Democracy in action

Nov 06, 2008 Editorial

The deed is done: Barack Hussein Obama will now become the forty-fourth President of the United States of America on January 20, 2009.

We refer to him by his full name, the name of his father who bestowed it to him, to remind those who would have used the “Hussein” in the middle to pander to the fears of the American people that good sense and judgement won out in the end. And this is the prime requirement for democracy to blossom, take root and finally grow in any society.

Democracy did not have a good name for most of its life in the more than two millennia since its birth in the Greek city-states. Let the people decide who would rule?

Why, that would surely be the greatest folly; the certain road to ruination. Wouldn’t it eventually become “rule of the mob”? Wouldn’t the people who voted be duped by the sophistry of the silver-tongued aspirants to power?

Almost all the ancient commentators were, at the very best, lukewarm to the idea of a democratic government for one of those reasons or another.

As we struggle to entrench our hard-won democracy in our own country, it is useful to remind ourselves how new this form of governance actually is.

After all, it was only a few centuries ago that the notion gradually took hold in a Europe struggling to emerge out of a thousand years of darkness that maybe it was not only the divine right of kings, whether of church or state, to rule.

The path to where we are today, where a Barack Obama can remind us that democracy is “rule of the people, by the people, and for the people”, was a long and arduous one.

Even in Obama’s America, it was only fifty years ago that people with the colour of Obama’s skin were being jailed for just sitting on the front seat of a bus.

There were some who became so impatient at the immoral gap between the rhetoric and the reality of democracy in America that they advocated and embraced violence to move the process forward.

But there was one man who towered over them and demonstrated the even greater immorality of trying to justify violence towards one’s fellow citizens – Rev. Martin Luther King.

He advocated the path of non-violence, inspired by another fighter for democracy – Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi – and assured America that he had a dream that one day they would be able to live out the true meaning of its creed of freedom and democracy.

Today, with the election of Barack Obama, America has made a quantum leap towards achieving Rev. King’s dream.

But this is not to say that the confirmation of its democratic credentials has made America free of all problems.

Democracy will continue to face problems that inevitably will confront any polity: it is simply a way of choosing those who will lead the effort to grapple with those problems, not a magical erasure of them.

And even a democratic form of governance will have its own inherent limitations that may lead to frustrations among the citizenry.

It is useful to remember Winston Churchill’s pithy aphorism that democracy is the worse form of government – until one compares it with the other possibilities.

But to return to the essential quality of reasonableness that we asserted earlier is essential to democracy, we are not saying that we have to suddenly transform ourselves into a nation of Talmudic scholars.

All it takes is a core of citizens who accept that they will not simply vote reflexively as do the majority of peers: these are the “swing voters”, who vote according to the issues and in doing so create functioning democracies. This is what we witnessed in America.

Confronted with the racial fears that had long held America in thrall, a chunk of white voters looked at the real issues that confronted their country – a stuttering economy and a collapsing financial system, a debilitating war and a tattered world image – and did the right thing.

But it was the courage of Obama during the campaign to directly address the fears of that majority constituency and not to be bogged down by charges of “pandering”. Would that we had such leaders here, who rather than chastising voters, addressed their fears.

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