The Price of Democracy

Image: NY Times

Usually when something, be it a product or a system works well, the desired effect of it working well is usually a positive one. My argument which I will attempt to establish here is that there can be a glitch when ‘it’ has become too efficient.

Now, after that mildly convoluting intro, let me then unveil this ‘said thing’ in this particular instance as democracy, in particular, the United States’. I’m no historian, but from what I remember about American politics, U.S. democracy has had a pretty good stint thus far; one of the oldest and most efficiently run machines. Even if the argument can be made that some of their current and past policies, both internal and foreign have been less than ideal, only few would question their method of selecting their leaders. The selection process for the most part is a transparent and always keenly contested one; if you take away the mess with the Florida votes during Gore versus Bush and similar cases in her history, American elections have otherwise had a pristine record in terms of fairness.

This is the time to now invoke the point that was introduced in the opening paragraph. The American democratic machinery has performed so well in the last couple of centuries that maybe there was bound to be an anomaly, an unintended consequence for getting it right too many times. And as you might have surmised by now, this generation’s gremlin produced Trump; that’s my theory and I’m sticking to it. President Trump is what you get for having an electoral system that has worked so well, it was due for a malfunction.

Now, the ‘perhaps’ and there’re quite a few of them. Perhaps Americans had grown too confident in their electoral system that they didn’t bother to guard against as many points of probable interference in the process as possible. Perhaps if The DNC had had fairer primaries, Sanders could have emerged and Americans would have been spared a Trump presidency. Perhaps if the Brits had not pandered to fear and prejudice, they would have voted ‘BrexIn’ and stemmed the unsavoury ‘far right-wing’ cyclone that took off as a result of Brexit, partly influencing a Trump win. Perhaps if Comey had done his job well, the pre-election polls would have been proven to be accurate. But alas, the reality is Trump and the plan is to prove that only this theory makes sense of his rise to power.

Clearly, a lot of things could have been done differently with the last American presidential elections, however if this hypothesis holds even a drop of water, Trump would still have emerged winner or some greater political calamity would have befallen Americans, irrespective of how things were done.

I would imagine, even though it should have been stated much earlier, that it is evident that I don’t believe Trump makes a very good president, I doubt there are few of us. Comey’s recent firing has been described among many other ‘Trumpian’ acts as an assault on democracy and this dude’s just getting warmed up. We watch as the investigation into the Russian involvement unfolds, we watch as the North Korea saga unfolds, we watch as the new health plan unfolds, we watch as the Trump presidency unfolds.

What good is a theorem without a few already established instances to solidify the argument; and so, here goes nothing. The Concorde; I’m referring to the British-French supersonic jetliner. The official story about its demise has something to do with economics, ticket prices and routes, but taking a second look at it, it is indeed possible that the proposed theory which shall be christened the ‘Trumpian anomaly theory’ could actually explain why the Concorde isn’t around today. It simply worked too well and then was subject to a nose dive. Instance number two; creation. Need I say more; the garden had functioned too seamlessly, Adam and Eve were powerless against the pull of the Trumpian anomaly. Number three, the Roman empire; as efficient as it was in global dominance eventually had to succumb to the theory. I rest my case.

I will be the first to admit that this logic hardly makes sense but please pardon me. And so for anyone out there still scratching their heads as to why and how Donald J. Trump came to occupy the oval office, this is for you.