Economic and Political Weekly November 20, 2004 4986

US ELECTIONS
What the Electorate
Voted For
The recent US elections have set to rest some commonly held
notions about American democracy. Not only did the Democrats
not run a distinct campaign on the war on terror theme, that a
large chunk of American electorate voted for George W Bush can
be seen as an apparent vindication of the Bush worldview of a
unipolar world divided between good and evil. Such affirmation
of support by the electorate has perhaps widened the gulf between
Americans and the rest of the world.
not being a cowboy, has promised his
opponents supporters that he will attempt
to win their trust. Only the future lies ahead
of this, as Bush puts it, amazing country.
The US may be amazing for reasons
quite at odds with those commonly imag-
ined by Bush and the American electorate
which so evidently resonates to his
schemes for the upliftment of America
and, strictly in that order, the rest of the
world. In the state of Oregon, a ballot
cannot physically be cast at an electoral
booth; it must be mailed to the appropriate
authorities beforehand. Fewer people vote
in elections in the US than in almost any
other democracy, though no country has
done more to peddle the idea, especially
to that portion of the world which is
resistant to electoral democracy, that
voting constitutes the ultimate fulfilment
of a persons political life. If dictators
understood, at least from the American
example, that voting absolves people from
further political responsibility, one sus-
pects that they would be much less hostile
to the vote as an expression of political
sentiment. I vote, therefore I am; man
votes, Bush disposes with some aid from
god. All these must surely constitute
grounds for thinking of America as an
amazing country.
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, ob-
served four decades ago in Compulsory
Miseducation that American democracy
serves no other purpose than to help citi-
zens distinguish between indistinguish-
able candidates. Both parties are utterly
beholden to the culture of the corporation
and what used to be called monied inter-
ests, and both have contributed to bloated
military budgets; besides, however short
the memory of those who fetishise Demo-
crats as paragons of liberalism, decency,
and civility, Democratic administrations
have been scarcely reticent in exercising
military power to subjugate enemies or
ensure American dominance. The current
debacle in the Democratic party owes much
to Bill Clinton, though he has been so
lionised the consummate diplomat, the
comeback kid, the supposed engine
behind the growth of the American
economy that any criticism of him, barring
the moral turpitude he is said to have
displayed when he was caught with his
knickers down in the Oval Office, is all
but impossible. Many Democrats instead
held Ralph Nader, who understands better
than most people the elaborate hoax by
VINAY LAL
T
he recently concluded American
elections, which have given George W
Bush the victorious verdict that he
so vigorously sought, were being touted
as the most marvellous demonstration of
the success and robustness of American
democracy even before the polls had closed
in some states. The lines to vote were
reported to be unusually long in many
places around the country, the prolific
predictions about fraud, voting irregulari-
ties, and the unreliability of electronic
voting machines largely fell flat, a record
number of new voters made their presence
felt at the polls, and more Americans cast
their vote than at any time since 1968. The
usual platitudes, calling upon all Americans
to unite after a bitterly divisive election
campaign, were heard from Senator Kerry
in his concession speech, and once again
Bush, who poses as an archangel of
compassionate conservatism when he is
Economic and Political Weekly November 20, 2004 4987
means of which one party has been mas-
querading as two for a very long time,
responsible for sprinting votes away from
Al Gore in 2000. This served as one long-
lasting excuse for Democrats to explain
why Gore was unable to prevail at the
polls, and also explains why they went to
extraordinary lengths to keep him from
appearing on ballots in 2004; the other
excuse originated in the circumstances
under which a tenacious Bush, whose
ambition for power is just as ruthless as
his ignorance and arrogance are colossal,
was able to get his brother Jeb Bush and
the Supreme Court to hand over the White
House to him. The dictators who run banana
republics were doubtless imbibing a very
different meaning from the axiom that
America leads the way.
The present elections have blown these
excuses, under which the Democrats have
been sheltering and smouldering, to
smithereens. Bushs victory margin, by the
standards of democracy, is comfortably
large. Nader, the so-called spoiler and
traitor, won a mere few hundred thou-
sand votes, and his presence doubtless
even emboldened more Democrats to go
to the polls. If Americans could not much
distinguish between Bush and Kerry, and
indeed how could they when Kerry, with
his promise to hunt down the terrorists
and wipe them from the face of this earth,
sounded entirely like his opponent, the
Democrats must ponder how they could
have moved so far to the right and thus
surrendered what little remains of their
tattered identity. Considering the hor-
rendous record that Bush has compiled in
nearly every domain of national life an
illegal war of aggression against Iraq, the
occupation of a sovereign nation, the stri-
dent embrace of militarism, the reckless
disregard for the environment, the shame-
less pandering to the wealthy, the trans-
formation of a 5-trillion dollar surplus into
a 400-billion dollar deficit, the erosion of
civil liberties, the insouciant disdain for
international treaties and protocols, and
much else one cannot but conclude that
the American people have given Bush carte
blanche to do more of the same. One thought
of George W Bush as the Butcher of
Crawford, the arch executioner, under
whose jurisdiction Texas sent more men
to the death chamber than any other state,
but his appetite for destruction extends
even to the English language. Edmund
Burke, with his inspiring mastery over
English, indicated Warren Hastings, a
proconsul of an earlier generation, with the
terrible observation that when Hastings
ate, he created a famine; but when Bush
opens his mouth, words come out horribly
mangled, as unrecognisable as the bodies
which litter the streets of Iraq. Bushs re-
election means, in stark terms, that the
majority of Americans condone the torture
and indefinite confinement of suspects,
the abrogation of international conven-
tions, the ruthless pacification of entire
countries, and an indefinite war of terror,
not just on terror against nameless and
numberless suspects. No extenuating cir-
cumstances can be pleaded on behalf of
Americans, however much progressive
intellectuals might like to think that
Americans are fundamentally good and
merely misinformed by the corporate
media.
It is no secret that the defeat of George
Bush was, from the standpoint of the world,
an outcome devoutly wished for. Many
well-meaning Americans deride Bush as
an embarrassment. Used with reference
to him, the word appears an encomium.
The best of peoples are embarrassed by
their own actions at times, and embarras-
sment can, at least on occasion, be read in
the register of modesty, awkwardness, and
innocent virtue. Embarrassment seems
wholly inadequate as an expression of the
visceral anger and hatred Bush unleashes
among some of his detractors. Those even
more critical of Bush are inclined to view
him as a liar. There is, however, scarcely
any politician in the world who does not
lie, though one can say of Bush that he
almost always lies. But what if the American
electorate understood, as appears to be the
case, his lies to be desirable, necessary, and
premonitions of truth? Bush lied to the
world about the presence of weapons of
mass destruction in Iraq, he lied about the
purported imminence of a threat against
the US from Iraq, and he falsely claimed
a link between the al-Qaeda network and
Iraq. Yet none of these revelations about
the insidious modes in which consent is
manufactured made an iota of difference,
and Bush charged ahead with insistent
reiterations of the same falsehoods.
Consequently, more arresting clues to
the danger that Bush poses to the world
must be located elsewhere. One did not
expect him to act any differently; but that
a large chunk of the American population
has boldly declared its affinity for him is
proof enough that, at the end of the day,
many Americans share with Bush his
contempt for the world and the view that
the US can never fundamentally deviate
from the path of good. A very substantial
number of Americans have declared that
they found Bush to embody moral values,
presumably the same moral values that
they hold sacrosanct. Bushs moral vision,
as is well known, extends to clear and
unambiguous distinctions between good
and evil, and he is emphatic in his pro-
nounced belief that those who are not for
us, are against us. The success of Bush
points, in other words, to something much
more ominous, namely, the sheer inability
of Americans to comprehend complexity
and retain some degree of moral ambi-
valence. The fear that Bush is charged with
exploiting, namely, the fear of terrorism,
is more broadly the fear of the unknown,
the fear of ambiguity. Such exhortations
to simplicity and unadorned moral fervour,
and clear invocations of authoritarianism,
couched as messages to people to entrust
themselves into the hands of tried leaders
who are hard on crime and terror, have in
the past unfailingly furnished the recipe
for transition to anti-democratic, even
totalitarian, regimes.
Elections in India have consequences
mainly for the Indian subcontinent, just as
those in Australia largely impact Australia.
But the American elections 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. However
much every American might balk at this
suggestion, it is indisputable, as the strik-
ing examples of Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos,
Nicaragua, El Salvador, Afghanistan, and
Iraq so vividly demonstrate, that the US has
never considered sovereignty an inviolable
fact of international politics. We shall,
then, have to radically rethink the received
notions of the nation state, sovereignty,
democracy, and internationalism. These
elections will widen the gulf between
Americans, and most of the rest of the
civilised world. One nonviolent way of
moving the world towards a new concep-
tion of ecumenical cosmopolitanism is to
allow every adult an involvement in the
affairs of a nation that exercises an ir-
repressible 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.
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