This, I told myself, is how political parties operate in mature democracies. This is how a stable political system conducts itself. Issues matter more than personalities. Politicians will claw each other’s eyes out during the primary season, but it’s Kumbaya my Lord by the time they arrive at the convention site. They swallow their pride and stick with their party because it stands for something and they believe in it.
This stability in the party system is reflected in the people’s respect for America’s government institutions.
When the U.S. Supreme Court voted 5-4 to award the bitterly contested Florida electoral votes to Dubya in 2000, there was outrage among the Democrats and lefties, but at the end of the day, the controversial decision was accepted, even by the losing candidate. Can you imagine if something like that happened, say, in the Philippines? There would have been riots; coups even — now staples of the political system back home.
In durable democracies, politicians come and go but government agencies, for the most part, are always staffed with personnel who are technocrats; they are there because of what they know, not who they know.
This functional, reliable and enduring system is the envy of the democracies in the developing world and in the Pacific islands.
However, we must also remember that the Western democracies are old nations. The political system of the U.S., which is way younger than Great Britain or France, is over 200 years old. These countries went through the same birth pains and convulsions still wracking the new democracies: the bought and/or irresponsible media; rampant corruption; unenforced laws; frail institutions; personalities that loom larger than the rules, which those in power can ignore or even flout.
Yet the young democracies are expected to leapfrog through history and catch up with the West, with their head start of over two centuries, right about now.
This expectation is frustrating for the forward looking citizens of the young democracies. They live in societies that V.S. Naipaul has dissected mercilessly in his writings: Societies created by colonialism where people feel “trapped between traditions they cannot endure and a modernity they cannot achieve, uncertain which of these frustrations they resent the most.”
At its extreme, this “distorted identity” of colonial peoples often result in “that envious and exasperated sense of being on the fringe of a dominant civilization which they would always need, on which they would always be parasitic, but which, in the nature of things, would never be able to satisfy their even greater need for self-esteem.” This unhappiness is keenly felt by the well educated, particularly those who have studied in the West. “Theirs is a misery of the spirit — the misery of colonial foxes, yearning for metropolitan grapes, which they are eternally obliged to denounce to the world as sour.” This is why “left fascism” became prevalent in the Third World. “Its characteristic emotion is a kind of retributive vengefulness toward whichever class or race or cultural tradition impairs one’s self-esteem; and its characteristic political expression consists of policies which satisfy no economic rationale but exist almost entirely to satisfy a need for revenge.”
Happily, compared to their counterparts abroad, the advocates of reform in the CNMI are far more democratic and optimistic. They know that no one else is to blame for the bad choices freely made by their very young democracy. And they believe in change. They are willing to plod on. They will be accused of Utopianism, but they will say, “Utopia was a country imagined by Thomas More, wherein existed universal suffrage, religious toleration, almost complete abolition of the death penalty and so on. When the book was published these things were looked upon as dreams, impossibilities — that is, Utopianism. Yet civilization has left the country of Utopia far behind, the human will and the conscience have worked greater miracles…things impossible for even Utopia itself!”
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