How they see us: Can U.S. democracy be saved?

If this farcical shutdown of the U.S. government were happening in any other country, we’d call it a failed state, said The Express Tribune (Pakistan) in an editorial. Failed statehood, after all, amounts to “a breakdown of governance to the detriment of the populace as a whole”—and isn’t that what we’re seeing in Washington? President Obama dared to pass a law that will raise the U.S. standard of health care up from the “Third World status where it currently sits.” The law was explicitly approved by the highest court and implicitly approved by the voters, who re-elected Obama after a campaign largely about the health-care law. Yet still its opponents balk.

How can this settled issue now cause the world’s greatest economy to flirt with default? said Gabriel Guerra Castellanos inEl Universal (Mexico). In a normal country, it wouldn’t. Yet somehow, one tiny faction of the opposition party has been allowed to dictate whether the U.S. can even pay its government workers. Washington, D.C., is now the seat of “a banana republic.”

That’s because American democracy has been systematically undermined, said Waleed Aly in The Age (Australia). Republican-controlled statehouses have gerrymandered congressional districts so that it’s all but impossible for a Democrat to gain a seat. In the seven states redrawn by Republicans, “near parity voting” of 16.7 million Republican votes to 16.4 million Democratic ones delivered more than twice as many congressional seats to the Republicans: 73 to 34. “That’s a clear perversion of democracy.” Yet that hijacking of the system is hurting the Republican Party, too, by forcing it ever further to the loony fringe of the right. “Freed from the need to defeat any meaningful Democrat challenge,” Republicans now vie against one another in the primaries for the title of purest ideologue. “It’s a classic case of a closed system encouraging ever more radical posturing.”

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Maybe democracy isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, said Michael Chugani in theSouth China Morning Post (Hong Kong). Hong Kongers have been agitating for more of it, but “the nauseating theater we are now seeing in Washington has made me think twice.” Out of money because Congress won’t pass a budget, the U.S. has been forced to stop inspecting food imports and cancel clinical trials that are the last hope for sick children. The U.S. used to see itself as a champion of democracy, the nation the rest of the world aspired to emulate. “But surely it is scaring off people instead when its own democracy shuts down not just libraries but even lifesaving medical research.”

Democracy isn’t the problem, said Ajit Sahi in Tehelka (India), just America’s version of it. In India, the gerrymandering that favored the Tea Party isn’t possible, because we have a “statutorily autonomous” Election Commission to draw up constituencies. So do most Western democracies, which see the value in not allowing one party to rewrite the rules in its own favor. The U.S. should take a lesson from the rest of the world and change a system that now “dangerously risks shattering the world economy.”