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COMMENTARY
June 13, 2009
Popular theatre
The elections last week for the European Parliament were probably more open and less rigged than the election yesterday for the Iranian presidency, but we should not jump to any further conclusions.In both "polities," candidates are hand-picked -- from party lists in the European case, and by the authority of the ayatollahs in the Iranian. "The people" come into the process in the final round, and confer legitimacy, by voting -- rather as you confer legitimacy on your telephone bill, by paying it. It is a game that could be called "name the figurehead," in Tehran, or "fill the figurehead with warm bodies" in Strasbourg and Brussels. Every large political system requires the consent of the governed, even if that consent consists only of keeping them silent through fear (e.g. Bolshevik Russia; Taliban Afghanistan). The more sophisticated the system, the more it is possible to replace fear with an illusion of choice (Iran). Very sophisticated systems begin to employ inertia (the E.U. and its 27 Nanny States; the U.S., Canada, etc). The closest we come to perfection in this world is in the great sprawling empires at their height -- the Roman, the British, the several Chinese, whatever -- in which heaven and Earth seem to have conspired to make the order of things perfectly inevitable. It hardly matters who is ruling until the empire begins to crack up. "Democracy" -- among the most abused words in the English language -- is a system that can, and sometimes does, apply to very small states. It exists in the Vatican, for instance, where a small conclave of citizen-cardinals elect a pope, freely, from among no set list of candidates. They have what they require as electors -- firsthand experience of ecclesiastical government, familiarity with the personalities, and the habit of requesting divine guidance. There were some interesting experiments in ancient Greece. Each restricted the franchise to a small, very propertied slice of the population, to assure a knowledgeable electorate of manageable size. To the small frontier municipalities, of North American history, something like democracy sometimes pertained, among people with fragments of a classical education. The idea of "democracy" and the idea of "freedom" became hopelessly confused; and to that confusion we have since added more layers, including the dangerously insane idea of "equality" beyond the law. "Parliamentary democracy" and its imitations (the Persian Islamist imitation is an exotic dish indeed) is an extraordinary curry of seemingly incompatible intellectual ingredients, most of them quite stale. "The worst system except for all the others"? I'm no longer as sanguine as Winston Churchill. But all that aside, any system that serves a polity larger than a village requires the manufacture of consent. Do I sound like Noam Chomsky? He co-wrote a famous book by that title (Manufacturing Consent), but it was specifically about media, and skewed by the authors' own illusion that the consent might be somehow unnecessary. The phrase comes originally, I believe, from Walter Lippmann's more sober, compendious, and interesting work, Public Opinion (1922), along with the old Platonic notion that "the public" are a bewildered herd, hardly qualified to judge grand issues of policy, and able to remain interested only in those with strictly local effects. Reading the European press over the last fortnight or so, from over the hump of the Atlantic Ocean, I see one of Lippmann's observations being demonstrated. The media deal less in information than in the manipulation of symbols, and the belief that the European election has changed something depends largely on the impression they leave. We may read much breathless reporting of what consists, in fact, of a slight vagrant shift to the business-interest Right among the centre parties, and a modest growth in the standing of more colourful parties on the environmentalist Left and the nationalist Right -- but nothing to disturb the European Union's bureaucratic equanimity. That will crack only with the system as a whole; and the election was significant only as an indication of how fast it is cracking. (Slower than I thought.) In Iran, the nominal government of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has been supposedly under challenge from the more "moderate" (symbolic language) Mir Hossein Mousavi; but Ahmadinejad offered only a change of veneer from that of his "reforming" predecessor, Mohammad Khatami. The reality is that the Iranian president is subservient to Iran's council of ayatollahs, as the European Parliament is to Europe's technocratic ayatollahs. In both cases the vote is popular theatre. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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