NRA untouchable with the white nationalists in charge

Roy Moore celebrates his win in the Alabama run-off.

This week, Donald Trump, Mike Pence and staff gathered on the south lawn of the White House for one minute’s silence. It’s doubtful any Washington gathering could compete for such pietistic dissimulation. The wafting fumes of hypocrisy might have breached the capital’s air safety standards.

Truth is, not a single Republican on the lawn had any intention of supporting gun control. After all, their party had blocked background checks on gun buyers after the 2012 Sandy Hook massacre.

Heads bowed in simulation of grief, the President and his Vice-President knew the script: sympathy for victims, praise for police, pleas for calm. But no confrontation with one of America’s bastions of power: the National Rifle Association.

The Republican Party has several personalities. Being the political arm of the NRA is one of them.

Former Democratic congressman Steve Israel this week recalled earlier tragedies: “I heard (Republican) colleagues confide that any vote for gun safety would lower their NRA scores, making them casualties in the next election.”

The veto power of super lobbies such as the NRA is one reason the US is, indeed, exceptional. That is, different from the world’s liberal democracies. In any one of them, faced with such outrage, electorates would rise up and governments would topple.

The failure on guns reflects a slowly gathering crisis for the US political system, stressed and shaken by economic change and race tensions. It reflects the paradoxes of a constitution from the 1780s, written as a republican statement but not a democratic one. The electoral college was designed explicitly by the founding fathers to counter the popular will.

That’s how it worked last ­November when Hillary Clinton polled 2.8 million more votes than her opponent but lost in the electoral college by 306 to 232.

That was the fifth such result since 1824, but such a result may now be congealing as the new normal. A higher percentage of Americans live in metro areas and the rural states are being hollowed out. It’s ethnically diverse Democrat laagers in New York and California versus small rural states.

Presidents with a minority of the popular vote are likely to become more common.

Yes, the new normal.

In a practice that would astonish most Australians, in the US, boundaries for seats in the House of Representatives are drawn up by state MPs, with nothing comparable to the Australian Electoral Commission. Think Queensland’s federal boundaries, during the era of Bjelke-Petersen, being drawn by state MPs, maps spread at their desks. The Republican Party dominates state legislatures.

Journalist David Wasserman says the efforts of Republicans to gerrymander congressional districts have moved the median house seat well to the right.

In their new book, One Nation after Trump, three Washington think-tankers, EJ Dionne Jr, Norman J. Ornstein and Thomas E. Mann, calculate that two-thirds of the Republicans’ 25-seat majority in the house is based on “redistricting” following the 2010 state elections, which produced Republican domination of the boundary-drawing process.

But that’s nothing compared with the anti-democratic distortion the Senate embodies.

Each US state gets two seats in the Senate, regardless of population. In recent years, Republicans have made huge advances in small rural states, such as Arkansas, North and South Dakota, and Montana. Wasserman says this gives them “disproportionate power in the upper chamber compared to their populations”.

With more urbanisation, the distortion is increasing. By 2040, 70 per cent of Americans will live in 15 states and will be represented by a mere 30 of the 100 senators. That’s the calculation of political scientist David Birdsell.

When I spoke to Mann this week, he told me, “At that point we could not be called a representative democracy. The Senate is the only serious legislative body in the world that is not based on one person, one vote.”

This week he and his two co-authors argued in The Washington Post:“Claims that our republic is democratic are undermined by a system that vastly overrepresents the interests of rural areas and small states. This leaves a large share of Americans in metropolitan areas with limited influence over national policy. The United States is now a non-majoritarian democracy.” Which is to say, not a democracy in the sense Europeans, Canadians or Australians could recognise.

Many may say the US is not a democracy at all. But it is more or less what its 1780s constitution intended, a republic with some democratic features carefully balanced by oligarchic ones, the Senate, the electoral college. So no gun reform, not ever, it seems.

As Philip Bump of The Washington Post has said: “(I)f all 50 senators from the 25 smallest states voted for a bill and Vice-President Pence cast his lot with them, senators representing just 16 per cent of Americans could overrule those representing 84 per cent.”

Roll together these political trends: You have an electoral college that is set to award the presidency more frequently to the candidate with the minority of the popular vote. You have gerrymandered boundaries for the House of Representatives crafted by Republicans in state assemblies. You have 70 per cent of the population allocated 30 per cent of senators.

Add to this the veto power given to the super lobbies such as the NRA, which can countermand the wishes of the 94 per cent of the population supporting background checks for gun buyers. Reinforce that with a Supreme Court interpretation of freedom of expression that blocks any restraint on big money donations extended through political action committees. Then dilate on conservative states pursuing “voting suppres­sion” measures to discourage min­orities and the poor from going to polling booths. And you have US exceptionalism.

In this context, the decision by black American footballers to kneel in protest while their national anthem is played is worth cheering, for its inherent truth and as a reminder that freedom of expression still flourishes in the US. A smarter president than Trump might have flung it in the face of the North Koreans as a statement about universal freedom. But white nationalism is now housed in Republican America and that can never happen.

Right now, the advantage given to non-urban America by its constitution is elevating Republican power just as their party is captured by an America-first agenda so tinged with white nationalism that Trump almost chokes before bringing himself to condemn pro-Nazi demonstrators.

Some want to believe that as the Trump aberration exhausts ­itself, America is ready to return to liberal internationalism. This optimism was scuppered by the Alabama Senate run-off on September 26, a political upset quickly overshadowed by the Vegas massacre. A maverick former judge, Roy Moore, defeated the whole ­Republican establishment, which had backed his rival, Trump candidate Luther Strange, with a $US30 million campaign.

The victorious rebel now will go on to contest a seat against the Democrats in December.

A stunt that helped Moore achieve his 54 per cent win occurred the night before the election. Wearing a white Stetson hat and leather waistcoat, he pulled out a revolver and held it in the air as a token of his support of second amendment rights.

That populist nationalists such as Moore may become the majority of the Republican Party is one thing. That the flaws in the US political system may make them serious players in Trump’s America and beyond is something else.

Yes, the US is exceptional. Let’s drop the pretence this isn’t becoming a different America from any we imagined.

Bob Carr is a former foreign minister and was the longest serving premier of NSW.