Strengths and Weaknesses in the US

Commentators have long argued over the causes and factors that explain why the United States alone, of all the countries of the world, enjoys enduring political and social stability that has shown hardly a tremor even in moments of great crisis (as in the crises of 1929 and 2008), or that explain — at the very least — its capacity to absorb its crises, contain them and neutralize their harmful effects on the state, society and the economy.

Those causes and factors have been argued over for decades; the disputants have split into many camps of opinion, and the argument has gone on to this day without being settled.

Some of the disputants attributed that stability to wealth, positing that the European settlers’ seizure of a continent rich in agricultural natural resources and minerals, beginning in the 16th century, produced the basic material conditions for building a strong economy — one that fed every sector of society and gave the U.S. the material resources to pursue scientific and technological development and to achieve superiority in that field by drawing the highest scientific talent from every part of the world to U.S. universities and laboratories and to its production, health care and other institutions.

Others attributed it to geography: a location between the oceans whose watery barriers isolated the United States from the world and, more specifically, formed an impregnable barrier against any military dangers that might beset or threaten it from abroad.

Still others attributed it to the nature of the country’s makeup and the factors that enriched its social soil. Because American society was made up of immigrants arriving from every corner of the globe, it was assumed that they brought with them their varied experience and their wealth into a society that knew how to integrate them and meld them into a common identity. Coexistence and living side by side, then, became the trait that stamped American society.

Others attributed it to the strength of the dollar and its imperial role in the global economy as a whole; success in establishing the dollar as a universal reference currency generated not only abundant profits and gains for the U.S. national economy, but also cemented the United States’ position as the strongest country in the world and the one that holds the reins of power and wealth within it.

Finally, there are those who attributed it to the strength of its political and constitutional system, since the political factor is a central, indeed decisive, factor in whether a society enjoys stability or is ravaged by chaos. The very phenomena of economic, scientific and technological prosperity, in their regularity and continuity in any society, owe their existence to its political stability, something that comes about and becomes possible only when the political system in place possesses the sources of strength and effectiveness whose effects reach into the other sectors of society.

The truth is that the key to understanding the state of stability in American society lies, first and foremost, in the singular character of the political system in place in the United States. That system is built on a precise design whose outlines were drawn and whose mechanisms were laid down in the U.S. Constitution. And there is indeed a feature that has set that design apart from the other constitutional designs of the world’s political systems.

Yet this political system is marred by two main flaws that call its democratic legitimacy into question — this, a system said to be “the greatest democracy” in the world! The two flaws turn on two matters: political representation and the alternation of power, both of them cardinal questions of the modern democratic system.

As for representation, its character is blurred, and it cannot be counted as democratic in any real sense. That is because it is dual: citizen representation and state representation, which leads, in both cases, to the formation of two chambers that share the legislative function and therefore decide who forms the governing team. For all the benefit this duality of representation provides in striking a balance between the central government and the states, its greatest flaw lies in moving the power of decision in presidential elections from the people (the theoretical source of power) to the Electoral College, whose members represent the states, and it hardly matters whether the president who wins a majority of Electoral College votes has won the votes of a majority of the people or not!

As for the alternation of power, it is nonexistent in this political system, or at the very least merely formal, because the “alternation” there takes place between two parties that monopolize that power are like two faces of a single coin. Indeed, they express nothing more than the forces of bourgeois class interests.