| Well, congratulations, it’s official: Democracy is boring. Not dead, mind you, just boring. An idea and a vision that once sent men and women to the ramparts and barricades in its defence now barely stirs a majority of us from our armchairs once every four years or so. Quite the achievement, that.
For example, take the recent mid-term elections in the United States. The big story was not, in fact, the much-heralded Republican triumph in securing House and Senate majorities to go along with the presidency, but the ongoing saga of low voter turnout. Even as George W. Bush prepares to commit his nation to another war with Iraq – a war that almost surely will incite a new wave of anti-American terrorism – many states saw but a slim majority of registered voters bringing themselves to cast an opinion one way or another on the prospect.
It’s not much better here in Canada, where one out of three eligible voters regularly goes AWOL during federal elections. At the municipal level, closer to two out of three are missing in action. Of course, such apathy or indifference is understandable – the summer soap opera of the struggle to succeed Prime Minister Jean Chretien has dragged its sorry carcass into the fall and doesn’t look likely to go into hibernation any time soon. Does it really – no, really – matter, and does anyone really care which middle-aged, middle-class, middle-everything guy takes control of the Liberal helm? Having watched the party absorb every single policy it stood against while in opposition in the ’80s, does anyone think it’ll make a difference? As Orwell pointed out at the end of Animal Farm, it soon becomes difficult to distinguish the pigs from the men, anyway.
As for the Conservative party – the party that with the Liberals has exclusively shared governance of Canada over the past 135 years – things look even worse. With Joe Clark stepping down, possible successors have been in a race to the exit – that the idea of bringing back Brian Mulroney can be floated even semi-seriously is a sign of how desperate things are with the Tories. Their British counterparts face a similar dilemma. Having only last year selected Iain Duncan Smith as their fourth leader in a decade, there’s already a move to oust him – the only trouble again being that no one appears to want the job.
The point is, across the Western industrialized world, politics ain’t what they used to be. It seems like the flair, the fire and the fever have all gone. All passion has been drained out of the democratic process, and of the very idea itself. This wasn’t always the case, even here in Canada where we pride ourselves on our lack of revolutionary zeal. Yes, we may choose to contrast the violent and bloody fight for independence in America in the 1770s with Canada’s sensible, negotiated path to political nationhood in the 1860s, but this image of a peaceful transition is way off the mark.
Take the rebellions of 1837-38. Fuelled by the conviction that government should be fully accountable to the people, the likes of William Lyon Mackenzie and Louis-Joseph Papineau stirred up thousands of Canadians to rebel against the status quo. No one today calls it a revolution, but that’s what it was. At least, that’s how authorities of the day viewed it. How else to explain the fact that they hanged more than 30 of the rebels and banished another 150 or so to Australia? The latter was probably the worse of the two fates – many died en route during the 16,000-mile, five-month journey, before reaching the horrors that awaited them at Botany Bay. Yet the rebels’ fight for democracy was soon vindicated, for by the 1840s the British government introduced limited reforms to the political system, and when these proved unworkable eventually gave its blessing to the idea of Confederation.
The struggle for democracy did not end there, of course. A generation later Louis Riel would battle for the historic freedoms and basic rights of the Métis, for which he too would be executed. Yet history would again prove his cause to be just, first with the creation of Manitoba in 1870 and then Alberta and Saskatchewan in 1905, marking the extension of political democracy into Western Canada.
And still the fight continued, with women wrestling the franchise from the federal government in 1918, a mere lifetime ago. And the government did not just "give" them the vote – women risked imprisonment, public humiliation and physical violence in the process.
So just when did democracy become so boring? Ten years ago, American Francis Fukuyama wrote a book called The End of History, in which he argued that after the Cold War there were no real alternatives to liberal, capitalist democracies. Communism was dead, capitalism had triumphed, and hence history had come to an end. All that remained was for the rest of the world to embrace the ideas and values of the winning team.
Well, we’ve seen where that got us. On the one hand, there’s been a frightening convergence of all major political parties around a nucleus of shared beliefs: a free-market economy, lower taxes, a reduced welfare state and so on. Canadian Liberals, Conservatives, Alliance and NDP; U.S. Republicans and Democrats; British Labour and Tories. Oink, oink, indeed.
On the other hand, it turns out that much of the rest of the world resented this post-Cold War triumphalism and the spread of Western values. The events of 9/11, whatever else they might signify, were a symbol of this resentment. For all the gleeful singing of globalization’s theme tune – "It’s a Small, Small World" – it seems, after all, that it’s still a world marked by division and diversity. And to a great extent, a lack of real democracy.
We should fit in just fine. |
