Winston Churchill, a man who owed his getting a position of power to his country’s panicked World War II state, didn’t have much respect for majority rule. “Democracy is the worst of all political systems,” he said, “except for all the others.”
This type of ambivalent attitude toward what is usually thought of as the proof of the superiority of Western progress has increasingly been detected, post-Nov. 2 election travesty, in the laments falling from the lips of liberals and those left of centre.
Professors, writers, artists, and all who voted blue (with a ballot or with their hearts), are, more or less, the ideological descendants of the original Brits who decided to found America as a democracy in the first place. Now it seems, 250 years later, that a change of opinion is on the horizon.
After all, we left the choice in the hands of the people on election day. Democrats mobilized the largest get-out-the-vote operation in a long, long time, concentrating on poor neighbourhoods, black neighbourhoods, and neighbourhoods that were a little bit of both; their campaigning was most intense in 2000’s make-or-break states: Pennsylvania, Ohio, Florida. P. Diddy and Jack Black were on our side.
And despite this, despite four years of phantom WMDs, the economy plunged into the shitter, and a growing pile of young, dead American soldiers, Bush was elected more decisively than he was when he was just an oil tycoon and failed baseball chief from Texas. We gave democracy a chance, and it failed.
But did it really fail? Is our impulse to blame ourselves, to “do some soul-searching” as some gloating pundits who bet on Bush are prescribing, really justified? The ability and readiness to critique itself is one of the left’s most valuable and endearing qualities, but it is possible to take it too far.
We can come up with a million reasons to explain the disaster that was Bush’s re-election. Kerry was uncharismatic/unmanly/not photogenic (comparisons to Sam Malone abound); Karl Rove signed up more creationist yokels than Kerry’s team could sign up blacks and women; and the disturbing argument that the election was decided by “fear that liberals favor marital unions among sodomites,” as Joel Achenbach compellingly theorized in a Washington Post article.
But does this actually explain what happened? The indications of exit-polling have never been wrong before this election, but inexplicably, they were wrong this time: the polls went for Kerry across the board.
There are a few things we know for sure. We know that there are votes which have still not been counted. We know about the voters who pushed K only to have W tabulated, and found themselves unable to retract their vote. We know about the counties which registered 4200 votes for Bush and 2700 for Kerry, when only 638 people voted. We know about the machines which could accept 30,000 votes only, where there were far more than 30,000 voters registered.
We know about the seven-hour waits to vote, unconscionable for working-class people-the difference between voting and not voting is a full day’s pay. We know that the makers of the voting machines said that equipping them with paper receipts is too hard, even though they also manufacture ATMs.
Some of this is just unfortunate, some of it is laziness, and some of it is due to a fear of speaking up, of splitting the country in half. But most of it cannot be explained by laziness, or even neglect.
I’m not saying that foul play was, beyond a doubt, involved. But there is enough here to justify a pause in our headlong plunge into the abyss of the next four years.
The image of the depressed Kerry supporter, slinking away with her tail between her legs, is far from accurate. Protests have been taking place across the U.S., although you won’t hear much about it in the media. Many, including Ralph Nader, are trying to file lawsuits and to push for an investigation.
It is time for Democrats to stop blaming ourselves, and start trusting our instincts. Kerry didn’t lose on November 2. The world did. What happens next is up to us.
