Democracy Americana

The loss of communist Soviet Union as a monster used by officials to frighten American politicians away from exposing warts of their economy, politics and social relations, has probably not been matched by fear of ‘’radical Islamists’’. The last time such a nutritional crisis emerged was when Africa became aflame with liberation wars in Algerian […]

The loss of communist Soviet Union as a monster used by officials to frighten American politicians away from exposing warts of their economy, politics and social relations, has probably not been matched by fear of ‘’radical Islamists’’. The last time such a nutritional crisis emerged was when Africa became aflame with liberation wars in Algerian and Kenya, and politicians damning and cursing white colonialism as violent governance. When it was heard by ‘’African Americans’’, they began a historic bloody struggle for their civil rights. Jews and women activists joined in and carried it forward for their own rights.
 The current explosion has its roots in demographic arithmetic which leaves ‘’European’ tribes with less votes than a salad mix of African-Americans, Hispanics, Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese, Iranians, Arabs, and the awakening ‘’Native Americans’’ (earlier labelled as ‘’Red Indians’’). Barrack Obama’s electoral victories are blamed primarily on their votes. It is a democratic arithmetic which has struck terror in supporters of the Tea Party and old Republicans. It has introduced a terror into democracy similar to what European settlers in Africa lived through in the 1950s from Algiers to Cape of Good Hope.
The resultant fighting back by blocking Obama’s use of the White House to take ‘’dividends of democracy’’ to his electors, has a peculiar way of reversing the history of democratic politics in England. In that tradition barons snatched the Magna Carta charter in 1215 which required the King to ‘’consult’’ with the barons before imposing new taxes. Parliaments fought kings Charles1 and James 11 between 1642 and won the Declaration of Rights in 1689. They were elected by barons as few as 7 or 32 voters in a constituency; since there was no universal suffrage. The barons, and business groups who later fought their way into parliament, focused their energies on defending economic interests of an emerging ‘’middle class’’. In 1698, for example, they forced an end to a monopoly of the ‘’lucrative African slave trade’’ awarded by Charles 11 to the Royal Africa Company. By 1775, parliament was giving copyrights to inventors like James Watt who invented the steam engine. The fury of these burning interests had led to their executing King Charles 1 in 1649.
The contrast of this narrative with that of the American ‘’shut-down’’ is that while the long road to ‘’democracy’’ broadened access to economic frontiers by more and more people (against the greed of the king and his close allies), the Tea Party and Republicans in Congress are fighting to lock gates against President Obama’s ‘’middle class’’; and denying health care to over 30 million Americans. Limiting access to cheap loans for college education; cheap loans to small and medium scale businesses; support for their innovations, and quality healthcare services blocks economic development for the masses. In contrast, the Republicans prefer promoting high profits for pharmaceutical companies or high profits for, and low taxes paid by the rich. It might be said that since, in their view, the threat of Soviet communism is dead, so too is the need to anchor loyalty to America on dishing out the lure of “the American Dream’’.  
 In 1972 Professor Ira Sharkansky, a political scientist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, dared to utter the profane dictum that ‘’the United States is an under-developed country’’. His charge was that a conspiracy by scholars and journalists cynically presented the United States as ‘’a post-industrial society’’. He urged that the label be limited to ‘’New England’’ states, and not to the region he came from, namely: Alabama, Mississippi, Tennessee, Arkansas, Texas, Louisiana Georgia, New Mexico and Arizona. This region bore classical traits of ‘non-’developed countries’’. Their politics was based on single-party dictatorships; rigged elections including use of police dogs to present black people from registering to vote; one telephone for a whole village; children dying from malnutrition and unclean water-based diseases; massive poverty and one single road crossing vast spaces like a tribal mark.  Nobel prize novelist V.S. Naipaul toured the region, and wrote that the majority of poor whites were anchors of racial hatred; and ‘’Country Music’’ as passive lamentations for their widespread illiteracy.
Former slave owners in the region brought to Congress defence mechanisms like using chairmanships of key committees to prevent the flow of federal funds to support education, access to contracts and loans for black Americans;  and their election into county, state and federal legislatures and officialdom. The ritual of blocking the majority from passing a hostile bill by talking non-stop for seventy two hours is one such ploy. In this regard, the trick by the Speaker of Congress not to allow members to cast votes and forcing the sut-down of government business is in character.
The indifference to loss of legitimacy by Congress is typical of a tradition of regional dictatorships and exclusion of welfare for the masses. The gerrymandering of constituency boundaries to ensure that incumbents are re-elected has a strong record; as is the notion that policies for which voters cast their votes can be brutally blocked inside corridors of legislatures.
 The first lesson for Africa is that the United States does not owe her economic development to being a national democracy. Her union has a diversity of governance. Socialistic policies in Wisconsin met slavocracy in Alabama inside Congress.
Another lesson is that the United States is a ‘’democracy on the road to development’’; with one region of the country being dragged screaming into a new political arithmetic and its discontents. It should share its genius and idiocies without being a frothing bully. Africa should tell America’s leaders that habits which made Latin American critics coin the tag ‘’the Ugly American’’ must be a thorn-crown of a bygone century.