Whose democracy is rotting

Our family has a distant connection to Germany and over time I have followed its politics with interest.

At one point, the Daughters of the American Revolution offered membership to my mom because our family tree had been traced to a German Protestant who traveled to America as a passenger on the Mayflower.

My father was a U.S. Army soldier during World War II and could speak passable German. But the connection to our German forbear withered and mostly died as I grew up. My mother, a Parisian who survived the German occupation, did not allow my father to speak the German language in our house. She did not join the DAR.

But the connection to Europe remained strong in our family. My mother’s relatives lived in France and we went there or they came here while I was growing up.

Those connections to the old world are still common in our nation. So our new government’s attacks on the Atlantic Alliance are a blow to who we are and where we came from.

Like almost any major offensive, the attacks include a propaganda charge. So the new vice president two weeks ago described the European democracies as rotting from within: “What I worry about is the threat from within, the retreat of Europe from some of its most fundamental values.”

Setting aside VP Vance’s own political fate, given that the Trump shadow eats politicians alive, I wanted to look at what he said and examine the relative health of our democracies based on a neutral factor, the numbers.

After German elections last week, five parties will be represented in the Bundestag.

The Christian Democrats, the mainline conservative party, will lead the government with 28.5% of the popular vote. They will in all likelihood find an entente with the mainline liberal party to form a majority of the middle.

The far left and far right gathered roughly 30% between them, attracting a large number of young voters. A total of 83% out of 59 million eligible German voters participated.

From that neutral indicator, we can judge the relative vigor of the two democracies.

A total of 64% out of 244 million eligible participated in the U.S. elections last fall.

Based on participation percentages alone — 83% to 64% — you would say the German democracy is more vigorous than the U.S. democracy. In the U.S. election, more than a third of the electorate, 90 million voters, stayed home.

Which leads to the next point about a healthy democracy, representation of diverse political viewpoints.

The popular vote in the U.S. split almost evenly with 49.8% going to Republicans and 48.3% going to Democrats. But those 75 million Democrats currently have no voice in the national legislative body, while 77 million Republicans have a monopoly on power. They in turn have been subdued by one person.

Contrast the German Bundestag where five parties are represented, including an environmental party that received about 12% of the vote in Sunday’s election and was a necessary partner in the previous German government. The rads on either side of the political divide will also be heard, and they will no doubt be loud.

Among early initiatives from the new German government, the incoming leader of the of the Christian Democrats has floated lifting the debt brake that currently constrains German budgets by going through the lame duck Bundestag, in order to blast ahead on defense and infrastructure spending.

Here at home, the victors in the last election are blasting ahead with a more radical set of decrees that already seem to be spewing doubt into the private sector: arresting immigrants, decimating environmental rules, increasing the income divide through tax policy. The Democratic Party on the other hand, despite representing 48% of the electorate, is prostrate, exhausted, lying down, listless, unable to gather itself.

That situation does not demonstrate a more vigorous democracy. It shows one that is ailing, where roughly one third of the electorate can’t be bothered, another third has no voice and another third is getting what it asked for even if the consequences were not clear at the time.

That brings forward the related question of whether the policies pushed by the new U.S. administration can be sustained through popular support or whether the honeymoon between the prevailing voters and the administration will be brief.

But that drama will play out within one party and not within the larger body politic where two-thirds of Americans have no say for the next four years.

So the enemy within that Vance was talking about, where does its outline seem more clear, in Germany or here at home.