In the US presidential campaign, radicals from both camps are convinced that a victory for the opponent will mean end of democracy. With Trump's excesses and fake news or the famous "Project 2025" progressives are convinced that there is indeed great danger. Democrats think they have to save democracy, Republicans think they are victims of the "deep state". This is what the French online magazine Causeur writes in its analysis.
Mark Zuckerberg's recent letter to Congress, in which he acknowledged that he bowed to pressure from the Biden administration in 2021 to censor content about the Covid-19 pandemic, illustrates the challenges to free speech in the United states and around the world. In a context in which the role of social networks has been heavily criticized, this reversal shakes the image of the defenders of democracy and freedom of expression that the tandem Biden and Harris tried to forge.
Smoke screen
Let's go back for a moment to 2020. A few weeks before the election, while Donald Trump is still president and the FBI has possession of Hunter Biden's laptop, which proves that the latter was going to use his political influence to get financial advantages , particularly in Ukraine and China, while his father was vice president, the agency deliberately lied to Facebook, claiming that the existence of that computer and the emails it contained, now widely confirmed, was the product of Russian disinformation. This thesis will be confirmed in a statement by 51 (!) former security officials, which will cause major social media platforms, including Facebook and Twitter, to censor all information on the subject, thereby stifling the nascent controversy.< /p>
As a result, most Americans will either never hear about this affair or dismiss it as a "Russian ploy" in the context of a contested election that ultimately came down to just 44,000 votes in three states. How can we explain, apart from the existence of the "deep state" , that the FBI and so many senior officials allowed themselves to be exploited by the Democratic campaign at such a crucial time? For many American citizens, this question is at the heart of the debate about the integrity of the American democratic process.
Democrats - the camp of good?
The Democratic thesis claims that Joe Biden saved American democracy threatened by Donald Trump and now assigns Kamala Harris the mission to preserve it, a view widely shared by the American and European mainstream media. For many Republicans, however, it is more likely that the Democrats, supported by most traditional media and major technology platforms (Google, Facebook, Instagram or YouTube), are undermining the very foundations of democracy in the United States by manipulating algorithms and censoring conservative voices. In late 2022, Twitter files obtained, among other things, from the investigative work of independent journalist Matt Taibbi, already revealed the censorship practiced by Twitter management, as well as the involvement of the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). This divergence of views is fueling an intense debate about the neutrality of institutions and the media, as well as the possible existence of a "deep state" that would discreetly influence American politics, distorting democratic debate.
Is the deep state a reality in the US?
Dozens of powerful government agencies operate without real control, making up the heart of this deep state where real power resides, thus eluding elected officials and the people. These agencies often have triple power—legislative, executive, and judicial—in their area of jurisdiction, a power that they continue to expand. For example, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), a federal health agency, gave itself the authority to ban the eviction of substandard tenants during the Covid-19 pandemic, a measure with no connection to the original mandate. From the Republican point of view, the Democratic government is also undermining the independence of the third branch and will now wage a legitimate war against its opponents. According to them, the prosecution of Donald Trump would not have happened if he had not been a candidate for president again, suggesting that justice would have become a political weapon. Indeed, the handling of the trials against the former president raises serious concerns about the integrity and impartiality of the judiciary. Likewise, the crackdown on the attack on the Capitol on January 6, 2021, with prosecutions still ongoing four years later targeting more than 1,400 people, some of whom were just walking the halls of the Capitol, stands in stark contrast. with the weak repression of the violent riots that followed the death of George Floyd. This disparity gives the impression of two-tiered justice.
A new pro-democracy electoral landscape
Republican fears are particularly acute about the election. They believe that the decision to open the southern border of the United States, allowing the entry of more than 10 million migrants in four years, is part of a strategy aimed at fundamentally changing the American electoral map to ensure the hegemony of the Democratic Party in future. In fact, each state's number of seats in the House of Representatives is determined by its total population. Immigrants mostly settle in large states dominated by the Democratic Partyq and vote mostly for the latter. Elon Musk, the supporter of Trump, even suggested that in this way about twenty seats could change in favor of the Democrats, providing this party with a majority in Congress for decades... In addition, the secretaries of state of the Democratic Party took advantage of the Covid crisis to change election laws in several states without going through local legislatures. They expanded postal voting, reduced voter ID checks, and made widespread use of ballot boxes, which could have swayed election results. These measures were maintained even after the end of the epidemic. Donald Trump and the Republicans want, similar to what is being done in France, to impose a mandatory ID card to vote, limit voting by mail, prefer paper ballots (they say they are more reliable and easier to count) and limit the voting period, which begins in early September in some states. Although these measures are in line with OSCE recommendations, they naturally meet strong opposition from Democrats... As we can see, the debate about the future of American democracy deserves a deeper discussion than the Manichean caricature between the camp of good (Harris) and evil (Trump).