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[by Ross Levine] Democracy may very well be one of the most viable systems of government on this heating-up, oil-happy orb, but nevertheless, it does have undeniable drawbacks. That has been quite evident of late in the U.S. of A., and doubly so in the state of California . We preface our tirade on this topic with the fact that America did not accomplish its present degree of democracy (and there are many who don't consider that a particularly high degree) without a good deal of kicking and screaming. As school kids may know (and adults are wont to forget), the early Federalists were not so gung-ho about the preeminence of the common man, and such renowned early Americans as Daniel Webster had grave and eloquently vocalized doubts. For about the first 100 years of our existence, any tendencies toward democratic government were compromised by a certain peculiar institution (ever hear of slavery?) and although some feel that its effects have been sufficiently erased to warrant the cessation of all types of affirmative action, the truth is that it, and other persistently intolerant currents in American society, have perhaps made it possible to debate whether or not we have a democracy at all. The 2000 presidential election nearly settled the argument forever, but if we assume that Bush v. Gore was a mere glitch on the landscape of government by, for and of the people, then we may proceed accordingly. Yes, Virginia (and the other 49 of you), there is a danger in democracy, as clearly revealed by the 2004 re-election – err, election -- of George W. Bush (in light of the Iraq war, tax cuts for the wealthiest, torture at Abu Ghraib, illegal detention of prisoners at Guantanamo, a burgeoning debt and an assault on Social Security while health care spirals out of control), and in the 2003 election of Arnold Schwarzenegger (in light of – among many other things -- California's impending "Special Election"). Starting with the larger fish, a year ago, a majority (though hardly a so-called "political capital"-granting majority) of the electorate (the trustworthiness of Buckeye State voting machines notwithstanding) decided that the incumbent President deserved another four years in office. We can blame this, of course, on candidate Kerry, who gave us plans instead of passion, could not find the words "yes" or "no" in his vocabulary, and believed that if he could make people believe he was a war hero, they'd trust him with our national security. He came close to pulling it off but was ultimately no match for Cheney's apocalyptic warnings and Bush's preeminence in the "who would you rather have a beer with?" department. Both Bush and Kerry were "C" students, but George snickered over his own mediocrity while John, with his long, gravedigger face, never quite got us to laugh with him. So did Americans make the right choice? First we must define which Americans we're discussing. Since voting in the United States is not compulsory, only those citizens who voted made the choice, and these were only 60% of those eligible. That means 40 of every 100 members of our democracy are either too turned off or too ignorant of politics or simply too apathetic to bother. So what do we do with these tens of millions of people who, for all practical purposes, are not really part of the democratic system, and are seemingly content to abdicate any control over the country's leadership to the rest of us? Why not force them to vote -- some countries do or have done it -- but such an approach may not sit well with Americans, lovers of freedom fries that they are. And in any case, maybe it's all for the best – if these people care so little, it's probably better they don't vote. Perhaps we should see this non-participating third of the country as a layer of society that, like protoplasm, simply moves along with whatever the body politic metes out to them. It must never be assumed, then, that when we have an election, the people have actually spoken, since about a third of them haven't said a word. And then there's the fact that (according to a recent poll), some 50% of Americans don't even know who Karl Rove is. Certainly a great many of these individuals must be voting, and – at the risk of sounding Daniel Websterish myself – they're voting from a position of ignorance, their decisions swayed more by appeals to their passions and prejudices than by dull, dry facts and truths that may be extremely hard to package. When these voters mark their ballots, they do so based on their feelings on Election Day rather than by considering what happened yesterday and what may happen tomorrow. When these citizens "speak" through their ballot, what they say has more to do with when they say it than anything else. They are perhaps Midas types who will, if given the chance, wish everything they finger turns to gold, only to later regret their inability to eat or drink. Put another way, there is a reason the words "democracy" and "demagogue" have the same root. Demagogues pray on the weaknesses of democracy, in that they exploit the fears and emotions of the voters, appealing to what lies well beneath their collective intellect. Not that the intellect is always right, but voters need to think through the choices they make, and not be persuaded on the basis of an ad, a slogan or a lie. Unfortunately, when, as in a democracy, candidates have to appeal to great masses of people, there is usually little real possibility of in-depth debate of issues -- people need to be converted to one's cause en masse, and the way to do that, as we all know, is to trash your opponent and make blanket promises that the Almighty himself would be hard-pressed to fulfill. Getting these demagogic messages across has become more and more efficient in our modern era -- is it any wonder candidates are so eager to raise money for television ads that take issues and individuals and turn them into products that are bought or rejected the way people purchase or reject items in the supermarket? These ads acknowledge no future and no past, but only an immediate campaign present; it's as if we can vote for the individual or issue at hand and then, if he/she gets elected or if the measure passes, all our troubles will vanish. The media covers government not as an assembly of slow, cumbersome gears grinding away tooth by tooth, but as some kind of prime time soap opera with certain all-important stars and plotlines. When all is working properly, government is hardly a front-page story, but when it's not, the feeding frenzy begins, and the media revels in portraying this lumbering, elephantine bureaucracy as a leviathan teetering on the brink of chaos. Savvy candidates exploit the media's hunger for blood and try to use it to their advantage; people, instead of being more informed, become more misinformed, and that's how elections -- as well as the battle for public opinion in general -- are won. Untruths take on a life of their own, and even when the truth finally surfaces, it's the untruth that persists in the mind of the electorate. Now imagine if, as it once was, only an elite class were permitted to cast ballots -- might the message be a little less "one size fits all"? It's not a concept we're comfortable with – that is, only a select group of people permitted to vote -- and smells of the Jim Crow South where all sorts of laws and restrictions were devised to keep certain people away from the polls. But the point is that ironically, democratic values are not always best served by democracy. Suppose, for example, to begin our discussion of the Golden State , Abraham Lincoln had been subjected to California 's recall law. Surely, in those dark early days of the Civil War, when the South was spinning circles around the North and Lincoln could scarcely get his generals to engage the enemy, the people may have decided a replacement leader was in order (just as Americans today might decide it's now time to recall George Bush [hmmm, maybe it is good policy!]). Of course, the federal government has its own nuclear option – impeachment – but that's a little different from California 's recall statute, where the man/woman-in-the-street gets to decide if it's time to give the chief executive the boot. An impeachment requires a great deal of process and energy, but the recall just meant that a lot of people unhappy with higher car registration fees and rolling blackouts could dump the man they blamed it on – Gray Davis – and replace him with – how perfectly appropriate – a major movie star. Arnold Schwarzenegger was full of bold, manly-man promises, the biggest of which was to solve the state's fiscal problems without raising taxes. It soon became apparent how this would be accomplished, and whose backs Schwarzenegger would accomplish it on. Of the four propositions that he insists are worth a special – and costly -- California election on November 8, one seeks to curtail the political voice of unions, another unfairly targets teachers, one takes redistricting power away from the legislature and the last gives the governor more power to decide how state funds are spent. Schwarzenegger is even supporting another propositions that requires parental consent for abortions for the under-18 set because his strategists know that the voters who will vote "yes" on that will most likely support his propositions as well. In his stump speech, he announces that California is broken and needs to be fixed and rebuilt, but it's ironic and quite telling that he wants to aim the wrecking ball at one sector of the state (workers) and not the other (big business). It's also ironic that Schwarzenegger, like Bush, is currently suffering from a deep-seated unpopularity. How could this be when he was swept into office with some 55% of the vote? Again, the people took their vote and ran with it, awarding the governorship to a man with few qualifications, as if somehow his movie star persona would carry over into the banal world of government. Arnold , the "gubernator," would fix everything because that's how it happened in his movies. When Arnold railed against "the special interests," the average Californian took him to mean the corporate nasties, not the average Californian. Thus the people of the state mistook fiction for fact, made Arnold their leader, and then little by little discovered what kind of governor he was. Anyone who had heard the tale of how, as a young bodybuilder making extra money, he broke people's chimneys so they would pay him to fix them would know what kind of governor they were in for -- but in a democracy, no such research is required; all that is necessary is a movie star's demeanor, and, in Schwarzenegger's case, the name recognition that comes of a long career in film, a fact that gave him, among the voting public, a huge advantage in defeating a field of who remembers how many candidates, most of them unknown or even more obviously unqualified than Schwarzenegger himself. So there you have it. A lot of Californians grumbling about a governor who has arrogantly tried to bypass the state legislature to get "the people!" to do his union busting and Republican agenda dirty work for him – he must figure they were dumb enough to elect him, they must be dumb enough to support his propositions, too – and a lot of Americans grumbling about a President who is utterly deaf to any possibility of rethinking his failing strategy in Iraq, whose administration is now embroiled in a "dirty tricks" investigation that goes to the very heart of the bogus reasons for the war, and who would rather see America's last great wild place marred with oil rigs (not to mention a warmed, less habitable world) than support meaningful changes to America's gluttonous energy habit. Some pundits have suggested that had Judith Miller protected the American public and not Scooter Libby, and the Fitzgerald indictment come before last year's presidential race, Ichabod Crane might have had a better chance to defeat the Brainless Bikeman. But that seems a pretty far-fetched notion. The truth was out for years – that the September 11 attacks had absolutely nothing to do with Saddam Hussein and perhaps much to do with our staunch allies the Saudis – yet the majority of Americans (who voted) apparently went to the polls believing that if they're Islamic and we're at war with them, we must be more than justified. We suppose it's possible that Kerry might have been a worse President than Bush, but Bush's approval numbers today suggest that in a democracy, the voters are even bigger wafflers than the candidates they elect. In conclusion, people are fond of saying that our system of government is not perfect but still the best the universe has to offer, and that may very well be true. But we should not suppose that our "democracy" somehow qualifies us for a big fat superiority complex. We may have, for all practical purposes, a democratic system of government, but perhaps our democracy is not as well developed as we assume it is. With so many of our fellow citizens not even voting, and so many others ignorant of even the basic tenets of our government and its major players, we shouldn't be so blindly eager to pat ourselves on the back. What gives this whole discussion even greater import of late is that we presently have an administration that seems to believe our system of government so superior that it needs to be exported to other parts of the world, even if that has to be accomplished by military force. To promote war under the pretext (after the WMD justification collapsed) of delivering our form of government to another society is the ultimate irony – like foisting barley seeds onto a farmer who may prefer to grow wheat. Given the convoluted logic involved in the drawing of Congressional districts, of the Electoral College, of the influence of big money and big corporations on our government officials, etc., our democracy is far, far from perfect, and perhaps should be refined a bit more at home before it's hawked on the open market. And so, with all due respect to the American voter and the principles our society purports to be based on, we should be aware that even our democracy has its limitations. We should remember that government, like death and taxes, is not optional, but that government, also like death and taxes, may not always function in our best interests. Once we understand that, once we become less complacent about the infallibility of our own system, we may think twice about trudging off to war to force it on others. And we may think twice, too, about voting for a movie star, and – worse – about not even voting at all. 04 November 05 Ross M. Levine is an author, Marcel Proust marathoner and manatee-hugger who feels safer on the edge; i.e., in New York or California. He agrees with the King of Brobdingnag that we're "the most pernicious race of odious vermin to crawl the surface of the Earth." He thinks Americans have too much freedom -- fries, that is. | GET MORE MORPHIZM
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Photo: AFP/Robyn Beck 
