"Americans have not been proud of the government that’s supposed to
serve them for most of this century so far. The first president to take
office in the 21st century was George W. Bush, who left the country
divided, at war, and in recession. Barack Obama ran as a candidate of
hope that could only come through change—through the repudiation of the previous administration.

After eight years of Obama, however, Americans sought hope in another
great change, this time with the untried alternative to Hillary Clinton,
Donald Trump. Four years later, voters declared the Trump experiment a
failure, voting him out without necessarily eagerly embracing Joe Biden
or Kamala Harris.

And after four years of Biden, the country is desperate again for
change, maybe one that will bring “joy,” something that’s been in short supply these past 24 years. Informed voters who are not partisan
Democrats know that Kamala Harris is not a force for change at all—she’s
a continuation of the Biden administration, which is her administration
too. She’s a slippery, cynical, standard-issue politician of the
California liberal variety. The first and so far only major media
interview of her campaign confirmed this—and also confirmed that Harris won’t be held back in the least by her record or political identity.

She correctly perceives that voters still want change more than they
want any program, whether left or right. So she is running on her
strengths as a non-entity who hardly attracted the public’s notice in
her four years as vice president. She’s running as the challenger and positioning Trump as the incumbent.

The tell-tale word that Harris kept returning to in her discussion with
CNN’s Dana Bash was “decade”: “Turn the page on the last decade,” “I’m
talking about an era that started about a decade ago….” Harris is
running against the past, but not just against Trump—who was, after all, president for only four of the past ten years. The decade that Harris
wants to leave behind includes two years under Obama and four under
Biden and Harris herself. But Harris wasn’t the face of those years of disappointment,..."

For Harris, those years of disappointment started about a decade ago.
But for Americans in general, most of this century.


(DDD = Decades of Democratic Discontent or Disappoint)

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https://www.theamericanconservative.com/the-non-entity-who-would-be-president/

Is Harris not running against the past?
Does the TAC author read Harris wrong?

If by “Turn the page on the last decade,” “I’m talking about an era that
started about a decade ago….” Harris is indeed running against America's democratic past, one has to ask WHY.

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Of course, one easy answer: American Democracy is in trouble.
In reality, the disappointment or discontent is so bad that many
Americans have a second civil war on their minds.

Ravi Agrawal of foreignpolicy.com asked Barbarw F. Walter, a expert of a
CIA task force specialized on political instability, on US political instability including a second civil war.

https://foreignpolicy.com/2024/08/29/barbara-f-walter-civil-war-united-states/

Ms Barbara comes up with two factors which could be used to discriminate healthy democracy from unhealthy, partial democracy.

"The first factor was something called anocracy. Anocracy is just a
fancy political science term for a partial democracy. It’s a country
that has elements of democracy, so elections are held and people vote.
But it also has elements of autocracy. It could be that only one party
ever competes in those elections. Or it could be like in Hungary today,
where Prime Minister Viktor Orban has such a hold on the media that he
is effectively able to harass the opposition so he wins every single
election, no matter what. That’s an anocracy. It’s somewhere in between democracy and autocracy.

The second factor that mattered was whether political parties in those
partial democracies were mainly organized around race, religion, or
ethnicity and not around ideology. So these would be countries where,
instead of joining a political party because you were conservative or
liberal or communist or capitalist, you joined a party because it was
the party of Serbs or Croats or Muslims or Hutus or Tutsis. When a
country had these two features—a partial democracy with these
identity-based parties—it was at high risk of political instability and political violence.

RA: Since this was a CIA task force, it was not measuring the United
States. At what point did you look at this checklist and wonder where
the United States falls on that spectrum?
..
The United States was downgraded a third time at the end of 2020. And by December 2020, the United States was classified at positive five.
Positive five is in the anocracy zone. Anything between negative five
and positive five is an anocracy."

So, the US is rated by the CIA task force, not any foreign organizations
or foreign countries, as an anocracy. The article does not dwell in the
second factor which depends on to what degree the US is really a people.

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While the divergence between America's claim of being a democracy and
deep concern about imminent civil war is clear, the cause is less
discussed including the article quoted above.

However, Barbara F Walter did mention the cause indirectly in an earlier
New Yorker article. https://www.newyorker.com/news/the-weekend-essay/democracy-needs-the-loser

"Even though political scientists have long studied these risk factors,
almost no one considered the U.S. a serious candidate for post-election violence until recently. Americans have historically had a great deal of
trust in their system of government, and hence a long tradition of
electoral losers conceding gracefully."

The link between electoral democracy and post-election violence is
known. People's trust toward the government would minimize the risk of post-election violence.

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DDD (decades of democratic discontent) in the US makes one wonder all
the accusations against election meddling from outside. One example is
provided by the Foriginpolicy.com
article with the headline of "How U.S. Cyber Adversaries Are Trying to Undermine the Election."

https://foreignpolicy.com/2024/09/19/iran-russia-trump-harris-campaign-election-interference-cyber/

The subtitle of the article "American companies and officials reveal a
flurry of warnings and actions against Russia, China, and Iran" further specifies Russia, China, and Iran as sources of election meddling.

The assumption of such accusation is that American electoral democracy
is doing great by left alone. But this kind of thinking is obviously not
true given America's decades of democratic discontent. Americans
themselves are doing a great job over the past decades undermining its electoral democracy.

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