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When potted ficuses run the country


While I was at a coffee shop last week, I overheard the guy at the next table say, “I would vote for a potted ficus before I’d vote for Bush.” I couldn’t help but laugh. The idea of a plant running the country humored me, but my laugh was also a bit nervous. Is this what we’ve been reduced to?

The number of times I’ve heard the phrase “anybody but Bush” is peculiarly telling — not just about the concerns of people about the Bush administration but also about democracy more generally. We’re no longer concerned with voting for the candidate who we think can best lead the country, best represent our individual (and collective) interests, and best help sustain democracy. These are desperate times, and they call for desperate measures.

But in the midst of this despair, however, we seem to be missing a prime opportunity to reconsider what democracy is supposed to mean, how it is supposed to be structured, the best ways to make it more representative, whether direct democracy might be better than indirect democracy. No one ever said democracy was supposed to be perfect, but it is supposed to represent the interest of the people and protect the interests of the minority from harm by the majority (though FoxNews might beg to differ). But is that happening as we speak?

A few weeks ago, I attended the premiere of the film, Bush’s Brain: How Karl Rove made George Bush presidential, and it frightened me — beyond belief. I learned things that perhaps I would prefer not to know about the workings of Karl Rove’s mind and his pseudo-fascist tendencies, but what frightened me more was that there are lots of people who don’t know and don’t care about the ways that Rove has ruined countless people’s careers, started insidious rumors that caught on because no one bothered to question his sources. A few days later, I saw Chisolm ’72: Unbought and Unbossed, a documentary about Shirley Chisolm’s run for the White House. I want to say that the inspiring story director Shola Lynch told about Chisolm made me walk out of the theater feeling hopeful, but I wouldn’t want to lie. Instead, it unsettled me. The first black woman to run for president, Chisolm ran on a platform that was for equality — in the most genuine sense of the word — and refused to engage in partisan politics. She spoke her mind and stood by it. But she received little to no respect from her running mates and fellow Congresspeople during her tenure as Brooklyn’s representative in the House. Granted, that was the 1970s and early 1980s. I’d like to think we’d come a long way since then, that democracy had become more representative, that it was the norm — rather than the exception — that politicans sincerely cared about the interests of their constituents more than their own political careers. But despite the increasing number of minorities in the U.S. government today, I’m not sure that the system itself is more representative or more democratic.  

And I’m undecided as to whether it has the potential to be more democratic or less so in this upcoming election. I’ve been told by a friend who works at a democratic polling firm in Washington, D.C., and read in other places that there is a high likelihood that there will be a tie in the electoral college this year, leaving the Republican House of Representatives to decide the election. Given the intense partisanship that seems to have taken hold of the government — and even the electorate, I would put money on it that Bush would be re-elected in this situation. In that world, is it the will of the people who elected those representatives or the will of the representatives deciding the election? Maybe a little of both? Whatever it is, the prospect of this has put me in a quandry about whether I think the structure of the U.S. government is democratic and representative and that democracy will thus prevail even if the election is ultimately decided by the House of Representatives or whether the electoral college — originally intended to guarantee equal representation to individual states based on the number of constituents they hold and thus equalize the playing field — should be done away with in the name of direct democracy.

In one of his essays in his book, Step Across This Line (which I highly recommend), Salman Rushdie talks about how the most democratic thing to have done to resolve the 2000 election would to have been to have Bush and Gore split the four-year term between them or have Bush and Gore essentially have a co-presidency where one was the president and the other was the vice-president since, after all, the electorate was so evenly divided about who should lead the country. It might sound ridiculous — even unfathomable — to us. But might that be the case simply because we have locked into our minds what constitutes democracy — i.e., the structure of the system itself — without considering the people who are part of that system as citizens and representatives? Is it unwise to center this election around Bush and Kerry? Whatever happened to we the people? Ralph Ellison wrote numerous essays in which he theorized about the limits of democracy and the ways in which people could hold democracy more accountable to the people. And every time, he suggested that change could only come from testing the limits of democracy. When we’re talking about “anybody but Bush” and potted ficuses sufficing as the next president, are we in fact testing democracy, or are we simply settling for something less becaues it seems more feasible? Maybe this is a good time to begin reopening the democracy debate — and maybe through that process, we’ll even find something resembling democracy …

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