Editorial | Why Mr Mayne should celebrate

From his perspective as a political partisan, Zavia Mayne might be forgiven his peeve over the Opposition's constitutional challenge of the National Identification and Registration Act, on which is supposed to rest a new and compulsory national ID system. For not only is Mr Mayne a government MP, he would have noted the flummoxing of Marlene Malahoo Forte, the attorney general, who last week marshalled the administration's case before the Constitutional Court - with questions from the Bench.

We, however, invite Mr Mayne, and others who fear that the law is heading for defeat, to take comfort in two things. One is that the rigorous questions by Justices Sykes and Batts that seemingly befuddled Mrs Malahoo Forte don't necessarily mean that they intend to strike down the law. As judges often do in these critical encounters, they look to lawyers to defend, with clarity, the intellectual merits of their arguments. But more profoundly, this case is a test of one of the Jamaica's key pillars of government, whose independence and functionality must be jealously guarded.

The latter, on the face of it, seems a trite observation. Jamaica's courts aren't under threat. Which, up to two years ago, is what the world would have said of the United States of America.

What, however, the election of Donald Trump to America's presidency has exposed is the vulnerability of apparently strong institutional arrangements of even a liberal democracy against the onslaught of a charismatic leader with illiberal and autocratic instincts, who has the capacity and willingness to exploit the resentments, fears and grievances of groups who believe they have been hard done by others. In Mr Trump's case, the disaffected are largely undereducated and undertrained, white, working-class males, whose perceived loss of privilege is being whipped into a cocktail of blame and resentment against brown and black people, immigrants, elites, intellectuals and so on.

Mr Trump's supporters may not be the majority, but are a sizable and sustained minority that was pivotal in catapulting their man to the presidency and has remained, up to now, a potent political force. Further, Mr Trump has weaponised his support against those in his own party who would wish to return to a political orthodoxy framed by Madisonian and Jeffersonian constitutional democracy.

DANGER TO DEMOCRACY

In the event, the Republic Party, having, over the last two decades, weakened its hold on the intellectual moorings of conservatism, has let them go altogether. It has acquiesced to Donald Trump's illiberal agenda. The Republican-controlled Congress has become supine.

In the face of all this, the world's idealistic notions of America's exceptionalism, and of a country whose institutions are incorruptible, are badly shaken. Indeed, this initial institutional acquiescence to Donald Trump is a boon to strongmen around the world, who will believe that they can trample their own political processes. Which is a danger to democracy. That is why we are invested in the midterm elections in the USA in a week's time, in which the Democratic Party will hopefully blunt Donald Trump's rising illiberalism.

In Jamaica, Mr Mayne should gloat that an opposing political party can test the constitutionality of a law in court, as well as praise the fact that while our political institutions have in the past been stressed, they haven't broken. America's courts aren't yet in jeopardy, but, with a president like Mr Trump, that doesn't say they couldn't be. Happily, for Jamaica, there is no Donald Trump on the horizon.