Democracy is a bread and butter issue

Democracy keeps food on the table and gas in the tank better than autocracies

Many pundits and insiders immersed in poll data say most voters care more about bread and butter issues than preserving our democracy. And they say it quite matter of factly, as if the two are obviously unrelated when, in point of fact, they go hand-in-hand.

Consider Venezuela:

“Venezuela sits atop the world’s largest oil reserves and once boasted Latin America’s most advanced economy. But after [President] Maduro took the helm [in 2013] it entered into a free fall marked by plummeting oil prices, widespread shortages of basic goods and 130,000% hyperinflation.” (AP article) 1

Against this backdrop, former diplomat Edmundo Gonzalez challenged Maduro for the presidency, and Venezuelans went to the polls to vote on July 28th. Only thing is, once a country succumbs to autocratic rule, it is terrifically hard to crawl out. Such was the case here when, despite much evidence to the contrary, Maduro claimed himself the winner. As Reuters  reported:

“[Independent] pollsters called that result implausible, and opposition leaders and foreign observers urged the electoral authority to release vote tallies. The tallies in possession of the opposition showed a total of 2.75 million votes for Maduro and 6.27 million for his rival, former diplomat Edmundo Gonzalez. The numbers were sharply different to the 5.15 million votes the electoral authority said Maduro had won, compared to 4.45 million for Gonzalez.”

Consensus among international observers is that Maduro instructed the National Electoral Council under his control to fix it. Unsurprisingly, protesters quickly took to the streets, which in turn prompted the Venezuelan government to clamp down. According to a recent New York Times article: “The Venezuelan government has mounted a furious campaign against anyone challenging the declared results of the vote, unleashing a wave of repression that human rights groups say is unlike anything the country has seen in recent decades.”

Electoral results like these—including the chaos and mayhem that suspect numbers spark—will undoubtedly harm the everyday lives of Venezuelans as well as the economic and democratic prospects of their nation.

A cautionary tale if ever there was one as the days number down to our own election.

Protesters taking to the streets after the election I Alexandre Meneghini/Reuters

The economic case for democracy and against autocracy

Trump is making no secret of his autocratic ambitions. His attention-grabbing remarks about being a dictator on day one and never having to vote again are subject to endless debate. Did he—or did he not—really mean what he said?

I myself think we should take him at his word, no matter his intended meaning. All you have to do is look at his actions. On January 2nd, 2020 he tried to bully Georgia’s Secretary of State Brad Raffensberger into finding him 11,780 votes, and when that failed, he instigated a violent effort to derail the counting of electoral votes on January 6th. Sounds an awful lot like an autocratic, Maduro-like leader to me.

Those untroubled by these behaviors because they think an all-powerful, autocratic Trump will make America great again might want to think again.

According to a 2018 working paper from the V-Dem Institute, average growth rates for democracies are 2.4 percent and only 1.0 percent for autocracies. Although a sizeable difference, it is not the paper’s main point. Rather, the point is that democracies have a lower variation in growth than autocracies, in both the shorter and longer term and both across and within countries. Its author, Carl Henrik Knutsen, goes on:

“[When] compared to autocracies, democracies show much less variation. . . Sure, democracies seldom observed the very high Chinese-style growth rates of recent years, but they do not observe the extreme growth disasters that are historically fairly common in autocracies either, a few examples being China under Mao’s Great Leap Forward, Zaire under Mobutu, or current Venezuela under Maduro.”

Knutsen’s conclusion?

“Democracy seems to act as a ‘safety-net’ that guards against the worst economic development outcomes.”

This suggests that voting for democracy is not just a matter of safeguarding our freedoms and the rule of law—though it is certainly that—it is also a vote for safeguarding economic growth and stability.

The destabilizing effect of autocracies on economies is well-known among experts. But because it is under-reported by the press, it is unappreciated by the voting public. Perhaps that is why sixteen Nobel prize-winning economists signed and published a letter on June 25th warning voters that the U.S. and world economy will suffer if Trump wins the election in November. “The outcome of this election will have economic repercussions for years, and possibly decades, to come,” they wrote. “We believe that a second Trump term would have a negative impact on the U.S.’s economic standing in the world, and a destabilizing effect on the U.S.’s domestic economy.”

Voter beware

As the 2024 election heads into its final lap, an authoritarian pandemic continues to infect nations across the globe. Just look at the map below showing autocratic countries worldwide in 2024. Unlike COVID—when many of us could retreat into our homes—there is no hiding from autocracy once it infects a body politic. Only the super-rich, many of whom finance its spread, have any hope of escaping its ill-effects.

World Population Review

As you can see, Venezuela is one of only a handful of autocracies in the Americas. And yet here we are in the United States, teetering on the edge of joining them.

If Trump wins in November, we will slip over that edge. If he loses, we get a hint from Trump and Elon Musk’s gabfest on X where the autocrat and the oligarch will go to lick their wounds:

"We'll meet the next time in Venezuela, because it'll be a far safer place to meet than our country," Trump told Musk. "OK, so we'll go. You and I will go, and we'll have a meeting and dinner in Venezuela."

How fitting.

It boggles the mind how the cradle of liberty finds itself among nations at risk of succumbing to the autocratic pandemic sweeping the globe.

If you find that prospect so hard to fathom that you dismiss it, consider what historian Timothy Snyder wrote in On Tyranny:

“The hero of a David Lodge novel says that you don’t know, when you make love for the last time, that you are making love for the last time. Voting is like that. Some of the Germans who voted for the Nazi Party in 1932 no doubt understood that this might be the last meaningfully free election for some time, but most did not.”

How on earth did we get here, and how on earth can we get out before it is too late? That is a question my next post will take up.

Meanwhile, what are your thoughts? Please let us know by leaving a comment below.

Footnote

Venezuela’s initial economic decline coincided with the democratic backsliding begun under President Hugo Chavez between 1999 and his death in 2013 when Maduro came into power.