The Right to Vote as an Achievement

After the democracies of classical antiquity in Greece and Rome, it took a long time until people were once again convinced that ancestry provides no guarantee for brains or leadership qualities. Especially Europe was repeatedly forced to put up with nutty, half-demented, mentally ill, and just plain stupid rulers. Sometimes the subjects didn’t even notice, sometimes they paid for it with their lives. The outbreak of World War I speaks volumes in this respect.

Afterwards, the European peoples agreed that if you have kings at all, they shouldn’t really have any say. They were given the post of moral authority, which, it has to be said, most of them fill quite professionally.

Following the example of the U.S., the old continent also began to elect those governing, and that on the whole went well, with one disastrous exception: Adolf Hitler. He came to power through democratic elections, but then he paid no attention to the separation of powers, rule of law, decency and morality. He found a parliament that just watched passively and, worse, empowered him to ignore it.

The consequence was World War II. Afterwards, the peoples were more convinced than ever that they should choose those who would govern, and supervise and check them. A fourth estate, initially viewed with suspicion, joined the executive, legislative, and judiciary branches. That was the free press that controlled all the branches of government. Since then, it has often enough proven that the other three don’t exert mutual control – the checks and balances – as effectively as it had been hoped.

That we elect our politicians, that nobody can assume an office of power without democratic legitimation, is an achievement that that required long struggles.

Now for more than 100 days we have a man in the White House who has managed to flout all democratic rules and customs.

How is that possible?

Recently I read an interesting interview, where a British political scientist said that for more than a hundred years, Bernie Sanders was the first American politician who tried to become President of the United States without attempting to buy his way into office.

The man was right. The many millions of campaign donations for the highest office in the land demonstrate one thing: the voting “little man” is, at best, regarded as a source of votes whose needs and interests are of little concern.

Is that worthy of a democracy?

I increasingly think we should stop regarding the U.S. as a democracy anymore. At the moment, not event the checks and balances work, which are supposed to guarantee the functioning of a democracy between elections.

The Americans see their country as the “land of the free.” One keeps hearing: “We can do what ever we want here.”

But who wants to encounter a policeman on a dark street over there? Who wants to be under suspicion of having committed a crime? Who wants to subject himself to arbitrary restrictions on entering the country? Who wants to live in a country where there are repeated and increasingly violent race conflicts? Who wants to lose his life in Iraq because the government lied to the UN Security Council?

From a European perspective, it appears that the mechanisms that keep a democracy alive and alert don’t work anymore in the U.S.

I’m writing from a European perspective, and I certainly wouldn’t say that all is well and good over here either.

But we must stay alert! Many citizens over here don’t appreciate anymore that elections are an accomplishment for which people fought and struggled long and hard. In several European countries, we have recently experienced that elections can have unexpected, close or indeed rather worrying results.

The people are the sovereign. But the sovereign is the entire people. Those who don’t vote, or who follow a pied piper, have surrendered their sovereignty.

That’s what people in the U.S. are now learning the hard way.