In a year of elections around the world, here is one where the incumbent president calls his predecessor a Nazi. The former president accuses his successor of stealing the previous election. The current establishment is hounding the former president with a bunch of criminal cases. The Opposition accuses the government of weaponising law to keep the popular former president off the ballot and is retaliating by preparing to impeach the president. The top court has got into the act, but whatever its decision, a large section of the deeply polarised society will see it as illegitimate and politically motivated.

We are not talking of a banana republic in the Third World, but the US. The American foreign policy elite sees itself as the champion of democracy. It routinely passes judgements on not just the broad political orientation of other countries but on the micro trends within them. Washington punishes foreign governments for presumed transgressions against democratic norms. But what about American democracy?

It is at once tempting and pointless for political elites around the world who are at the receiving end of American criticism to call out its unabashed, if unconscious, hypocrisy. The US is a deeply self-absorbed and self-referential society. What matters, though, are the outcomes of America’s internal dynamics. After all, notwithstanding the quality of its democracy, the choices its polity makes affect the entire world.

To be sure, the many structural problems of American democracy are there out in the open in the 21st century, starting with the first election in 2000 when the Supreme Court had to step in to resolve a dispute over counting votes in Florida. Those problems have sharpened. As the primaries — the state-by-state competition to pick the presidential nominee of the two main parties — begin next week in the mid-Western state of Iowa, the New York Times has declared that American democracy and its constitution are in danger. The Times declared Trump “utterly........

© Indian Express