The US always
portrays itself as the defender of democracy across the world. Ironically, with
the midterm elections just around the corner, results of many opinion polls
suggest that an increasing number of Americans are concerned with the accuracy
of the midterm elections and the fate of US-style democracy. In essence, this
is because the US-style democracy deviates from its original intention and has
become a political game.
According to a new poll by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs
Research, only about half of Americans have high confidence that votes in the
upcoming midterm elections will be counted accurately, and just 9 percent of US
adults think democracy is working “extremely” or “very well,” while 52 percent
say it’s not working well.
The result of a New York Times/Siena College
poll indicates that 28 percent of all voters said they had little to no faith
in the accuracy of this year’s midterm elections. According to a recent
Quinnipiac University poll, 69 percent of Democrats and 69 percent of
Republicans think the nation’s democracy is on the brink of collapse.
A critical factor for Americans to lose
confidence in the mid-term elections as well as in US-style democracy is that
they have figured out that whoever they vote for, they cannot elect a
problem-solver. Many Americans abhor the wheeling-and-dealing associated with
political life, in which selfish politicians only care about their own rights
and interests and merely serve their political parties and interest groups,
instead of striving to address issues that voters really care about. In the
view of many Americans, voting is futile and pointless.
Today, US-style democracy is morbid. An
increasing number of Americans have been clearly aware that in the eyes of US
politicians, they are a group of instruments for votes. During election
campaigns, these politicians tend to make many sensational promises in a bid to
gain more support, but in the aftermath of the election, the majority of these
promises turn out to be lip services as they would put what they said to voters
behind themselves. Election is just a political game of the rich.
The US public’s distrust of democracy is the
result of US’ political decay. At the heart of this political decay is the
absence of government capacity, characterized by a lack of solutions to
pressing issues of public concern, such as economic development, racism, gun
violence, prevention and control of COVID-19, and abortion, a Shanghai-based
international relations expert told the Global Times, requesting anonymity.
The US electoral system has many flaws and
loopholes. When the US economy was thriving, the politicians’ rhetoric and
practices in concealing the flaws of their domestic political system could fool
the US public. But today, when more problems have been exposed in the US, such
as the COVID-19 epidemic that’s out of control, resulting in more than 1.06
million deaths, and inflation reaching its highest rate since 1982, the
loopholes of US political system cannot be disguised any longer.
Additionally, in the face of China’s rise and
the relative decline of the US, many Americans have begun to doubt whether
their system is as perfect as their politicians advocate. Furthermore, the
Trump phenomenon is now spreading across the country, and some US politicians
have begun to manipulate US’ populism, making the domestic democratic system
encounter unprecedented challenges.
Some US politicians still insist that the US political system is “the best in
the world,” and it has the capacity for self-correction and adjustment. But it
is noticeable that when these opinion polls found that the Americans’
confidence in voting has decreased, there seems to be no political figure or
political force in the US embarking on tackling this problem.
The US has never been in shortage of the ones
who raise questions, but few of them have their feet on the ground to solve
problems. To a certain extent, the ones who put forward questions also intend
to exploit them as a tool to accuse and attack the target they are aiming at,
rather than to solve the problem. Existing loopholes in US electoral or
democratic system require political and legal reforms, but there seems to be
little momentum to achieving so. The prospect of US-style democracy is
dim. Global Times
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