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The bitter pill of 'American Democracy'

BY VINAY LAL

He recently concluded American elections are already being touted as the most marvelous demonstration of the success and robustness of American democracy. The lines to vote were extraordinarily long, the prolific predictions about fraud fell flat, and a record number of new (mostly young) voters made their presence felt at the polls. Only the future lies ahead of this “amazing country,” as President Bush put it.

Quite to the contrary, these elections furnish the most decisive illustration of the sheer mockery that electoral democracy has become in America. The iconoclastic American thinker Paul Goodman observed four decades ago in his book, “Compulsory Miseducation,” that American democracy serves no other purpose than to help citizens distinguish between “indistinguishable candidates.” Many Democrats held Ralph Nader, who understands better than most people the elaborate hoax by which one party has been masquerading as two for a very long time, responsible for spiriting votes away from Al Gore in 2000. Their other excuse for Gore’s defeat is summed up in the phrase “stolen election.”

The present elections have blown these excuses to smithereens. Bush’s victory margin is comfortably large, and Nader was barely a factor. If Americans could not much distinguish between Bush and Kerry, the Democrats must ponder deeply over how they came to surrender what little remains of their identity. Considering the horrendous record that Bush has compiled in nearly every domain of national life, one cannot but conclude that the American people have given Bush carte blanche to do more of the same — illegal wars of aggression, occupation of sovereign nations, strident embrace of militarism, reckless disregard for the environment, shameless pandering to the wealthy, mushrooming of the federal deficit, erosion of civil liberties and much else. Even the English language has not been spared.

Bush’s election means, in stark terms, that the majority of Americans condone the torture and indefinite confinement of suspects, the abrogation of international conventions and an indefinite war — of terror, not just on terror — against nameless and numberless suspects.

It is no secret that nearly the entire world was praying for the defeat of George Bush. The American elections, unlike those recently conducted in India, Indonesia and Australia, impact every person in the world, and there are clearly compelling reasons why every adult in the world should be allowed to vote in an American presidential election. The United States, which has violated the sovereignty of nations at will, should not balk at this suggestion.

We shall have to radically rethink the received notions of the nation-state, sovereignty, democracy and internationalism. Bush’s reelection will widen the gulf between Americans, ensconced in their gigantic Hummers and endlessly adrift in the aisles of Costco and Wal-Mart, and most of the rest of the “civilized world.” One nonviolent way of moving the world toward a new concept of ecumenical cosmopolitanism is to allow every adult an involvement in the affairs of a nation that exercises an irrepressible influence on their lives. Meanwhile, there is no morning-after pill to abort the nightmarish results of 2004, and the rest of the world will have to swallow the bitter pill of “American democracy.”

Lal is associate professor of history.