avoiding sharp objects

Posted on | November 8, 2004 |

Responding to Kris, I got a bit carried away, so I’m posting it here…

I said ‘our friendship’ on purpose, because usually I never know who ‘them’ or ‘us’ are supposed to be in the kind of formulation you cite (even with a self-imposed blackout on any pro-Democrat commentary after the US election, I’ve heard a heap of these paeans too). But the night of the Australian election, I made the same big, scary sounding statements. Ones like: ‘Why is it always our side that has to try to understand and empathise with the other? They don’t care about us - they hate us.’ and: ‘I’m sick of being patient. There’s no time to try to understand any more. Unless we become more militant, we won’t ever know what a victory feels like.’

On some level I still believe all these things, while knowing that it’s just the kind of polarising and abstract rhetoric that political leaders succeed by inciting. But I also recognise the major factors tainting this diagnosis, like any other. They are (and here’s another one) the variables of education, location and class. How to change the red and blue patches on the US and Aus electoral maps in the next four years is to me a major question - one that is quite out of our hands, and already mobilising the army of Hilary/Latham advisors. But this doesn’t mean I won’t spend the next four years studying the dynamics of regional location, parochialism and nationalism, which I’ll write more about in my next post.

More broadly, I am wondering about these other things:

1. Why people remain genuinely outraged about the travesties of democracy as if it has ever been a perfect system in the US or anywhere else;

2. What it means that the US is exporting this democracy to the rest of the known world;

3. Taking the point of view that democracy is the least worst system (and I don’t know if that is my view!) why ‘progressive’ ‘intellectuals’ have such a hard time accepting the judgement of the people, no matter how comforting the tales of stolen ballot boxes and dodgy electronic voting systems might be (in Australia we don’t have that overt luxury);

4. How difficult it is to contextualise these events in history. I never imagined my lifetime would be characterised by conservative, which seems to mean reactionary governments, which is interesting in itself - why? And the other thing I wonder is, who ever does?

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