I read that in the 1930s travellers returning from Mussolini’s Italy, Stalin’s Russia and Hitler’s Germany praised the hearty sense of common purpose they saw there. They tended to compare them with their own democracies that seemed weak, inefficient and pusillanimous. Democracies today are in the middle of a similar period of envy and despondency. Authoritarian competitors are aglow with arrogant confidence.
In the 1930s Westerners went to Russia to admire Stalin’s Moscow subway stations; today they go to China to take the bullet train from Beijing to Shanghai. Just as in the 1930s, New Zealander’s now return from China wondering why autocracies’ can build high speed railroad lines seemingly overnight while in Auckland they’ve argued for over 40 years on how to build a commuter rail service and Wellington can’t get permission to build a flyover to skirt the Basin Reserve.
Russia and China are emerging as the world’s two great powers while America sets a dismaying example to its allies and friends. For 200 years its constitutional machinery was widely admired; now in the hands of polarising politicians in Washington it generates paralysis.
America’s democratic discrepancies were starkly demonstrated in a study by Professor Joseph Olson of Hamline University in St. Paul.
In the last presidential elections Barack Obama, a community organiser from Chicago before becoming a senator and then president won 19 states against Mitt Romney, a hugely successful businessman and a devout Mormon who won 29.
The square miles won by Obama: 580,000, Romney: 2,247,000. Population of counties won by Obama: 127 million, Romney: 143 million. Murder rate per 100,000 residents in counties won by Obama: 13.2, Romney: 2.1.
Professor Olson adds: “In aggregate the map of the territory Romney won was mostly the land owned by taxpaying citizens of the country. Obama territory mostly encompassed those citizens housed in low income tenements and living off various forms of government welfare.”
I thought of this when I saw what you might describe as canaille shouting obscenities at an alcohol-fuelled, Hitler-style rally, punctuated the devils hand-signals and led by a German fraudster with the curious name of Kim Dotcom and I couldn’t help but think: “And these people vote?”
An unfair observation I will concede. Democracy after all allows one vote per person and everyone should have an opportunity to express their views no matter how much they conflict with my own.
But democracy can only work if politics is conducted between respectful adversaries. Right now New Zealand is experiencing a lead-up to the elections that looks like a war between bitter enemies. To emphasise this, Nicky Hager’s book recounts democracies’ grubby underbelly.
Fringe factions who have nothing to lose and everything to gain under our flawed MMP system of governance have thrown up a gaggle of would-be aspirants who under the old first-past-the-post system wouldn’t have had a look in.
These left-leaning minor parties are likely to blur the thinking of many of Labour’s natural constituency and I suspect that if only National and Labour were contesting the forthcoming election Labour might have an odds-on chance of winning. To paraphrase Roger Millar: “New Zealand swings like a pendulum do.”
When conservatives win elections corporate interests often have undue influence. When the progressives win back power they only succeed in making the state more domineering. When the conservatives are restored to office, they cut back. And so it goes on; a continuing dynamic of political alternation, each trying to outdo each other in the popularity stakes and in the process creating a modern, overloaded state that is a real threat to democracy.
The more responsibilities the government assumes the worst it performs them and the angrier people get which only makes them demand more help. Far from reducing inequality you could argue that the modern democratic state is making the problem worse.
Meanwhile both Russia and China still dwell on the humiliations they have received at the hands of the West. Both refuse to accept liberal democracy as a model and both insist that their 20th-century experiences of revolution and civil war necessitates centralised rule with an iron fist. This isn’t communism as such; communism may be over as an economic system, but as a model, state domination is very much alive in The Peoples Republic of China and in Putin’s police state.
Alexander Tyler, a Scottish history professor at the University of Edinburgh, reckoned the average age of the world’s greatest civilisations from the beginning of history has been about 200 years. During those 200 years these nations always progressed through the following sequence: from bondage to spiritual faith; from spiritual faith to great courage; from great courage to liberty; from liberty to abundance; from abundance to complacency; from complacency to apathy; from apathy to dependence; and from dependence back into bondage.
I have therefore reached the inevitable conclusion that what this country needs is a benevolent dictator.
I’m ready and willing and could start next Monday.
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