Commentary No. 54, December 15, 2000
"Democracy and the Vote"
Thirty-six days after counting, and not counting, the votes, the United States of America has a President-Elect. The two candidates made speeches, one of concession and one of victory, in which both emphasized the importance of "coming together" and celebrating the United States as a country that lives under the law, a country that is democratic.
The U.S. takes great pride in claiming to be the most democratic country in the world. The U.S. preaches democracy to the rest of the world and asserts that its foreign policy is intended, in the words of Woodrow Wilson, to make the world safe for democracy. The U.S., in recent years, has sent "observers" to electoral processes in many countries, to ensure that their voting processes are democratic.
But what do we mean by democracy, and why is it a virtue? When the word was first used extensively in political rhetoric, which was in the first half of the nineteenth century, it was an extremely controversial word. It was a word of the left, even of the far left in politics. For the majority, it had a bit of the tonality that the word "Communism" had in the second half of the twentieth century. Somewhere along the historical track, the discourse shifted. Democracy became a term embraced by an ever-wider swath of the political spectrum, and after 1945, everyone was in favor of democracy.
The resistance to the term in the beginning was in what it seemed to represent - that the demos, the ordinary people, would make the political decisions, would dominate the state apparatuses. This seemed very radical. It probably still does. The reason the word became acceptable was that many people began to redefine it. One of the features of the period from circa 1850-1950 was the extension of the suffrage, until it became theoretically universal almost everywhere. I say theoretically and will return to that. Democracy came to be defined as the holding of free and fair elections. Now, free and fair elections are certainly a necessary element in a democratic state, but they are far from the whole story. By limiting the definition of democracy in this way, many people sought to pull its fangs and let us forget about the idea that ordinary people would make the political decisions.
Of course, defined in this way, as the holding of free and fair elections, we could come up with the generalization that this occurs primarily in North America and western Europe, and only occasionally in other parts of the world, which are less modern or less civilized or less something.
There have always been two views about elections in the United States. There is the official rhetorical view, that the U.S. is a model country in regard to elections. The fact is that this official rhetoric is probably given credence by one-third to one-half of the American people. And then there is the cynical view, that stealing votes and preventing people (who are not on your side) from voting is the absolutely normal way of doing things, that everybody does it and that, as long as it doesn't create a public scandal, no one ought to say anything about it. This is the view of hard-bitten journalists and Realpolitiker political scientists and probably most professional politicians. It is also the view of the underclasses, who are the most burnt by such processes and has been expressed very vociferously during this recent period by African-Americans in particular.
Let us review what happened in this election. There were two candidates competing who both tried to appeal to centrist voters, and who each also tried in addition to secure what was called their base (right-wing for Bush and left-wing for Gore). Neither candidate was charismatic. The result was that the election was extremely close. Gore beat Bush in the popular vote, but by only circa 300,000 votes out of approximately 100 million. Since the U.S. has a mode of indirect election via the Electoral College, the popular vote doesn't count. In the Electoral College, Bush has 271 and Gore 267. However, in the crucial Florida election, Bush had only a lead of only 537 votes (out of 5 million) in the final accepted tally, and without Florida, Bush would have lost. So it was close, indeed.
As a result, we have a month-long debate in the U.S. about whether the vote was "free and fair." There were many aspects to this debate. Were the votes counted correctly? Were there forms of balloting (each county using different methods) that led the voters into mismarking the ballot? Were some votes counted that should not have been counted? Were some persons prevented from voting because, although they were registered, their names were not on the voting register? Were some persons intimidated into not voting?
The Gore camp concentrated on the first issue, were the votes counted correctly? They asked for hand recounts. In the end, this is what the Supreme Court of the U.S. denied the Gore camp, by a 5-4 vote. The Gore camp concentrated on this issue because it was sufficient to make the result they wanted likely, and because it was the easiest to litigate. Morally, it was not necessarily the most important.
To be sure, we can take the position that all the mistakes were peccadilloes and almost unavoidable. And normally everyone would have been satisfied with such an analysis. But when the margin is 537 votes out of 5 million, and these 500 votes mean the Presidency of the United States, it is understandable that the issue was contested. Two questions become thereupon obvious: What are the consequences of this election for the United States? What does it tell us about democracy?
We do not know yet the full answer to the first question. The 5-4 decision of the Supreme Court is seen by many people (perhaps half the population) as a decision made on political grounds papered over by juridical rhetoric. This seemed to be the view of the dissenting justices, who talked of a "self-inflicted wound" to the Court and the nation, and who denied any legitimacy whatsoever to the refusal to permit a recount to continue. Gore and Bush now say that they will try to repair the damage and be "bipartisan" and this may have some effect. One wonders, however, why one should bother to be partisan if one is going to be bipartisan. The fact is that the Republican majority in the two Houses of Congress is now extremely narrow. And more importantly, political passions were aroused in this election that turned the tepid pre-election atmosphere into a post-election fervor which threatens to last until 2004 and perhaps beyond.
But what about democracy? It has become clear in this situation that the random errors in vote counting are not random. The voting machines in lower class/non-White counties tend systematically, for simple reasons of the economics of the tax base, to be poorer than those in the other counties, and therefore the votes that aren't counted tend to be those of the underclasses. But one could raise other questions. We do not have universal suffrage in the United States. For example, in many states, all persons who have been convicted of a felony may not vote. This adds up to a lot of people, and they are disproportionately from the underclass. I leave out the question of non-citizens, a growing group. Furthermore, something like 50% of the eligible voters do not vote, and this 50% is drawn disproportionately from the underclasses. We should be asking why they don't vote. And even more, what we can do to get them to vote.
If democracy is free and fair elections, then we have a long way to go to get there. If democracy is even more than that, we have an even longer way to go.
Immanuel Wallerstein
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These commentaries, published twice monthly, are intended to be reflections on the contemporary world scene, as seen
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