The outcome of the latest U.S. presidential electoral farce has been said by many commentators to cast suspicion on the legitimacy of the new regime of George W. Bush, and to limit his power to act in the name of the U.S. people. There is some small truth to this—especially for those adhering to the rival Democratic Party, who with much justification can consider the election to have been stolen from Al Gore by the Republican-stacked U.S. Supreme Court. However, in a wider sense, George W. Bush will govern in the name of the U.S. people with the same legitimacy as any other U.S. president to this day. This is because, whatever the particular contingencies of his elevation to the post of president, the presidential role and the role of the government remains the same: the rule of the powerful and wealthy elite over the vast mass of the relatively powerless and poor. Little has actually been changed by the elevation of Bush over Gore aside from a few details of policy that, though sometimes significant in themselves, more generally pale beside the mountain of commitments these men share.
There are thousands of ways for the powerful and wealthy to subvert people’s wills and prevent them from governing their own communities themselves. The sum total of these methods constitutes what is usually termed “politics.”
However there is a smaller subset of these methods, which has proven especially effective in modern industrial countries, requiring people’s intentional participation in the subversion of their own wills. This subset is generally termed “political democracy” or “democratic politics.”
Those of us throughout the world who live in so-called “democratic countries” have for the most part been carefully and thoroughly instructed in the ideology of political democracy from childhood. Many of us can recite some of the more important principles of this political democracy from memory—even without the benefit of any actual thought on the matter:
Like other forms of political ideology, the success of democracy as a system of government (i.e. a system for the domination of people in general by powerful and wealthy elites) requires that most people in their everyday activities consider it legitimate. However, unlike most other forms of political ideology, the legitimacy of political democracy rests not only on this, but on people’s actual participation in the process of legitimation. As long as people can be convinced (through lifelong political indoctrination, through a school system that forbids its criticism, and through a mass media which constantly reinforces its themes) that they have a political or moral “duty” to participate in the electoral process (regardless of how empty, one-sided or corrupt it may be in actual practice), their participation legitimates this process both in their own minds and—as a mass, statistical phenomenon—for people in general.
Political democracy, thus, requires a more highly indoctrinated, more carefully controlled and more highly molded citizenry than other forms of government. It is, in a sense, a true but perverted form of self-government, meaning it is a form of (circumscribed and limited) popular participation in the very institutions by which people are dominated by the powerful and wealthy. This in turn means that even when the sordid, corrupt details of the electoral process get out of hand and are revealed for a change in the mainstream media, they are automatically and successfully characterized as anomalies of an otherwise legitimate process for those who have participated in the electoral process.
As a result, the biggest source of concern in this electoral fiasco for those whose power and wealth the U.S. state exists to protect is the growing number of people who refuse participation in electoral politics precisely because they refuse to grant this system of domination any legitimacy. It is these people who are increasingly targeted by the mass media for their alleged “anti-social” views and their threat to the stability of any potential regime taking hold of the U.S. state.
For now, while the immense absolute number of non-voters continues to climb, the percentage of non-voters refusing the legitimacy of political democracy remains relatively small. However, with the threat that this percentage of intentional non-voters may increase as well, we can expect a continuing drumbeat of criticism from the mainstream media aimed at those they label “irresponsible” elements.
It is the role of genuinely radical, alternative media to continue to undermine the legitimacy of political democracy. Not just by pointing out that the ruling powers themselves have no commitment to democracy when it gets in their way, but by showing how political democracy itself is a system of domination that both prevents the development of self-regulating communities and serves as a cover for the continuing degradation of society and nature.
Jason McQuinn
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Updated: 3/30/2001