From: Jurriaan Bendien (adsl675281@TISCALI.NL)
Date: Mon Oct 23 2006 - 13:32:53 EDT
Rereading some of Karl Marx's articles in the New York Daily Tribune, I got a strange sense of deja vu... plus ca change... Sebastian Mallaby (Washington Post, Monday, October 23, 2006; Page A21) muses: "In fact, it's hard to name a single creative policy that has political legs in Washington. (...) Instead, the right and left are pushing policies that are marginal to the country's problems. (...) I'm not predicting the end of the American era, not by a long shot. The U.S. business culture is as pragmatic and effective as its political culture is dysfunctional. But has there been a worse moment for American power since Ronald Reagan celebrated morning in America almost a quarter of a century ago? I can't think of one." http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/10/22/AR2006102200716.html But why is US political culture "dysfunctional"? Presumably because in reality governmental politics and the two main parties are seriously out of sync with where a critical mass of the voters are really at, there is a lot of second-guessing by the apparatchinks about where they are at, and nobody is willing to take the bull by the horns to resolve longstanding domestic problems. In a representative democracy, politicians are supposed to represent the electorate. But what if they really don't? What if there is only an opportunist scramble for a "policy mix" that will appease voters sufficiently to get candidates elected? Foreign policy is high on the agenda in the upcoming election, but what about domestic policy? From an admittedly European and impressionistic perspective, the American parties themselves also seem to be internally divided about a whole range of public issues and thus unable to take a principled stand on anything much, and the leaders seem to fall over each other in their search for subtle policy distinctions and qualifications so as not to upset potential voters too much. For the rest, there is a lot of vague rhetoric and appeals to sentiment. Just how pitiful American democracy really is, is shown by the Green Party's recent protests against "aggressive efforts by Democratic and Republican politicians and their supporters to block Greens and other third party and independent candidates from participating in this year's candidates debates." http://www.gp.org/press/pr_2006_10_12.shtml Not only is there a lack of popular debate, there are also attempts to prevent it from happening. You might well say that this is not really a democracy, but a plutocracy. And these are the politicians who want to tell the world how to "democratize" themselves... So you can hardly blame ordinary people in the rest of the world for not taking American politics very seriously, beyond wanting Mr Bush out of power. But maybe many Americans experience the upcoming election as a non-event as well - there are plenty important issues, but few people are debating them in a principled way - which is most probably conducive to cynicism. Possibly the most important benefit of a Democratic Party win of the critical seats in Congress, as Andrew Rawnsley (The Observer, Sunday October 15) pointed out, would be that hard questions could be raised about 9/11, the Iraq War and various local scandals. But would they be raised, and are Democrats committed to raising them? The Clintons for example have pronounced themselves in favour of promoting the "unity of all Americans", prudently not raising many issues. Yet if anything is clear, it is that Americans aren't united, and that they have conflicting interests... hence the difficulty of finding the common denominator that will strike gold. Meanwhile, the American body politic, so it seems, doesn't even enable the real controversy to be expressed in a democratic way. Jurriaan
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