The Democracy Rock

One morning when I was twelve my father woke me shortly after daybreak to tell me that the American president, Franklin Roosevelt, had died. My eyes stayed open long enough to note tear stains on my father’s cheeks before I fell effortlessly back to sleep. However, my father’s distress over the death of a politician at the far ends of the earth may have subliminally reorganised my brain while I slept. I awoke with an intense curiosity about American politics, which, with the impetus of opportunities for close inspection of its processes, has developed and entrenched itself over the decades. With a large number of the world’s people at present magically transformed into wannabe American voters, my idiosyncratic enthusiasm gives me a rare experience of being trendy.

Did 200,000 Berliners actually turn out to hear an anodyne speech not by an American president but by a mere candidate for the office, Barack Obama? Did Obama inferentially extend the franchise by beginning his address to the throng, “My fellow citizens of the world…”?

Nobody surpasses the Europeans as groupies of American politics. One recalls the Guardian’sencouraging its readersduring the 2004 US presidential election to write to voters in fence-sitting Clark County in the swing state of Ohio, urging them to back the Democratic candidate, John Kerry. (Clark was subsequently the only Ohio county to reverse its vote for the Democrats in 2000 and come out for George W. Bush in 2004.)

However, Americans are possessive of their politics. Obama’s rapturous reception by Europe may not count with hometown folks as a value-adding seal of approval. Likewise, hints by Iraq’s Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki when Obama visited him that he thought highly of his guest’s plan to remove American troops by mid-2010 have not necessarily enhanced Obama’s perceived qualifications as the future mastermind of American foreign policy. Charles Krauthammer, the Washington Post’smaster of mordant irony, reported poker-faced: “In a stunning upset, Barack Obama this week won the Baghdad primary.”

Though not getting so above ourselves as to fantasise about influencing outcomes, Australians have been swept up in this year’s US presidential election to an extent not seen since John F. Kennedy, representing the forces of light, opposed Richard M. Nixon, the Darth Vader of the 1960s. Since the 2008 presidential primaries got under way in February, bulletin leads and entire pages devoted to American political events have been commonplace in Australia’s serious media. With the titillation of a woman and a black man running for the first time as serious contenders for the Democratic Party nomination and Obama then the opinion poll favourite to win the presidency, the frivolous media has been pretty engaged as well. I have grandchildren who are rabid Obama supporters because he looks like Will Smith.

Franklin Roosevelt was undoubtedly the first individual to focus the world’s attention on American domestic politics. His unprecedented and—as a result of a 1951 constitutional amendment restricting a president to two terms—unmatchable twelve years in the White House spanned the Great Depression and most of the Second World War. For people in distant countries such as my father, who got married just as the Depression was beginning to ravage, the Roosevelt government’s swift and robust interventionism—using public funds and resources as splints for the fractured American banking system, and then to create jobs—was the first indication that the seemingly inexorable slide into the abyss might be checked.

Roosevelt’s outfoxing the USA’s considerable isolationist forces to supply Britain, and then the Soviet Union, with armaments as they confronted Hitler’s Germany, and his position as commander-in-chief of US armed forces when they entered the war, meant that interest in his performance at the polling booth was virtually global.

Incidentally, a new biography of Roosevelt, FDR,by Jean Edward Smith, suggests that we foreign kibitzers overlooked the global consequences of a 1943 Roosevelt initiative that matched in significance his restoration of hope and purpose during the Depression and his wartime leadership: legislation in the GI Bill of Rights that provided war veterans with government subsidies for four years of university or vocational education. Until then, Smith notes, “higher education was a privileged enclave for the children of the well-to-do”. Less than 5 per cent of university-age Americans studied at universities before the war. In the immediate postwar years more than a million ex-servicemen graduated. Smith comments: “The educational level of the nation rose dramatically. So did its self-esteem.” He quotes the description by another American historian, David Kennedy, of Roosevelt’s veterans’ legislation as “a kind of after-burner to the engines of social change and upward mobility that the war had ignited, propelling an entire generation along an ascending curve of achievement and affluence that their parents would not have dreamed”. Other Western countries followed the Americans along this curve.

The oxygen-sucking glamour of the Kennedys drew millions to press their faces wistfully against the display windows of American politics in 1960. The rich, handsome, insouciant playboy-turned-statesman, who sent men into space and faced down Soviet challenges in Berlin and Cuba, was super-hero fantasy material. Add a presidential wife of outstanding stylishness and beauty, two attractive young children and a human sea of glamorous brothers, sisters and in-laws, nephews and nieces, and it was necessary to burst into song to do them justice, melody courtesy of European emigre Frederick Loewe:

Where once it never rained till after sundown
By eight a.m. the morning fog had flown.
Don’t let it be forgot
That once there was a spot
For one brief shining moment
That was known as Camelot.

Having spent the four previous years in New York, I was on holiday in Europe with my wife and daughter when John F. Kennedy was assassinated. We had a long drive that day and went to bed early, knowing nothing of the drama until told about it at breakfast the following morning by a waiter in our Paris hotel. The waiter did not shed tears for Kennedy as my father had for Roosevelt, but his voice quavered and the morning paper rustled in his hands as he brought it to show us the headline: Kennedy tue par un assassin.

Our clothes were American and it is possible a touch of New York had crept into our honest Antipodean accents. In any case, as we meandered around France and Spain during the next couple of weeks, we were approached constantly by sad, friendly strangers expressing sympathy for us in our bereavement. It was an interesting time to be mistaken for an American.

The dream city of Camelot had wide boundaries. A dozen years after breakfast in Paris, in the general store of a tiny, poor, isolated village in the hills of South Korea I came upon a large colour photograph of Jack Kennedy, framed and elevated to a place of conspicuous honour above the rice bags and bric-a-brac.

Villains as well as heroes are keenly sought among American presidents. Richard Nixon was embraced by outsiders as the ugly American incarnate—rather prematurely—while those who knew him best welcomed his political comeback as Governor of California and twice voted him into the White House. Ugly-American hunters had a go at Ronald Reagan as a ridiculous Hollywood cowboy (only eight of his fifty-three movies were, in fact, westerns) but he was too popular at home, too humorous and amiable and his country too clearly on top of a disintegrating Soviet Union for the characterisation to take hold. What a refreshment it therefore was when George W. Bush’s opinion poll ratings collapsed during his second term. This made it safe for schoolyard bullies to get stuck in, apostrophising the president as “Dubya”, mostly without any comprehension of the cultural nuances of the homegrown nickname, and indulging themselves in ludicrously patronising and contemptuous rants against Bush in the mistaken belief that they had 70 per cent of Americans behind them.

However, the popularity or unpopularity and visibility of an incumbent president or aspirant to the presidency is not the essential reason for the world’s fascination with American politics. This stems, I think, from astonishment, often touched with resentment or hostility, that such an open and free society should, for generation after generation, have been as stable as a rock—Ayers Rock, to add ethnic flavour to the analogy.

In another country, virtually any country you can think of, the explosive events of the 1960s and early 1970s would have brought about systemic upheaval, a deuxième republique, perhaps. First there was the assassination of a president in 1963, followed five years later by the killing of the leader black Americans had dreamed for a century of having, Martin Luther King. A few weeks after that, the late president’s brother and possible White House successor, Robert Kennedy, was murdered. All this against the background of an unpopular foreign war, bitter resistance to conscription and a president, Lyndon B. Johnson, visibly losing his grip. Through all this, the American rock barely shuddered on its base.

The reason for this fabulous equanimity is that America’s citizens never take their hands off the master controls of government. Nowhere else do voters act more confidently as shareholding directors, giving respect and reliable support to the executives they appoint but attentively monitoring their performance from above and peremptorily calling them into line when necessary.

That unique American institution, the primary, establishes from the beginning of the political process who is in charge. Office seekers have to compete for acceptance as candidates not only for the presidency but also for the Senate, the House of Representatives, governorships and seats in the fifty state legislatures. “Parachuting” an insider into a safe seat, in the Westminster manner, is a real gunslinger’s challenge in the USA.

In most cases, the selection of candidates is made by registered members of political parties (some states include the uncommitted). At last count, the USA had 39 million registered Democrats and a shade over 30 million registered Republicans (the Greens muster 289,000). This is a high rate of active participation in an eligible voting population of about 220 million—because active these registered Republicans and Democrats are. In addition to all the primaries and the subsequent elections there is the incessant hum of local politics.

Residents of the town of Irvington, Virginia, population 600, with which I have some acquaintance, vote every two years for six town council members and a mayor. As part of Lancaster County they also vote for a county sheriff, attorney-general, clerk of courts, treasurer, commissioner of revenue and five members of a board of supervisors. They are free then to turn their attention to state legislature primaries, senators, governors and presidents and all that stuff.

This vast smorgasbord of electoral action creates a need for organisation by those millions of Democrats and Republicans, and their organisations never sleep in their efforts to direct community attention and interest to the political side of life. Party organisations in the bigger cities have come misleadingly to be called “machines”, giving the impression of juggernauts rolling over people, the antithesis of democracy. In fact, the “machines” are classical shape changers, responding almost instinctively to the general will, and incomparably less rigid than Australia’s party factions. In 1981, for instance, the New York Republican machine linked arms with the notorious Tammany Hall to endorse a Democrat, Ed Koch, for mayor—because that’s what New Yorkers wanted.

The Chicago Democratic machine, with Mayor Richard Daley at the controls, is legendary in American politics. Daley had passed to his reward when I was introduced to the machine in 1982 as editor of the Chicago Sun Times, and while there were still Kellys and Murphys (and Daleys) tending the equipment, the Irish ascendancy was over. Ostensibly steering the machine was Evil Eddie Vrdolyak, an affable apparatchik, who may conceivably have invented the Evil Eddie label to give himself an aura of menace. But it was Evil Eddie’s fate to preside over the Chicago machine’s most amazing shape change: in 1983 Harold Washington, a black man, became mayor of Chicago. Washington was a son of the machine. His father had been a Democratic precinct leader. From the infinite adaptability of the Chicago machine has since emerged the presidential candidacy of Barack Obama.

As the result of so many of them being involved in the activities of political parties, and the frequency of their opportunities to cast their ballot, Americans are, I think, the world’s most sophisticated and perceptive voters. Their skill and judgment are essential to the system’s working so well.

But what does one make of the low participation rate by Americans in any given election, including the presidential race? The American average turnout of around 54 per cent of those eligible is well short of weird: for example, India and Switzerland have about the same percentage of non-voters. But it seems low for a country so steeped in democratic principle and tradition.

Library foundations groan under the weight of books by political scientists attempting to unravel the mystery of the missing voters. The better educated are the most consistent participants and older voters more likely to trek to the polling booth than the young. Do you have to be a fascist hyena and elitist pig to suggest this self-selection contributes to the high standard of American voting? I guess so, but nobody’s perfect.

In the American context, at any rate, it is reasonable to look upon not voting as a political act, variously motivated: I don’t need the government intruding on my life. I trust my fellow citizens to make sensible choices. None of the candidates is worth voting for. They’re both capable guys (in the genderless sense of “guys”) and I’ll be happy with either one. My guy can win without my vote (or can’t be saved by me from losing). Turnout can vary by as much as 20 per cent from state to state in presidential and congressional elections, giving support to the theory that all politics is local.

Missing from the voluminous data on American voting patterns are reliable estimates of how many of his numerous voting opportunities the average American voter passes up. Irvington, Virginia, may be full of people comfortable with having chosen members of the Lancaster County board of supervisors capable of protecting them from the Feds, and not much interested in making a call between Barack Obama and John McCain.

Some outsiders see as inefficient America’s profusion of elected branches of government, frequently getting in one another’s way. I believe the collisions and obstructions to be intelligent design, and the source of control of government by the people.

Can American political style be transplanted to other countries? Possibly not, but it certainly deserves World Heritage listing.