Bad guy versus bad guy; there’s no good guy

Aug 06, 2010 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

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Responding to a reporter’s question on the exigency of political compromise and political healing, President Jagdeo is quoted in the August 3 edition of the Stabroek News as saying; “There is political divide and in most countries you will have that because that’s the competitive nature of politics. The people in opposition want to get in government and the people in government want to stay in government. So you will always have conflicts and one side needs to make the other side look bad and the other side needs to talk about what they are doing. This will never be changed until the nature of politics changes.”
If this is Mr. Jagdeo’s conceptualization of politics in a historically divided and fragile polity as Guyana, then frightening consequences await this nation. The politics of raw pragmatism replaces the politics of morality, the politics of hope, the politics of change. Mr. Jagdeo’s cartography of politics as spelt out in that press conference should engender profound reflections on the presidency of Mr. Jagdeo.
We can begin with a compelling question. If politics is about perpetual struggle between competitors that want to make each other look bad then where does that leave the civilian population and how should the population view this competition?
Missing from Mr. Jagdeo’s configuration is a delineation of the role of society torn by inherent political rivalry. We begin with state actors, that is, the personnel in society responsible for carrying out the functions of the State. If a civil servant grows up with the inculcation that politics is about antagonists trying to outdo each other, then what should be his/her attitude towards the actions of both sides?
What does a police officer say or do when an opposition politician goes outside of the laws of morality and legality to maximize his/her political capital? Does he/she say that the conduct is contextualized and therefore no action should be taken? This is a logical outcome if one accepts the theoretical paradigm of Mr. Jagdeo. Armed with such a theory, the police officer can shrug his shoulder and say, “Why, worry, it is all part of one guy versus the other in the endless battle for power.
Let us take the discussion to a higher level and return to the historical controversy of rigged elections for which President Forbes Burnham sought a sociological justification. The deeper the exercise of power under the present government gets into the degenerative mode, the greater the likelihood that proponents of the Burnham method of politics will justify rigged elections, thereby arguing that there can be both moral and political justification for Burnham’s rule.
Forbes Burnham contended that in a plural society as British Guiana was, politics was about the control of the state machinery for the protection and survival of ethnic communities. Open elections in which an Indian majority will win state power was not feasible since it meant Indian hegemony and African subordination.
If one accepts Mr. Jagdeo’s outline of the inherency of realpolitik then should Mr. Hoyte have allowed for free and fair elections? We need to remind readers of what Mr. Jagdeo intoned. He said; “The people in opposition want to get in government and the people in government want to stay in government.” Was President Desmond Hoyte naïve, or unlearned or even foolish then to have ignored the sociological binary that Forbes Burnham used to practice politics during his presidency and accept the Jimmy Carter formula of free and fair elections?
At the time of the Carter/Hoyte dialogue, there was a tempest raging inside the PNC that open elections were impractical because demography would bring an Indian victory? The rest is now history. In four successive electoral triumphs, statistics showed that 98 percent of PPP votes came from East Indians.
The affirmation of Mr. Jagdeo on the nature of politics is not uncommon and is a very old one. It has been around for centuries. In the early 20th century, the relentless march of fascism and communism revived its reapolitik content. After World War II, it lost currency and the politics of morality and obligation supplanted it, especially in the writings of late 20th century thinkers like C.B. McPherson in Canada and John Rawls in the US (see Rawls’ phenomenal and influential book, “A Theory of Justice”). Rawls’ masterpiece has been succeeded by the mammoth effort of Nobel Laureate, Amartya Sen (see his masterpiece, “The Idea of Justice”).
The embrace of an outdated philosophy of politics by President Jagdeo in the light of an impending national election is scary material indeed.

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