District of Columbia have passed the needed acts. These jurisdictions have 209 electoral votes, which is 77 percent of the 270 votes needed to activate the mechanism of the compact and give it legal force. It remains unclear whether it will eventually reach the 270-vote threshold, but it is a clever way to bring greater democracy without a constitutional amendment.
Turning to #3 and #4, it is clear that there is no quick fix, but over the long term it is not impossible that educational initiatives might improve the state of affairs. Problems #3 and #4 are not unique to the US, but they are more consequential for the world when they happen to a quasi-democratic great power.
That leaves #5. In ordinary times, fixing it would almost certainly be hugely politically unpopular, no matter how well a government explained the problem to the citizenry. A major crisis related to the under-taxation would probably need to occur to reorient the thinking of the electorate. Americans have, in the past, accepted that emergencies called for sharp tax increases. The Victory Tax of 1942, and subsequent additional taxes through the rest of the Second World War are a case in point. But, short of a US debt default, it is not clear to me what sort of emergency would make a realistic level of taxation palatable to the voting public, given the political rhetoric in the US.
All things considered, hold onto your seats. It’s going to be a bumpy ride.
Header image: Anti-ICE protests and riots on the streets of Los Angeles in reaction to widespread federal immigration raids. (Photo: The Robbie Harvey)
