America’s Elections: Why Should We Even Care?

by Louis René Beres (November 2014)

Routinely, in these United States, elections are praised as plausible evidence of democracy, and hailed, simultaneously, as a tangible source of hope and restoration. But if such plainly redemptive reasoning were actually correct, the state of our democratic union would be substantially more prosperous, happy, and secure. Fortunately, by looking further beneath the surface, we may begin to identify the apparent contradiction.

Nothing is ever as determinative for democracy as the private state of the individual human citizen.

There is a difficult lesson here for all democracies that celebrate elections. It is that citizens must somehow learn to embrace what they have not yet even been told. It is that as a preferred form of governance, democracy is always about more than the ritual exercise and adoration of core institutions.

In the end, we may extrapolate from Kierkegaard and Dylan, our odd couple here, that even for long-established democracies, it is never for elections to cast light in dark places.

Let us be even more straightforward. We the people now inhabit a withering national landscape of incessant imitativeness, crass consumption, and  utterly dreary profanity. Bored to tears by the  banality of everyday life, and beaten down by the Sisyphean daily struggle to avoid despair amid brutally stark inequalities, we Americans now grasp desperately (if still unknowingly) for virtually any residual lifelines of escape.

Can all this be a sign of American democracy at work?

When it is expressed by society as a sort of ritual incantation, ideology can quickly replace reason and rational judgment. Nonetheless, we Americans still tend to think viscerally, against ourselves, and against history. In the end, as we have already begun to re-discover, even the most ardently democratic societies can be transformed into thoroughly bitter and petrified plutocracies. Revealingly, our vaunted American democracy is now a place where everyone has a fully codified right to free speech, but where only a fortunate few can afford to keep their own teeth.

In part, such meaning stems from the understanding that life without belonging would be insufferable.

There is more. Our American electoral democracy is rapidly making a machine out of Man and Woman. In what now amounts to an unforgivable reversal of Genesis, it even seems reasonable to conclude that we have been created not in the divine image, but rather in the image of the machine.

No democratic society, however institutionalized, systematic, and sacred its process of elections, can ever rise above the inclinations and capabilities of its individual citizens.

 

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LOUIS RENÉ BERES was educated at Princeton (Ph.D., 1971), and is the author of many books and articles dealing with international relations and international law. A Professor of Political Science at Purdue, Dr. Beres was born in Switzerland at the end of World War II, a tiny democracy tracing its own unique electoral origins back to the 13^th century.

 

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