verging_on_random

Democracy and leadership

April 13, 2007 on 12:30 pm | In Uncategorized |

As the war party in the USA presses on with its campaign to establish American hegemony over the Middle East, it becomes increasingly obvious that large sections of the ruling class have no commitment whatsoever to democratic principles. Well I suppose we always knew that but it’s still depressing to have it confirmed so emphatically.

It’s understandable that politicians in power will ignore the clear opinions of the majority of the population, especially if they are not facing re-election, like George Bush, or believe themselves to be invincible, like John Howard. It’s harder to understand, let alone sympathise with, pundits from the media who are so keen to dismiss majority opinion as something that can and should be ignored because only the elite have the capacity to rule. When substantial chunks of the MSM no longer feel any inhibitions about expressing blatantly authoritarian attitudes, it’s clear how perilously close a nation is to losing its democratic character altogether.

If indeed that hasn’t already happened, of course.

Case in point:

The Wall Street Journal ran an editorial praising John McCain, in which this sentence appeared:

The most revealing exchange came when Mr. Pelley, in all apparent seriousness, asked the Senator “at what point do you stop doing what you think is right and you start doing what the majority of the American people want?”

The significant phrase is ‘in all apparent seriousness’. In other words, a reporter has suggested to a politician that his duty is to place the wishes of the majority ahead of his own personal opinions and the Wall Street Journal finds this suggestion so remarkable, if not downright offensive, that it wonders if the reporter was joking.

The underlying anti-democratic attitudes were articulated at the Townhall blog, whose writers combine a professed concern for the abstract ‘American people’ in theory with a massive contempt for lots of identifiable American individuals in practice. Dean Barnett, who is actually one of the less hyena-like writers on the blog, seized on the Wall Street Journal editorial and elaborated on its theme:

“At what point do you stop doing what you think is right?” What a perfect example of the amoral sophistry that infects the media, academia and other American institutions. One wonders if, even upon reading the transcript, whether Pelley will realize how repulsive this inquiry was.

Once again the language is revealing. Barnett is suggesting, ‘in all apparent seriousness’, that hinting an elected representative of the people has a duty to do what the people want him to do instead of stubbornly clinging to his own personal agenda is not only ‘amoral’, it’s actually ‘repulsive’.

Both Barnett and the editorialist proceeded to laud McCain for his courage, principle and so on but it obviously never occurred to either of them that McCain is behaving in a profoundly undemocratic manner. Equally it never crossed their minds that the reporter who posed the question to McCain was actually expressing a deeply moral position, namely that elected politicians are there to do what those who elected them want and not to go off on a vainglorious adventure of their own, puffed up with arrogant fantasies that they are God’s chosen who alone know What Is Right.

I would be the first to argue that politicians should not be poll-driven, in the sense of responding to any and every shift in perceived public opinion about the issues of the day. McCain’s circumstances are not like this; he’s defying the American people on an issue that has been discussed exhaustively for four years and on which a recent election has been fought. It’s not some abstruse matter of tax policy or whether the federal government should take over running schools - it’s a genuine life and death question concerning a war of aggression followed by the occupaton of another country. The people whose interests he serves are as well-informed on the issue as they reasonably could be and they’ve had lots of time to make up their minds. And their attitude is clear: they want the USA to disengage from Iraq starting now.

If McCain was truly an honourable servant of his people he would accept their collective decision and work to implement it. At the very least he would admit that his view was a minority one and content himself with trying to change people’s minds while accepting that until he succeeded, the wishes of the majority should be honoured.

He does neither of these things however. Instead he basically says he doesn’t give a shit what the majority of the American people want, he’s going to back Bush and Cheney regardless in bringing further death and destruction to millions of Iraqis and quite possibly an unknown number of Iranians in the near future. And his baying supporters in the media fall over themselves to praise him for his courage and his ‘leadership’, as if leadership consists of thumbing your nose at the majority because you are convinced you know better.

This brand of leadership is the kind practised by authoritarian leaders everywhere, from Caligula to Robert Mugabe. It’s not leadership at all, it’s the imposition of the will of a minority on the majority in the belief that the minority knows best. It leads naturally and inevitably to totalitarian rule by an ever-dimishing ruling class and ultimately to rule by a dictator.

God knows democracy has its faults, the latest being 11 years of a federal government led by John bleedin’ Howard, and I’ve always had a sneaking admiration for people like Gustave Le Bon who wrote so disparagingly about ‘The Mob’. Nevertheless, without reciting the tired old Churchill line about all the other systems being worse, I believe that democratic principles are one of the genuine foundations of our society. During the 20th century we saw on many occasions how quickly a seemingly democratic nation could slide into authoritarian rule. When the American MSM starts being offended because someone suggests politicians should heed the views of the majority on life and death issues, it’s a sign that the USA might have started that slide too.

*****

This is a cross-post from Road to Surfdom. I got carried away there last night and this brilliantly insightful piece got lost in a welter of other stuff that was easier to digest.