Tag Archives: obama

America

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American politics is a strange and funny thing. I like how their whole political spectrum is shifted pretty far right when compared to a British or European norm. Obama is being accused in the US of being a socialist, but in all honesty he’s probably further right than David Cameron. It’s very peculiar.

They also have some very funny ideas about liberty and what it means to be free; mostly when Americans (both politicians and the public) talk about freedom and liberty, what they really mean is naked self-interest, and the ability to fully persue such a naked self-interest without any interference, no matter the consequences to themselves, society, or the world at large.

This leads to some truely Orwellian constructions in which the concept of liberty is invoked in attempts to undermine liberty, for instance the USA PATRIOT Act; which in and of itself is fascinating because it’s an intricate piece of branding, it’s actually an acronym for “Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism”, and the name serves to suggest that anybody who opposes it is not a patriot. Genius!

I think we can all by now agree that the American-led interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq were not to promote liberty or freedom. I think that in some part the utter failure of these projects to create anything even approaching a liberal Western democracy can be placed at the door of the odd American mythology.

To put it bluntly, the Americans give a massive shit about their constitution, as if it and it alone were the instrument of liberty, the defining feature that seperates freedom, truth, justice and the American way from the barbarians of the outside world. They often believe that their constitution is perfect and inviolate, that the founding fathers were political geniuses unmatched in their own or any other era, with only they having the foresight to build a perfect political system.

This is a load of bollocks, naturally. The constitution is a document written and signed by a bunch of dead white men. It’s not a guarantor of freedom, it’s a piece of paper (or parchment, whatever) with words handwritten on it. I could write the best constitution the world has ever seen on some loo roll with a biro and it wouldn’t be an instrument of liberty (but it would be quite an achievement; biros tend to tear up loo roll). The constitution, and the writing and ratification of it, is not important and have never been important.

What was important was that a group of people decided that they’d had enough of autocratic rule and decided instead to govern themselves democratically; that the democratic spirit and dedication to the rule of law survive to this day. The same process happened organically in Britain, as the power of the monarch yielded to the power of the Lords, and the Lords yielded to the Commons. Our constitution is to a good degree unwritten, and the rest is a patchwork of Acts of Parliament strung together over the centuries. It wasn’t planned or constructed by geniuses or otherwise, and it’s certainly not perfect, but it is at least an evolving mechanism. The Queen legally still has enormous power, but that doesn’t need to be regulated by lines on a page; we all know that any attempt by her to exert her power would be extremely undemocratic and unwise. We don’t need a piece of a paper to tell us that!

The power shift from autocracy to democracy was a long and hard fought process by the people against arbitrary rule, everywhere that it’s happened, be it in England, or in the French Revolution or Classical Athens. That is the essence of liberty, the liberty the founding fathers meant, an idea of liberty that is essentially British; it’s a liberty from arbitrary rule, rule by whim rather than due process under the law. This is why the recent American “Tea Party” protests are retarded. The original tea parties were in protest at the arbitrary imposition of tax. The current US Government has a pretty strong democratic mandate, it’s an incorrect historical allusion.

This mythologising of the constituion and the men who wrote it is pathological for several reasons. It obfuscates the true source of power and the nature of liberty, it discourages modifications and questioning of the wisdom of the provisions of the constitution, and it makes people think that democracy follows from the constitution.

It’s this last point which has surfaced in Afghanistan especially. You can install a Western-style constitution by force, but you can’t install democracy by force. Democracy comes from the bottom up, it happens because essential socio-economic forces make it happen. Democracy as we know it in Europe and the West is the result of hundreds of years of evolution and struggle, and you can’t just jump in and short-circuit the process. The  political force of democracy will forge itself a constitution, but a constitution can’t forge a democracy.

I wish I had time to focus in on some other things, like how some Western behaviour e.g. Guantanamo, makes us look like hypocrites for not following our own avowed principles, but alas, I will have to leave it here.

Until next time, dear reader.

The Case for World Democracy

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This week saw intense world-wide media coverage of the inauguration of President Obama, replacing the hated Bush, and it got me thinking.

In the interconnected globalised age we find ourselves in, it’s starting to genuinely matter to the rest of the world who ends up in power in the US. As the old saying goes, when the US sneezes, the rest of the world catches a cold, and they’ve been pretty much laid up in bed with the flu for the past 8 years.

Even though the policy of the man at the top has far-reaching implications on the world at large, we’re unable to project any influence upon that choice of leader – he is remote and unaccountable to anyone but a small fraction of the world’s population.

What I think’s notable about this is it seems almost like a blown-up version of society thousands of years ago; a small group of the nobles and the king together dictate policy, while the great unwashed mass of the population have no say at all. Maybe that’s a flawed analogy, but it feels to me like we’re hitting a transition point; just as the scattered tribe gave way to the city-state, and the city-state gave way to the nation-state, so too must the nation-state give way to something greater; perhaps continent-states, maybe even a world-state.

I feel the real question  is if the process of evolution towards a global state will be smooth and frictionless, or if pressure will build along the fault-lines until it’s released all at once in a violent earthquake.

Clearly though, we need to give organisations like the UN and EU much more in the way of balls than they do right now. At the moment they’re unions of nations, not unions of people, and this is a severe failing.

I think we need to try and wean ourselves off the old ideas of patriotism, the focus on the things that make us different, not the things that make us the same. There’s no shame in federalisation! Great cities like New York, London, Rome, Athens etc. are not diminished because they are a part of larger nations, and the UK is not diminished because it’s a part of the EU. The French aren’t that bad, really.

I almost certainly won’t see a global state in my lifetime, but I really do kinda hope that we’ll see the beginnings of such a thing. If a black man can get elected as the President of the United States, then I guess I can have hope for anything.