Against the Olympics 4

Part Four: Corruption, Consumerism, Doping, Repression…all brought to you by Adidas and Coca-Cola

After rising through the ranks of various national and international sporting bodies, not to mention the ruling party in General Franco’s Spain, and serving a stint as his country’s ambassador in Moscow, Juan Antonio Samaranch was elected President of the IOC in 1981. His immediate program for reforming the Olympic movement included lifting the ban on professional athletes in 1981, and the decision made two years later to open up the use of the five-rings symbol to corporate sponsorship. (An IOC official at the time called the Olympic emblem “the most valuable unexploited symbol in the world”.) At the beginning of his tenure, the IOC held assets worth less than a quarter of a million (U.S.) dollars; by 1996 it would be worth US$100 million. For the right to televise the five Games held during the 2000s, NBC would pay US$3.5 billion.

With Samaranch at the helm, the Olympic movement became a model of neo-liberalism: television rights were maximised, the efforts made by bidding city authorities to suck up to the IOC reached ridiculous proportions (resulting in various bribery scandals), and funds were diverted away from activities which didn’t earn a profit (eg. the Paralympics, which receives less funding than the IOC’s stamp collection). The IOC exploits its coubertiniste heritage to endow it with moral respectability: it likes to be seen leading the fight against performance-enhancing drugs or uniting the two Koreas under one flag at an Opening Ceremony. But under the surface, it hasn’t changed much since it acted as a useful idiot for Hitler in the 1930s.

Juan Antonio Samaranch: franquista-turned-neoliberal.

By awarding the 2008 Summer Games to Beijing, the IOC completed a dubious hat-trick: it had awarded its showpiece event to the three most murderous regimes in human history (after Berlin in 1936 and Moscow in 1980). Any attempts to shed light on China’s human rights record were dismissed as attempts to politicise sport, and when Russia invaded Georgia during the event, the IOC was quick to insist that Russian and Georgian athletes show the utmost camaraderie towards one another (fearing, one would suspect, a repeat of the ‘blood in the water’ USSR-Hungary water polo match at Melbourne in 1956). Just as it did with Jews in 1936, Mexican students in 1968, and Afghans suffering under Soviet imperialism in 1980, the IOC used its neutral, apolitical guise to tell the victims of oppression to shut up for the duration of the Games, lest their protests upset the artificial atmosphere of international solidarity and lessen the value of the ‘product’ being lapped up by the television audiences.

The Olympics don’t need to be held behind the Iron Curtain or the Great Firewall to be sites of political repression. The use of force by authorities against those who disrupt their self-congratulatory carnival has become a feature of every Olympiad, and even in liberal democracies, the full force of the national security state is thrown behind the goal of protecting the Olympic brand. Prior to the Vancouver Games in 2010, Canadian authorities detained journalists who questioned the purpose of the Olympics. (Australia wasn’t immune to this either – I can still remember former Democrats’ Senator Andrew Murray’s passionate defence of civil liberties against the calls of the Howard government for the passage of ‘shoot-to-kill’ laws in the run-up to Sydney 2000.) With the reputations of entire nations on the line, the logic of neo-liberal capitalism (which, despite its free market rhetoric, is more accurately termed neo-mercantilism) allows governments to use the hosting of the Olympics as an excuse for a bit of old-fashioned authoritarian social control.

The run-up to this year’s London games has witnessed all the usual hallmarks of Olympism: the displacement of the little people whose existence gets in the way of the technocrats’ plans for all-seater state-of-the-art facilities (probably to be torn down after the Games anyway), the use of anti-terror-style legislation to prevent disruptions by protestors, and the use of the spectacle by tin-pot demagogues to make some political point or other (eg. Mahmoud Ahmedinejad, who threatened to boycott London because the ‘2012’ on the Games’ logo looked too much like ‘ZION’). The push for a single UK soccer team has been used to bash Scottish and Welsh nationalisms, while the continuing oil-fuelled dispute over the sovereignty of the Falklands/Malvinas has made itself felt in the controversy over an Olympics-related Argentine advertisement filmed on the islands.

When the athletes parade around in the Opening Ceremony and ‘Er Majesty proclaims ‘let the Games begin’, we would do well to remember the victims of Olympism: the People’s Olympiad participants who died in the Spanish Civil War, the Jews and others massacred because of the political capital granted to Hitler by the staging of the Berlin Games, the students killed in Mexico City in 1968, and the Georgians killed by Putin’s goons in 2008.

(Credit to British investigative journalist Andrew Jennings, whose book on corruption in the IOC [The Lords of the Rings: Power, Money, and Drugs in the Modern Olympics] I first read as a teenager and which inspired my critique of the Olympic movement.)

Against the Olympics 3

Part Three: Black Power, Black September, and Black Africa: the Olympics during the Cold War

The second half of the twentieth century witnessed a number of political conflicts which found themselves fought out under the Olympic rings. The 1968 Games in Mexico City were marred by the shooting of anti-government student protestors, and then played host to the famous ‘Black Power’ salute of two African-American medallists. Four years later, eleven Israeli athletes were massacred by the Palestinian ‘Black September’ terrorist group. In 1976, the clash between the West and the non-aligned/post-colonial world provided the backdrop for a boycott of the Games by African countries, an action taken in response to Western sporting appeasement of apartheid South Africa (most notably the selection of all-white All Black teams for away tests against the Springboks). And in 1980 and 1984, the United States and the Soviet Union engaged in tit-for-tat boycotts of each other’s Games. On each of these occasions, the response of the IOC was to reassert its apolitical character, which meant in practice that it called for the suspension of all political and social conflict which might interfere with the running of its showpiece event.

That salute.

As with its dealing with the Nazis before and during the 1936 Olympics, the IOC’s professed political apathy caused it to sacrifice any moral compass in favour of bringing as many of the world’s regimes under its banner as possible. Under Avery Brundage’s tenure as its President, the organisation brought the Soviet Union and its satellites into the Olympic fold despite their shameless flouting of the ban on professionalism, tried to please both sides of the Beijing-Taiwan conflict over Chinese sovereignty, and held off for as long as possible international pressure to exclude the racially-selected sporting teams of South Africa and Rhodesia. When the IOC voted in 1972, against the wishes of its President, to bar Rhodesia from attending the Munich Games of that year, Brundage was furious. On the day that the Israeli athletes were killed, he publicly compared the vote to the killings, and told the world that he had been on the losing side of the vote because of “naked political blackmail”. Once again, any attempt to bring up questions of morality and human rights was ‘politics’, but the IOC bestowing its blessing on all sorts of questionable regimes was apparently not.

Although the Olympic movement during this period operated in a world radically different from that which existed in the first half of the twentieth century, many of the old sporting certainties remained, and the world of Tom Brown’s School Days was still the vision of sport adhered to by the keepers of the Olympic flame. In the 1972 Winter Games at Sapporo, Austrian skier Karl Schranz was banned for professionalism after he appeared at a soccer match in a sponsor’s t-shirt. (Such heavy-handedness from the authorities was reminiscent of Jim Thorpe being stripped of his two gold medals in 1912, or of the Gaelic Athletic Association, which would send spies into soccer and rugby crowds to catch players who were breaking its rules by attending English sports.) When the Games would eventually go professional, it would not be because of the irrelevance and elitism of the Victorian amateur ethic, but because of the replacement of that system of values by the profit-seeking logic of the Reagan/Thatcher revolution.

In the decades following the Second World War, the geopolitical tensions of the Cold War made the Olympics into the perfect stage for states to gain a propaganda victory for their ideology, turning every Games into a re-run of Berlin in 1936. The desire for national prestige led governments to spend public funds to develop athletes (eg. the Australian Institute of Sport was established after the country’s failure to win any gold medals at Montreal in 1976). Meanwhile, the spiralling cost of hosting the event was becoming apparent to voters and taxpayers – Denver had to relinquish its hosting of the 1976 Winter Olympics to Innsbruck after a ballot initiative to raise the necessary tax revenue was rejected. The lure of television revenue and the political rivalries which fuelled Olympic competition would inevitably lead to professionalism and commercialism. To get there, however, the IOC would renew its acquaintance with fascism, and turn to the leadership of a man from the city which fascism deprived of the opportunity to host the People’s Olympiad way back in 1936.

Musings on electoral systems: Bucklin voting

The United States has a reputation for being a barren wasteland in terms of electoral system design: every office at every level of government seems to be chosen by first-past-the-post or its multi-member variant (the block vote), with the occasional use of the party block vote (eg. for presidential electors) and the two-round system (most associated with Louisiana, but recently adopted in California). Even a simple reform such as the alternative vote is limited to such über-progressive hubs as San Francisco and Cambridge, Massachusetts. The nation has, however, experienced periods of frenzied electoral reform, with the 1910s (the height of the Progressive Era, and of the socialist and single-tax movements) being perhaps the most experimentative decade.

Bucklin voting takes its name from James W. Bucklin, a prominent civic leader in Grand Junction, Colorado. From biographical information available online, he appears to have been the very model of a turn-of-the-century progressive, hostile to political machines and saloons, and supportive of prohibition, non-partisan elections, and commission government. Bucklin voting, or at least one of its variants, was invented by him for use in his home town after it adopted a reformist city charter in 1909. It spread rapidly across the country (often adopted simultaneously with female suffrage or new city charters), and was used in large cities such as San Francisco, Portland, Seattle, Denver, and Cleveland before its advance was abruptly stopped and rolled back around 1920 (more on that below).

In the version used in Grand Junction, voters were able to cast a first-, second-, and third-preference for candidates for an office (write-in votes appear to have been allowed). If no candidate had a majority of first preferences, the second preferences of all candidates would be added, and then the third preferences, at which point the plurality winner would have to be elected if no majority was found. Other variants involve eliminating low-placed candidates, allowing more preferences, or allowing multiple preferences at the third stage. (Oklahoma briefly implemented a variant, the only Bucklin method ever tried at state level, which counted lower-preference votes at fractional values: one-half for the second preference and one-third for the third preference.) Bucklin voting was most commonly compared to the alternative vote, which also involves preferential voting for a single office. Unlike its competitor, Bucklin voting doesn’t necessarily eliminate low-placed candidates, allows the voter to cast multiple votes at later stages of counting, and allows for supporters of the two main candidates to express preferences for those in third place or lower. The latter feature was decisive in the 1909 mayoral election in Grand Junction, in which the second and third preferences of the candidates who finished first and second on first preferences helped to elect the candidate who place third on first preferences.

Groups which lobby for electoral reform in the United States typically call for the alternative vote for single-winner offices. The largest such group, FairVote, claims that Bucklin voting was dumped because voters failed to express preferences below the first, making elections function the same as they would under first-past-the-post. Actual data from major elections, however, demonstrates otherwise. The reason for Bucklin voting’s demise was probably the reason that so many other electoral reforms were repealed in the United States: racism and anti-communism. Heterodox electoral systems such as the single transferable vote were often blamed for letting African-Americans and socialists into municipal legislatures; a key feature of the campaign for a ballot measure to repeal STV in Cincinnati in 1957, for example, was the threat of a ‘Negro mayor’. In that regard, it is interesting to consider that the first experiment with Bucklin voting, in Grand Junction in 1909, produced a Socialist mayor, that the 1915 Cleveland mayoral poll almost elected an anti-war, pro-labour Democrat, and that Bucklin voting’s rollback coincides exactly with the First Red Scare. (It’s no coincidence that the other wave of repeal of alternative voting systems occurred in the 1950s – the era of McCarthyism, or that the widespread banning of electoral fusion took place during the 1890s, after the rise of the Populist Party and the entrenchment of Jim Crow.)

Bucklin voting has the following advantages: it can provide for multiple candidates of the same party or political tendency to contest a single office, thus negating the need for primaries; it avoids the lesser-of-two-evils tactical voting made necessary in first-past-the-post and runoff systems; it shares with the alternative vote the incentive for candidates not to alienate supporters of other candidates, whose preferences they might need; and it requires, in most cases, the winning candidate to obtain votes from a majority of voters. The experience from the United States in the 1910s suggests that it might be a way of breaking Duverger’s Law – instead of being mere sources of preferences for the major parties, as they are under the alternative vote, third parties can, given a double-digit percentage of first preferences and good transfers from those finishing above them, win single-winner elections. In the French presidential election of 2007, for example, it is conceivable that second and third preferences from supporters of Nicholas Sarkozy and Ségolène Royal might have catapulted François Bayrou (the third-place-getter, who would have beaten either Sarkozy or Royal approximately 60-40 in the runoff) to victory.

Against the Olympics 2

Part Two: Homage to Barcelona

In the early twentieth century, working-class people around the world often controlled their own cultural institutions – schools, theatres, libraries, clubs, etc. Sport was no exception, and there existed thousands of autonomous working-class sports clubs which existed outside of the official, IOC-affiliated national and international sporting bodies. This movement organised its own governing bodies, federations, and tournaments, and at its peak in the 1920s and 1930s, its multi-sport festivals attracted more participants than the Olympic Games. These events superficially resembled the Olympics, but with a few key differences – national flags and anthems were replaced by the red flag and ‘The Internationale’, and ‘national’ teams didn’t always conform to actual state boundaries (eg., Catalans, Basques, Alsatians, and the Jewish diaspora competed under their own identities). Moreover, they welcomed the nations which had lost the First World War, whom the IOC excluded from the official Olympics of 1920 (and also from those of 1924, in the case of Germany).

(The Soviet Union, whose leaders shared the priggish yet hypocritical hostility to professionalism of Rugby schoolmasters, also set up a parallel sporting structure [the Red Sport International] with its own counter-Olympics [the Spartakiads], but made its peace with the Olympic movement after the Second World War.)

The workers’ sports movement faced hostility from governments, who diverted funds into mainstream sport, yet its reach was still impressive. In 1929, the governing body for workers’ sports clubs in Germany (which was linked with the non-communist left) boasted 1.2 million members, while another quarter of a million belonged to a separate, communist-aligned body. The combined state funding received by both bodies from the Weimar government was less than one-sixth of that received by mainstream sporting bodies. When the two federations were liquidated by the Nazis in 1933, the IOC, despite its rhetoric about placing participation over politics, remained silent.

When the Popular Front government came to power in Spain in early 1936, it launched one of only two official boycotts of the Berlin Olympics, and set about organising an alternative event in concert with the Catalan government. Building on the strength and size of the workers’ sports movement, it invited competitors from clubs run by unions and leftist political parties to Barcelona (the runner-up to Berlin in the IOC’s bidding process for 1936) for the People’s Olympiad, pencilled in for the 19^th through 26^th of July. Athletes from twenty-two countries arrived in the city, including German and Italian exiles, members of Jewish sporting clubs, representatives of Spain’s autonomous communities, and athletes from French and Spanish colonies in North Africa. Only the Spanish government officially endorsed its delegation to the Olympiad, though the French Popular Front government (whose Socialist and Radical members had been split on the question of boycotting Berlin) contributed funds. In an attempt to move beyond the inter-state character of the Olympic movement, events were to be contested in three separate categories: national, regional, and city teams, the latter sort intended to evoke the competition between city-states which took place in the ancient Greek Olympics.

A poster for the 1936 People’s Olympiad.

The People’s Olympiad never took place, as General Franco’s coup d’etat forced it to be cancelled. Apart from one more Workers’ Olympiad to be held in Antwerp in 1937, it would be the last attempt at organising an autonomous working-class multi-sport festival. Deprived of the chance to compete on the sporting field, many of the athletes took up arms for the republican cause in the ensuing Civil War.

Today, the official narrative of the Olympic movement omits any mention of the pre-WWII workers’ sports movement. Nevertheless, its existence serves as reminder that large swathes of humanity once rejected the Olympic ethic, grounded in the elitist sporting culture of nineteenth century English private schools and masked by an apolitical, bourgeois internationalism coupled with a ridiculous can’t-we-all-just-get-along pacifism. Instead, socialists, communists, anarchists, and other leftists organised their own sporting clubs and bodies, and competed in the spirit of a different set of values.

Against the Olympics 1

Part One: From Rugby to Berlin

The modern Olympic Games have their origins in a particular vision of the social role of sport, common among Europe’s elites in the nineteenth century, which saw sport as a part of a broader social trend towards a muscular Christianity. This vision was encapsulated in the book Tom Brown’s School Days, which celebrated the tenure of Thomas Arnold at Rugby, a prestigious private school in Warwickshire which is, of course, the origin of the eponymous football code (an Olympic sport until 1924, and again from 2016 in its seven-a-side form). The book was popular across the British Empire, but it also found an audience in France, whose education system was in the process of being democratised and secularised. It was there that the Victorian sporting culture epitomised by Thomas Arnold would combine with a streak of pacifist bourgeois internationalism to spark the revival of an ancient Greek tradition.

The founder of the modern Olympic movement, Baron Pierre de Coubertin, came from a noble family but was part of a milieu of right-of-centre republicans dedicated to reforming France’s elite education system along English lines. His admiration of everything English extended to its sports: he refereed the first French rugby championship final, and wanted cricket included in the Olympics. His idealistic vision of sport was commendable: the purpose of the Olympics, he said, was “not to win but to take part; for the essential thing in life is not to conquer but to struggle well”. He demonstrated a humanism rendered more touching by the geopolitical tension of his times – in 1912, two years before the outbreak of war, he submitted an anonymous entry in the name of Germany which earned them a gold medal in the Olympic literature competition. But the movement which he founded bore the birthmarks of the Victorian-era idea of sport as muscular Christianity, and the International Olympic Committee was dominated from the start by Europe’s aristocrats.

Baron de Coubertin: anglophile extraordinaire.

European elites at the time usually viewed sport as an activity to be enjoyed exclusively by themselves, and to this end, made use of various restrictions to prevent the working class from getting involved. The centrepiece of this class apartheid was the insistence on amateurism. When workers in Lancashire and Yorkshire began taking to rugby, for example, the sport’s rulers were hostile. They had seen what had transpired in soccer, where tolerance of professionalism had allowed northern clubs to win multiple FA Cups and then to form a professional league. When simply banning player payments didn’t work, the authorities tried banning the collection of gate takings and banning the playing of ten-a-side and twelve-a-side games until their intransigence caused the schism of 1895, which divided their sport into (amateur, southern, and elitist) union and (professional, northern, and democratic) league.

Other sports were just as prone to elite attempts at class cleansing. In mid-nineteenth-century England, industrialists and priests campaigned against traditional ‘folk football’ games, in many ways the precursors of soccer, as they distracted workers from their employment, and because they had historically often been used as methods of political protests. (Eighteenth-century land enclosures in Northamptonshire and Lincolnshire had been protested by the playing of folk football games, and authorities charged some of the participants with rioting.) In addition, institutional sexism prevented women from being able to take part in sport. Spooked by the large crowds which had attended women’s soccer during the First World War (a phenomenon symbiotic with the suffragette movement), the Football Association enacted its infamous ban in 1921, locking English women out of the sport until 1969. The Olympic movement reproduced these inequalities: speaking in 1894, de Coubertin declared that his Games would be an “exultation of male athleticism…with female applause as a reward”, and women would not be permitted to compete in the Games until 1928.

Even though historians have unearthed quotes which show that Coubertin was not staunchly opposed to professionalism, his movement certainly was. After winning gold medals for the United States in pentathlon and decathlon in the 1912 Olympics, Jim Thorpe was banned from future competition after it was discovered that he had played two games of professional baseball – which didn’t become an Olympic sport until 1992! (Thorpe went on to have a distinguished sporting career, however – he played in the NFL in its early seasons and led a Native American version of the Harlem Globetrotters.) During the Cold War, the ban on professionalism served the shameful purpose of forcing amateur Western teams to compete against full-strength national teams and top-class athletes from communist countries, and wasn’t lifted until the lure of television broadcast rights revenue forced the IOC to rethink its fidelity to the amateur ideals.

The Olympic movement’s self-image, and the contradictions abundant therein, were perhaps best captured in the 1981 film Chariots of Fire. Released in the same year that the Olympics were opened to professional athletes, it tells the story of a group of British runners competing in the 1924 Games in Paris, and glorifies the self-sacrifice of amateur athletes (all of whom come from privileged enough backgrounds to attend Cambridge). When one of the runners receives coaching, he is subjected to the usual accusations that he has embarked on the slippery slope towards professionalism. Another refuses to compete on a Sunday, forcing him to navigate a conflict between his Christian faith and his patriotism; he later gives up sport to practice his life’s true calling: missionary work in China. His quarrels with the British Olympic authorities presage the way in which national interest (as interpreted by state-funded and state-sanctioned governing bodies) would increasingly come to overwhelm the Olympic movement’s ostensible idealism. The film’s bad guys are the American runners, whose intense training methods and will to win are the foil against which the British athletes’ gentlemanly values are contrasted. But as always with the amateur ideal, the class inequalities are passed over: the film omits the fact that the governing body for athletics in Britain historically excluded “mechanics, artisans and labourers” – that is, the working class – from its competitions.

When Baron de Coubertin established the IOC, its mode of governance (a self-appointing global committee of dignitaries) and its location in famously neutral Switzerland served to evoke comparisons with other worldwide social and cultural organisations, such as the International Committee of the Red Cross or the various pacifist movements. It was these features which made the Olympic movement attractive to reactionary regimes seeking to use the IOC’s political neutrality to present themselves as rule-abiding members of the international community. While Stalin initially continued the Soviet policy of self-imposed isolation from the Olympic family and entertained the idea of challenging the official Olympic movement by promoting the Red Sport International, Hitler opted to use the Games for this purpose. When the Nazis came to power the IOC expected that it would have to hold the 1936 Games elsewhere than in Berlin, but the Nazis, who had earlier denounced the 1932 Los Angeles Olympics as an “infamous festival dominated by Jews”, saw the propaganda value in them.

An early example of Olympic commercialisation: “one people, one Reich, one drink”.

The Berlin Olympics (and their winter counterpart, held the same year in the Bavarian town of Garmisch-Partenkirchen) provoked a backlash among progressive people everywhere. In the United States, future IOC President Avery Brundage blamed “misguided Jews” for spoiling the Nazis’ plans to use the Games as propaganda. (Brundage would later be instrumental in bringing the Soviet Union into the Olympics, and went into bat for Ian Smith’s Rhodesia before it was banned from the 1972 Games.) As the Olympic movement was dominated by the sort of conservative who supported appeasement of Hitler and non-intervention in the Spanish Civil War, and who viewed the Nazi regime as a bulwark against the communist threat supposedly facing Europe, the result was obvious, and forty-nine countries participated in the Games with only Spain and the Soviet Union dissenting. The spectacle that ensued – athletes giving Nazi salutes, the snub of Jesse Owens, Leni Riefenstahl’s Olympia, etc. – was made possible by the IOC’s apolitical character, and by the similarities between Nazi racial ideology and the Victorian-era muscular Christianity which so inspired de Coubertin.

Musings on electoral systems: France’s majority bonuses

The most potent weapon in the arsenal of any opponent of proportional representation is the threat of instability. Israel, the Italian First Republic, the French Fourth Republic, and the Weimar Republic are held up as examples of the problems caused by too many small parties gaining power without responsibility, and by the need for a majority to be composed of many, often dissimilar, political forces. (Ignored, of course, are examples such as India, where first-past-the-post in single-member districts yields the world’s most kaleidoscopic array of parties.) Even where there is stable government, proportional representation is said to give disproportionate power to small parties: a well-known example is Germany’s FDP, who played kingmaker for over three decades, supporting both CDU and SPD governments until the rise of the Greens gave Germany a four-party system.

French regional and municipal elections (for towns with over 3500 residents) use a majority bonus to short-circuit these potential problems. Parties compete in a standard two-round system for top spot; if no winner emerges from the first round, lists which obtained 10% of the vote can take part in the runoff, and may combine with each other, and with parties which scored between 5% and 10%. Three-quarters of seats are distributed proportionally, with the other quarter being given to the winning list. (The bonus is one-half at municipal level, one-fifth in Martinique and French Guiana, and one-sixth in Corsica.) With such an advantage given to the winning party, the election of regional President or Mayor by the newly-elected council becomes a formality, and early elections are rare.

The need to form broad coalitions in order to win the majority bonus leads to alliances being formed prior to the runoff. Similarly to Switzerland’s system of apparentements, parties are given incentives to co-operate and to form multi-party alliances. In the 2010 regional elections, for example, the three main forces on the French left (the Socialists, the Greens, and the communist-led Left Front) fused their lists in most regions between the first round and the runoff; each of these lists already comprised independents and members of smaller parties, as did those of the (post-Gaullist) UMP. In all twenty-one mainland regions, the winning coalition obtained a clear majority of the seats, even when the runoff was a three-way affair between the left, the UMP, and the National Front. (The introduction of this system at regional level was actually spurred by the National Front winning the balance of power in several regional councils during the 1990s.)

Similar majority bonuses are awarded in Greece (the fifty out of three hundred parliamentary seats which New Democracy and SYRIZA recently contested) and Italy (whose electoral systems at all levels of government allocate fixed percentages of seats – usually 55% – to the coalition of parties backing the successful candidate for chief executive). The rest of the world uses other ways of taming proportional representation, such as requiring thresholds for representation or drawing small multi-member districts. The charm of a majority bonus is that instead of favouring the largest parties in a particular polity, it incentivises them to coalesce with smaller ones, who then receive their share of the extra seats if the alliance is victorious.

The majority bonus system could be improved by eliminating the runoff and using the Alternative Vote or Supplementary Vote to determine the winning party. The Swiss apparentement system could substitute for the need for form coalitions; the parties forming an apparentement could have their first-preference votes counted together, protecting the smaller ones from being eliminated from the count. If the executive branch is elected separately from the legislative, the bonus seats could be given to the party or parties supporting the winning candidate. Alternatively, the bonus seats could take the form of at-large seats voted for on a separate ballot using a majoritarian system such as the Block Vote (i.e. the old-fashioned method for electing members of the U.S. Electoral College from each state). With these changes, a proportional electoral system with a majority bonus would be the perfect way to ensure parties are represented according to their support, while early elections and unstable coalitions are avoided.

Arizona, Obamacare, and SCOTUS elections

The U.S. Supreme Court handed down two momentous decisions this week. Firstly, in Arizona v. United States, it gutted much of Arizona’s draconian immigration law (SB 1070) which gave state law enforcement the power to stop anyone and ask them to prove their status as a citizen or legal immigrant. The Supreme Court struck down the more heavy-handed provisions as intruding on powers constitutionally granted to the Feds by a series 5-3 and 6-2 votes (Kagan recused, and the other three Democratic appointees were joined by Roberts and Kennedy, and, on one provision, Alito). They did, however, unanimously agree on the constitutionality of the stop-and-search provisions, and the fact that the law clearly targets Mexicans and Mexican-Americans doesn’t matter, as a series of precedents going back to the mid-1970s (damn Nixon appointees!) have made it virtually impossible to get any law struck down as violating the Fourteenth Amendment on the grounds that it is applied in a racist manner.

The Arizona law is part of an upsurge in anti-immigrant and anti-Latino/a rhetoric on the American right. This upsurge began seemingly for no reason in 2006 (although it did conveniently distract from the Republicans’ unpopularity at the time), and quickly reached the point where prominent conservative bloggers were accusing politicians from their own side of selling out American’s interests. (In one memorable example, Michelle Malkin displayed on her website a 100-peso note depicting President Bush with a moustache and wearing a sombrero.) In the last two years, Arizona and Alabama have enacted similar laws purporting to give state officials the power to police immigration matters and judging by the number of states which filed amicus curiae briefs in support of Arizona (nine, plus the Northern Mariana Islands), more could be planning similar crackdowns.

The decision in Arizona v. United States will likely only be a symbolic one for immigrants and their allies. The same administration which took Arizona to the nation’s highest court has deported one million undocumented immigrants (mostly Latino/a) in just over three years. Earlier this month, it defended in court armed federal officials who pointed a gun to the head of an eleven year-old Latina girl during a drug-related raid. And then there’s the Fast and Furious-gate scandal, in which D.C. has been found to have been fuelling the drug-related border violence which many Mexicans move north to get away from. The severity of the anti-immigrant measures taken by the Obama-Brewer axis has ensured that net migration from Mexico to the United States has fallen below zero. It will take more than the striking down of parts of a state law to bring back the glory days of the poor, tired, huddled masses.

The second case was the one regarding Obamacare. I predicted that the provision requiring virtually every American adult to purchase health insurance would be upheld as permissible under the Commerce Clause by a margin of 6-3 (the four Democratic appointees being joined by Kennedy and Roberts). The result was quite different: 5-4 (Kennedy dissented), but the provision was justified under Congress’ power to tax despite it violating the Commerce Clause. Most of the rest of the law stays in place.

I read in the weeks leading up to the decision that some of the conservative justices might uphold Obamacare because they could endanger certain Republican policy ideas by asserting and strengthening the Commerce Clause. It seems that Chief Justice Roberts found a way around this problem by endorsing the idea of the mandate as a tax, rather than as a regulation of interstate commerce; because of his hedging, there is a 5-4 majority against Obamacare’s compliance with the Commerce Clause. Watch out for a future liberal-leaning SCOTUS striking down a Republican administration’s efforts to implement school vouchers or health care vouchers or to privatise social security on this ground.

The debate around the case has been excruciating. Liberals have put forward conceptions of the rightful powers of the federal government which include compulsory military service, something which their ideological forebears risked life and limb protesting against in the 1960s and 1970s. They have also found themselves defending a law which forces people to buy a product from the same large corporations they accuse of profiteering. Conservatives have opportunistically opposed this expansion of Washington’s reach, but seem to forget about the Commerce Clause when it comes to enforcing reactionary social mores. (Case in point: Justice Scalia, who concurred in Gonzalez v. Raich that the Feds could stop California from legalising marijuana cultivation for private consumption, but seven years later finds Obamacare unacceptable in its entirety.) In the end, the nation’s highest court has handed down an ambiguous decision which somewhat protects its (and its Chief Justice’s) impartial reputation and avoids accusations of attempting to influence the upcoming presidential election, while providing for many unintended consequences down the track.

The controversy surrounding Obamacare has caused many to rehash the old debate about judicial interference in public policy matters, a debate which has moved in and out of the forefront of American life since Marbury v. Madison. President Obama himself weighed into this a few months ago, tentatively suggesting that the will of the legislative branch should be considered alongside any constitutional concerns that the Justices might have about the law. For this, he earned rebukes from the same conservatives who have built an entire literature about ‘judicial activism’. The conservative critics of so-called ‘judicial activism’ and the liberals who fret about the supposed partisanship of the five Republican-appointed SCOTUS Justices (but never the partisanship of their four Democratic-appointed colleagues) have in common a conception of the role of the judiciary which is elitist, apolitical, and unrealistic. They demand that judges be impossibly impartial and insulated from the political climate around them.

The bête-noire of those with such a conception of the judiciary is judicial elections – one of those peculiarly American devices which a certain type of cosmopolitan, New York Times-reading American finds embarrassing and provincial. Just look at this article in the aforementioned newspaper, which talks gushingly of the exams that French magistrates must pass before serving, which are contrasted with the judicial elections used in some U.S. states. Three members of Iowa’s Supreme Court recently received the John F. Kennedy Profile in Courage Award for legalising same-sex marriage and then being voted out of office. Electing judges, according to its critics, invites partisanship, populism, and demagoguery, but no-one advocates abolishing elections to the legislative and executive branches for the same reason. The Supreme Court, by contrast, is chosen by presidential nomination, American Bar Association vetting, and senatorial confirmation, but still throws up partisan appointees (the current 5-4 split), justices subject to political pressure (the New Deal-era ‘switch in time that saved Nine’), unqualified nominees (Harriet Miers, Robert Bork…), and morally outrageous decisions (Dred Scott, Plessy v. Ferguson, the WWII internment of Japanese-Americans…).

Judicial elections emerged in the United States during the Jacksonian era, when they were seen as necessary to preserve the independence of the judiciary against the legislative and executive branches. Nowadays, special interests such as the various state Bar Associations lobby for their abolition in order to insulate judges from public opinion. The result of successful campaigns to abolish judicial elections is that the politics is simply moved behind closed doors, and partisan elected officials are supposed to impartially select meritocratic judicial nominees. Needless to say, appointing judges doesn’t remove the politics of judicial selection nor does it result in better adherence to the laws and constitutions of the several states. Opponents point to unsavoury electoral contests in which judges have campaigned on their record of executing more criminals, but never explain how this is more disturbing than demagogic, ‘Tough on Crime’ appeals made by candidates for other branches of government (such as the Willie Horton ad, or Bill Clinton suspending his 1992 campaign to sign the death warrant of a mentally retarded African-American man).

If the Supreme Court were elected, all Americans would be able to determine the direction of their highest court’s jurisprudence, not just the special interests which have the power to sway the vote of one of the hundred members of the Senate. If the Founders had instituted federal-level judicial elections from the beginning, we would probably have avoided Dred Scott, corporate personhood, Plessy v. Ferguson, the various cases affirming state-level eugenics programs, and the post-1970s rise of mass incarceration of black and Latino men. We could triple the Court’s size (to twenty-seven) and elect them for renewable six-year terms. Parties would put up slates of candidates (the literature suggests that partisan judicial elections are better) and a nationwide vote using an open-list form of proportional representation could be used. This way, the interpreters of the constitution would be chosen not by the President, Senate, and American Bar Association, but by the people themselves.