One Party States: Antithesis to Democracy?

One Lucky Bastard* by John Lithgow (read above by Joseph Gordon-Levitt)

I'm one lucky bastard! I'm John McEntee!
A staffer as callow as callow can be!
From a preppie career as a star quarterback,
I followed my dream as a government hack.

With family pull, my ascendance began
When Dumpty made be his ace body man.
I never received my security clearance
But with Dumpty around, no one called interference.

John Kelly, that dick, threw me out on my can,
But it turned out the POTUS was my biggest fan.
With everyone else either fired or retiring,
He hired me as head of all hiring and firing.

Keeping my job is as easy as pie:
I make sure all appointees are dumber than I.
Their job application is simple to pass,
A promise to constantly kiss Dumpty's ass.

Everyone tells me I'm doing just fine,
And who would've figured? I'm just twenty-nine!
I'm a staffer as callow as callow can be!
I'm one lucky bastard! I'm John McEntee!

McEntee’s name may sound familiar to hard-core White House–personnel watchers. He was fired back in May 2018 and suddenly escorted from the White House at the order of then–chief of staff John Kelly, after a federal investigation revealed that McEntee had committed “serious financial crimes.”

***** 

It's true that there were other parties in apartheid South Africa. But a one-party state is not necessarily a state with no opposition parties at all. Although Lenin's Communist Party and Hitler's Nazi Party arrested and murdered their opponents, there are plenty of examples of one-party states, even quite vicious one-party states, that permitted some limited opposition, if only for show. Between 1945 and 1989, many of the communist parties of Eastern Europe allowed opponents--peasants' parties, pseudo-Christian Democrats, or in the case of Poland, a small Catholic party--to play roles in the state, in the rigged "parliaments," or in public life. In recent decades, there have been many examples, from Ben Ali's Tunisia to Hugo Chavez's Venezuela, of de factor one-party states that controlled state institutions and limited freedom of association and speech, but allowed a token opposition to exist, so long as that opposition didn't actually threaten the ruling party.

This form of soft dictatorship does not require mass violence to stay in power. Instead, it relies upon a cadre of elites to run the bureaucracy, the state media, the courts, and, in some places, state companies. These modern-day clercs understand their role, which is to defend the leaders, however dishonest their statements, however great their corruption, and however disastrous their impact on ordinnary people and institutions. In exchange, they know that they will be rewarded and advanced. Close associates of the party leader can become very wealthy... -- Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism, by Anne Applebaum, pgs 25-26.

***** 

Twentieth-century history is replete with examples of one-party states, both nation-states and some among the 50 subdivisions of the United States of America.

Russia, under Lenin; China, under Mao; Venezuela, under Hugo Chavez; the US Deep South; anecdotally, Illinois; Arizona. What's common among those states? Well, not their economic systems.

In Illinois, it has been by, through, and from the Democratic Party. A friend of mine from the 1980s in Arizona now lives in Illinois. When I tried to converse with him about politics (on Facebook, not back in the 80s), he got quickly aroused with anger because he perceived corruption of the Democrats to be the reason. Given what we learned from Rod Blagojevich, the Ill. governor who was convicted of trying to sell the US Senate seat vacated by Barack Obama when he became US president, that's kind of understandable. 

Of course, soon-to-be-former president Trump recently pardoned Blago. 

The state I am most familiar with, Arizona, is certainly not overtly communist or socialist. But for years, the dominant (exclusive) influence over public policy, at least as implemented by elected officials at the state level, has been by, through, and from elected officials affiliated with the Republican Party.

Rarely do Democratic Arizona state lawmakers have their proposed legislation, unless it addresses something that caters to Republican interests, even get heard in legislative committees, let alone get implemented into law. 

Arizona reeks of being a one-party state. But one saving grace through the years has been our state constitution, which provides for citizens initiatives and referenda. The PEOPLE have brought us Clean Elections, which has been attacked by the one-party bullies in the courts until it is mostly impotent. 

Also from citizen initiative, the Arizona Independent Redistricting Commission, has likewise been attacked by the same bullies. But thus far, independent redistricting has fared much better against the onslaughts. Now that we are in a year ending in ONE, the third iteration of the AIRC will once again commence its work soon. In a capsule, the first iteration (2001) was successfully co-opted by parochial corporate interests. By the end of that decade, Republicans enjoyed a supermajority in both chambers of the state legislature, which allowed them to try to decapitate the 2011 commission. In 2012, the first election with the 2011's newly adopted district maps, the GOP lost its supermajority. 

Because the interests that co-opted the process in 2001 could not succeed the same way in 2011, they took the fight to the courts, both federal and state courts. They lost every one of those skirmishes, including two that went all the way to the Supreme Court of the United States. The story of the 2011 commission was recorded in roughly 400 posts to this blog, beginning on December 10, 2010.

I am excited for the battle over the course of 2021 and 2022. It will be fierce. If it works out well, Arizona will again become a two-party state.

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One Lucky Bastard is found on p. 66 of Trumpty Dumpty Wanted a Crown, by John Lithgow