Bring democracy back to America, Siva Vaidhyanathan

Tue, 26 Oct 2004 00:00:00 +0100

I shook with anticipation as I took my seat in the main hall of the ornate Prague Municipal Building last week at the annual Forum 2000 conference, where world-renowned politicians, scholars, and decision-makers spoke of how to strengthen global civil society.

I had never come close to a real hero for truth and justice, a Mahatma Gandhi or a Nelson Mandela. This would be my chance. I wondered what sort of wisdom I would imbibe this morning as I struggled to allay my fears of living in a world and nation run by a profoundly ill-equipped and ill-tempered president, George W Bush.

But as former president of the Czech Republic and human rights champion Vaclav Havel took the microphone for the opening speech, I could not help thinking he was missing an opportunity.

Havel decried the election fraud in Belarus on 17 October that had propelled “Europe’s last dictator” into a potential lifetime role as president of that country.

Was Lukashenko’s corruption of Belarus’s political system, I reflected, really the most perverse threat to global democracy and civil society in recent months? Wasn’t President Vladimir Putin’s recent bold move to centralise power in Russia much more alarming? And isn’t the constant decree by the unelected president of the United States that criticism of his policies is tantamount to “comforting the enemy” an even more alarming sign that all is not right in civil society?

The elephant in the room

A conference devoted to building global civil society is a noble effort. And overall, this was a good one. But as an American observer just two weeks away from the most important election of my lifetime, I could not help but think that what the world needs now – urgently – is American civil society. Some of the speakers at the conference recognised this and asserted that efforts to build global civil society have been severely hampered by what one activist called “the elephant in the room”, American belligerence.

The ugliness of current American political discourse was particularly clear when former CIA director and public cheerleader for the war in Iraq James Woolsey took his turn to address the crowd of veteran activists and scholars. Woolsey declared that “civil society was crushed in Europe in the Nazi years and in eastern Europe in the communist years”, and went on to affirm that we (the United States) “serve the cause of civil society by dealing with totalitarian societies and totalitarian states.” Without waiting for a response or reaction, Woolsey left the room.

Woolsey flattened what had been a rather nuanced and optimistic effort to harness the power of global protest movements and the established reputations of more stable non-governmental organisations (NGOs). He evaded this conversation altogether, effectively declaring the concerns of the disenfranchised billions irrelevant to global governance, and dismissing their criticisms of American imperialism as hypocritical because Saddam would not have tolerated their speeches as well as he himself had.

My country is trapped in such a confined rhetorical space: if you are not with the president, you are against him. If you dare raise concerns or counterarguments, you are disloyal, possibly treacherous. Our style is clear: turn a taut phrase and storm out, indignant and immune.

This cannot continue. We need a democratic revival to temper the current religious revival. A sound defeat of George W Bush at the polls (barring a judicial coup d’etat) is not enough. We need a reinvigoration of passion, honesty, and élan into our public sphere. We need openness, confidence, and patience. We need deliberation and dissent from all sides, not nefarious skulking and ad hominem attacks on anyone who dares put themselves in the public service.

Taking democracy for granted

Let’s be clear. The United States is not in danger of lapsing into a totalitarian state. Very few have been jailed for their political or religious beliefs. And Americans still enjoy the structural elements of civil society. It’s just that the temper of the times limits real deliberation, global considerations, and frank assessment of our needs and possibilities.

It’s trite these days to declare the pending American election the most important in a generation, in half a century, or since Lincoln. But it’s true. This election is about much more than whether Bush or Kerry can generate and maintain a working multilateral coalition to stabilise and liberate Iraq. It’s about far more than which party will serve public education better. It’s about more even than global warming and contaminated fish and human trafficking – all of which we have been ignoring to our peril.

This election is about the possibility of restoring the culture of American democracy. It’s about returning civility to American society. Whichever candidate wins, must win by a clear plurality of the popular vote to restore the pretension of democracy.

If George W Bush wins, my friends and neighbours will be affirming the most cynical of anti-democratic politics – narrow, provincial, shortsighted, and completely divorced from facts and rational arguments. Since the aborted election of 2000, the United States has stepped back toward embracing the divine right of kings, nearer to a constitutional monarchy than a democratic republic.

We celebrate the American revolution every year on 4 July. We assume that because we chose to mark one day from 1776 when John Hancock lifted his quill from the parchment that the revolution culminated at that moment. We imagine that the war against England, the subsequent experimentation with confederation, and the ratification of the constitution in 1787 settled the matters of sovereignty and democracy.

The American revolution actually ended in 1965, when President Lyndon Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act. Until then, millions of Americans were disenfranchised for one reason or another – mostly for having a particular shade of skin. Between 1776 and 1965 Americans extended the franchise from landowning free white men to white tenants, black men (in some states), white women, and finally black and white men and women in all states. Along the way, many people died so that we might live up to the ideals outlined by forefathers Thomas Jefferson and James Madison. Not until 1965 did the reality of American democracy live up to its promise.

For a very short time, from 1965 to 2000, almost all eligible American adult citizens could exercise their right to choose their leaders – and the results reflected the will of the voters. We made some good decisions and some bad. We saw one president resign in disgrace and another face impeachment yet remain in power. It was a time of tremendous social, economic, and political change. At least it was our turmoil. We were finally practicing real democracy, imperfect though it was. But we took this brief time for granted.

The next revolution

In 2000, we saw the dawn of a counter-revolution. A band of five judges abandoned their conservative principles of jurisprudence to appoint a political ally to the presidency over the will of the voters. Countless moves by the Republican party within American electoral politics since then have been aimed at intimidating voters, instilling doubt about the validity of votes, and bluntly disenfranchising millions. Every rhetorical move that George W Bush’s campaign and administration have made have pushed American voters to doubt evidence all around them, to mistrust reasonable authorities, to forget that we actually chose the other guy to lead us.

Almost immediately after Bush assumed office, a hush came over the nation. We were no longer allowed to discuss the illegitimacy of his rule. It was off-limits, impolite, a sign of derangement. Even people who knew better used the word “re-election” to describe Bush’s 2004 campaign goal. It was as if we were so familiar with the rituals of elections that we assumed that the very practice of the ritual granted legitimacy on the person who happened to assume power, even if the message the people sent had no connection to the final result.

If my country chooses George W Bush to lead it – really chooses him this time – then we have only come halfway back from the counter-revolution. We must fight subsequent efforts to disenfranchise large segments of the electorate. We must struggle twice as hard to demonstrate that democracy is more than marking a box on a computer screen and assuming that someone will care about that choice. It is about opening channels of communication to a broad array of voices and concerns. It is about bluntly interrogating the claims our leaders make for the actions they take. It is about returning sovereignty to the people and fostering a rich culture of deliberation and debate. It is about acting and living democratically.Voting is just an empty ritual if the nation does not allow itself to think and speak boldly.

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Bring democracy back to America, Siva Vaidhyanathan