Democracy’s Bad Month

Today on TAP: The leaders of Israel, France, and India all moved to subvert democracy in the past couple of weeks.

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April may be the cruelest month, but this March has been a friggin’ disaster. At least, if you think democracy is a good idea.

That it hasn’t been a total wipeout is due only to the fact that half of Israel took to the streets and shut down their workplaces on Monday in a spontaneous protest of Prime Minister Bibi’s weekend ploy. On Sunday, Netanyahu fired his defense minister for noting that Bibi’s impending destruction of judicial independence was causing a large chunk of the nation’s military to go AWOL in protest, and that therefore, he couldn’t support Bibi’s anti-court coup. The uproar at his sacking compelled Netanyahu to put his court-crushing offensive on temporary hold.

Unlike the other demonstrations that have filled Israel’s streets in recent weeks, this one wasn’t preplanned. Much like the uprising that followed immediately on Richard Nixon’s “Saturday Night Massacre,” in which Nixon ordered the firing of Watergate special prosecutor Archibald Cox and then fired his own attorney general and deputy attorney general for refusing to axe Archibald (he finally persuaded the deputy-deputy AG, Robert Bork, to do the deed), Israel’s response to the firing—which made clear Bibi’s determination to derail the Court regardless of consequences even to national security—was spontaneous, almost knee-jerk. New polling has shown that roughly two-thirds of Israelis oppose the firing, and that a majority now favors forming a new government composed of the (many) opposition parties.

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As he’d been compelled by the public outrage to put his “reforms” on hold until the Knesset returns from a several-week recess, Bibi had to compensate the far-right parties to which he’s beholden for his parliamentary majority with some sweeteners. And so, he promised Itamar Ben-Gvir, who heads the party of Palestinian-hating settlers and who’s kept a portrait of Baruch Goldstein, who massacred 29 Palestinian Muslims while at prayer, on his living-room wall, that he could establish and run a National Guard—something that Israel has somehow managed to do without in its 75-year history—to enforce domestic tranquility. Official Jewish brownshirts, to be deployed not just against Palestinians and Israeli Arabs (that’s old news), but non-fanatic Jews as well. The mind reels.

But Israel was hardly the only democracy to have itself a testy March. In France, President Emmanuel Macron’s decision to raise the nation’s retirement age from 62 to 64 by himself, rather than leave the decision in the hands of the National Assembly, where the proposal appeared likely to lose, exposed what small-d democrats might deem a flaw in France’s constitution, which basically permits the president to do what he damn well pleases. Polling shows that about two-thirds of the French are either small-d democrats, or don’t want the retirement age raised, or, in most cases, both. Like the Israelis, they’ve taken to the streets and gone on strikes. (Yesterday, the garbage wasn’t picked up in either Paris or Tel Aviv.)

And it’s been a calamitous month by democratic standards in the nation that periodically bills itself as the world’s largest democracy: India. Last week, the Hindu nationalist party headed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi used its parliamentary majority to expel from parliament the leader of the main opposition party, Rahul Gandhi. Gandhi’s expulsion followed by one day his conviction for criminal defamation (which came complete with a two-year jail sentence) for noting during a campaign stump speech that Modi had the same name as two convicted thieves. (I suppose had Gandhi noted that Modi had the same name as three convicted thieves, he would have been given a three-year sentence.)

In a magnificent display of inadvertent bad timing, President Biden will host a three-day “Summit for Democracy,” featuring paeans to democratic ideals from the leaders of 121 nations, beginning tomorrow. Netanyahu has reportedly already forwarded his own recorded affirmation of democratic ideals, which the Biden folks now have to decide whether to air or not. I don’t know if Macron and Modi are also weighing in, but even if they’re not, the fragility of democracy, even in nations that have long and proudly waved that banner, has seldom been more apparent. In Israel and India, the anti-democratic push is driven largely by sectarian intolerance (the ultra-Orthodox over secular Jews in Israel, Hindus over Muslims in India); in France, by the financial elite (whom Macron personifies) over the demos (or if you prefer, the rabble). Whatever the cause, it’s cause for alarm.

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