The States in a State of Crisis

The ouster of the Republican Speaker Kevin McCarthy of the US House of Representatives on October 3rd, 2023, had put America’s political landscape in a state of turmoil and crisis. According to a New York Times report, he is the first speaker in the whole of American political history to be removed from his position. Formerly, he was a Republican congressman who was elected after 15 rounds of voting by the US House of Representatives to be its leader in January of the same year.

Historians profess that there was a time in World History when the United States was considered the champion of stable democracy and taught the world the mantras of good governance. But in the years following Trump’s presidency, America had been in a chaotic situation as radical extremist right-wingers are claiming that the elections when Biden was elected as the president were unfair and a “deep state” in the United States is working against Mr. Trump and his idea of “Making America great again.” According to a Monmouth poll from the spring of 2018, a total of 37 percent of respondents had heard of a thing called the deep state. When asked if they believed there was “a group of unelected government and military officials who secretly manipulate or direct national policy,” almost three-quarters of respondents agreed such a “deep state” existed.

Donald J. Trump’s violent language and controversial views about the state and judicial institutions of America are the biggest factors in creating what I call a “self-made” politico-judicial crisis. On the ouster of Republican speaker Kevin McCarthy of the US House of Representatives, Mr. Biden said, “More than anything, we need to change the poisonous atmosphere in Washington.”

Furthermore, to counter the “conspiracy theories” of Trump, he (Biden) says, “I know we have strong disagreements, but we need to stop seeing each other as enemies. We need to talk to one another, listen to one another, and work with one another. And we can do that.” Although this response doesn’t answer the question of whether “Can the presidency in the hands of an aging traditional politician like Biden be a tool to heal the wounds of society?” asked by most of the supporters of Trump, it is giving him (Trump) enough space to play a homerun shot.

Mr. Trump, outside the courtroom in New York on Wednesday, claimed the judge who was hearing his case that, “He’s run by the Democrats,” he said, “Our whole system is corrupt. This is corrupt. Atlanta is corrupt. And what is coming out of DC is corrupt.” This type of narrative by a former president related to state institutions has not only created an atmosphere of confusion and mistrust in the general public and especially Trump supporters, but hysteria is evolving rapidly and forming into an idea that will eventually lead a majority of American citizens to not believing in the government and a judicial process for getting justice.

Some American scholars are proclaiming that Republicans under Mr. Trump’s leadership have directly attacked the foundation of the democratic system by refusing to accept an election and by encouraging political violence, most vicious the assault on The Capital on January 6th, 2021.

A Harvard professor, Mr. Daniel Ziblatt, recently published a book titled, “Tyranny of the Minority” with his colleague Steven Levitsky, a sequel to their seminal book, “How Democracies Die.” He said about the crisis, “A democracy on the verge of veering out of control is the consequence when one of the major political players in the democratic process won’t accept the basic rules of the game,”

Disbelief towards the Government and Democracy is rising rapidly in the States. A report in the New York Times further says, “The last time most Americans reported being satisfied “with the way things are going in the United States” in Gallup surveys was January 2004, nearly two decades ago. A separate survey by the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research in June found that 49 percent of Americans believe democracy is not working well in the United States, compared with 40 percent who say it is working only somewhat well and just 10 percent who believe it is working very or extremely well.”

A national security official who served as defense secretary for both presidents, George W. Bush and Barack Obama, Robert M. Gates, warned in his essay published in Foreign Affairs magazine last week titled “The Dysfunctional Superpower” that both Mr. Putin and President Xi Jinping of China were interpreting America’s troubles in perilous ways. Both presidents, he wrote, are convinced that democracies like the United States “are past their prime and have entered an irreversible decline,” evident in their growing isolationism, political polarization, and domestic conflict. “Dysfunction has made American power erratic and unreliable,” Mr. Gates further wrote, “practically inviting risk-prone autocrats to place dangerous bets — with potentially catastrophic effects.” About the removal of the Republican speaker, he wrote, “The events of the last couple of days have only underscored how real is the dysfunction.”

This, what I call a politico-judicial crisis in the United States of America, is merely because of the depoliticization, disinformation, and a lack of Critical thinking in the American public. However, what are the architectural factors of this crisis? This will be discussed in another article. We have merely detected the situation so far, and it will not be appropriate to address the complete issue here.