Glenn Greenwald argues:
The basic mechanics of American democracy, imperfect and defective though they may be, still function. Chronic defeatists and conspiracy theorists — well-intentioned though they may be — need to re-evaluate their defeatism and conspiracy theories in light of this rather compelling evidence which undermines them (a refusal to re-evaluate one’s beliefs in light of conflicting evidence is a defining attribute of the Bush movement that shouldn’t be replicated).
Karl Rove isn’t all-powerful; he is a rejected loser. Republicans don’t possess the power to dictate the outcome of elections with secret Diebold software. They can’t magically produce Osama bin Laden the day before the election. They don’t have the power to snap their fingers and hypnotize zombified Americans by exploiting a New Jersey court ruling on civil unions, or a John Kerry comment, or moronic buzzphrases and slogans designed to hide the truth (Americans heard all about how Democrats would bring their “San Francisco values” and their love of The Terrorists to Washington, and that moved nobody). It simply isn’t the case that we are doomed and destined to lose at the hands of all-powerful, evil forces.
It’s not hard to see a bit of pride in Greenwald’s writing. But the attentive democratic reader can only respond to the slightest hint of pride with the barest winsome smile. Even the faintest self-praise from the Colossal Failure that is the contemporary American left comes off as triumphalism. When a movement is so starved for success, its genuine successes will still seem like failures.
No doubt these people who have called themselves “Democrats” deserve some encouragement. They deserve sympathy in part because they have suffered through bad electoral times, and would like a break from perpetual horror; they also deserve it in part because they’re generally right. But what Mr. Greenwald and all the rest need to be reminded of, is that the sigh of relief can’t last long, and it hasn’t been earned.
The fact is, American democracy is in dire shape. The Democrats a) have gone from a barely-minority position, to a barely-majority position; and b) now have substantial amount of power because of that. And both propositions show how far gone American democracy has gotten, albeit in entirely different ways.
The Republican party’s image is a public-relations nightmare. Recent news has shown that they are the party of pederists, warmongers, supporters of a lost cause, censors, killers of innocent Iraqi civilians, apologists for torture, destroyers of social security, tactical and diplomatic incompetents, courtesans of theocrats, enemies of stem-cell research, despisers of both the United Nations and international law, and apologists for state terrorism. They are contemptuous of basic democratic systems, and lie to the public from the highest levels in order to get what they want.
But any basic democratic state would not, and could not, vote for such a party; it would be reviled by 90+ percent of the population. The mere fact that anyone would support it, shows that the democratic culture is reeling from a powerful blow. Much of the pent-up paranoia that any given 1950s straight-man felt against the communists can be attributed to, and was legitimated by, fear of totalitarian rule (albeit mixed with a healthy dose of greed, nationalism, and xenophobia). Yet you can scarcely find any such sentiment among the contemporary Republicans towards themselves; the libertarian right has fled.
Of course, the power of the Republicans originates from identity politics. And the fact of the matter is that identity politics skews towards the undemocratic insofar as it stops aiming toward the achievement of policy goals aimed at the greatest good for the greatest number, and replaces those ambitions with sectarian goals. It may be useful to remind ourselves of Rousseau’s insight on the matter: that a democracy is what happens when the people vote for whatever’s best for the people.
Granted, Rousseau’s ideas are unworkable in practice; people will tend to be self-centered and vote accordingly. Nevertheless, his sentiments are deeply connected at the root to the very practicable thing that makes a democracy work — namely, the willingness of a majority of persons to actually be democratic, and to utterly reject totalitarianism. To have a majority abandon this feeling for law — or to abandon the necessary second premise, of a feeling for reality — is not functional to democracy in any sense of the word. It is a genuine crisis of democracy at its most basic level. As much as I may like her, Nancy Pelosi can’t just pass some legislation to make it go away.
The problems of the culture translate into problems for the law. The dismantling of the filibuster, the alienation of large blocs of the voting population by providing limited voting booths in neighborhoods sympathetic to Democrats, the use of insecure Diebold machines which have zero transparency, and most importantly, the 2000 elections debacle, ought to have shown Americans that their system is broken. That system is broken, simply, because the crimes listed above are things that were done with impunity.
After the 2000 elections, given that we know how the majority really did vote for Gore, the legislature of the intervening years (2000-2004) could only be understood as having been altered or dissolved. As Locke explained: “When, by the arbitrary power of the prince, the electors, or ways of election, are altered, without the consent, and contrary to the common interest of the people, there also the legislative is altered. For, if others than those whom the society hath authorized thereunto, do choose, or in another way than what the society hath prescribed, those chosen are not the legislative appointed by the people”. The Conyers Report, coupled with reports from the GAO, lead us to suspect that the same sort of nonsense happened in Ohio of 2004. Yet where you find election fraud, you cannot find a legitimate democracy; you may only find a rogue state.
Second, the role of the opposition party should be considerable in a democratic state. Yet the impotence of the Democratic party in the past few years shows how broken the American system is. The American public genuinely was split 50-50, yet if you had just looked at the corridors of power, you’d never know it. The Democrats held a respectable amount of seats in both House and Senate, and yet could do almost nothing. The perfect illustration of this is that they had to hold their hearings on Iraq in the basement of the Capitol, literally driven underground.
These facts are not news to Greenwald. Still, he tells us that American democracy has suddenly come alive, with its “basic mechanics” working at a level that is “functional”. If so, it’s news to me. One does not need to be a conspiracy theorist to point out that the “defects” of American governance, rob it of all pretense to democracy.
License
This work is published under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 2.5 License.
I doubt that the cure for democracy lies in a return to Rousseau’s ideals. Rousseau’s vision of democracy is one in which the burgeois transforms himself into a political citoyen by subjecting his individual will to the will of the body politic. That, in my view, is bad metaphysics, and a strange political dualism. Rousseau is not our ally in the fight against totalitarianism. No, if anyting we need less subordination of the individual will, more individuals who speak up, and less conformity, driven by fear and identity politics. We need to encourage people to have the courage to use their own mind. (Remember: sapere aude!) How does that translate into politics? In my view, mainly through procedural improvements. Radical campaign finance reform ought to be on the top of the list. Ideally, all political campaigns would be financed by the state. (Yes, I hear your frowns, my libertarian friends, but regulation is justified where there is market failure.) Each candidate gets a certain sum of cash, newspapers and networks will be required to carry a certain number of ads per candidate on a non-discriminatory (e.g., randomized) basis, and that’s it. Strict limitations apply to the use of the candidate’s private funds, and third party campaign contributions are impermissible. Of course, such a system would still be imperfect, because there would have to be a threshold for reimbursment, e.g., 5% of the votes, to weed out bad faith campaigns, etc. But the overall effect would be to break the only strong causal link in politics, that between campaign spent and political success. With lower entry barriers, elected officials would face disruptive competition. There would be no safe districts any more. (Other changes to the system would include simplified districtis, uniform voting standards, and voter-verified, randomly paper audited voting technology.)