Watching the USA election debate between Joe Biden and Donald Trump, a contest between a raving megalomaniac and a dismal geriatric, one question came forcefully to mind: in a country with more than 333 million people, is THIS the best they’ve got? There’s a proverb that says: a nation gets the government it deserves. God help the voters of America.
Elsewhere, in the Indian election supporters of the returning PM Modi used AI fakery to make a revered but deceased politician appear to endorse him. It’s tempting to imagine Trumpeteers causing the four presidents carved into Mt Rushmore to bellow Make America Great Again… and US voters falling for it.
If Britain seems vanilla by comparison, fear not: ITV has upped the stakes by calling this election the ‘Fight for 2024’. Sounds grand, but you can bet (!) that after the two undersized candidates have squared off, the biggest perceptible change will be the décor in No.10.
In fact, British politics have calmed down considerably since the 18th and 19th Centuries. What’s the odd milkshake or egg thrown against a ‘pitched battle between armed factions each over a hundred strong’ (Coventry, 1705) or the fatal shooting of a Liberal by a Conservative (Cheltenham, 1865?) Even in Ross-on-Wye there was a riot at the hustings held at the Castle Vaults tavern (top of Wye Street), with dozens injured.
Much as it’s easy to make fun of the whole sorry mess, there is a serious side to voting. Although Churchill called democracy ‘the worst form of government’, and it’s been said that ‘the best argument against democracy is a 5-minute conversation with the average voter’, what is the alternative? Churchill’s quote continued ‘…except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time’. History has a long catalogue of brutal rulers and rabid dictators: Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, Mao Tse-Dong, Idi Amin, Vladimir Putin, Kim Jong-Un… For every ballot box there are thousands of unmarked graves whose occupants never got a chance to use one.
‘Man’s capacity for justice makes democracy possible, but man’s inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary’, wrote Niebuhr, a leading theologian and political thinker. Abraham Lincoln’s ideal of government ‘of the people, by the people, for the people’ is the best we’ve got. Suffragettes struggled for the right to vote, and people are still dying for it (see recent Mexico elections).
In the coming election, wouldn’t it be great if politicians would try
- Instead of fanning fears, raising hopes?
- Actually telling the truth?
- Rather than endless coverage of betting scandals, concentrating on real scandals such as sewerage, homelessness, unnecessary wars, and the plight of this planet?
Vote as if it will count, and be thankful that you can…
The patron saint of politicians is St Thomas More, who famously defied the tyrant King Henry VIII, but I prefer the patron saint of political prisoners, St Maximilian Kolbe.
He was a Polish priest who ended up in Auschwitz for quietly resisting the Nazi regime; he continued to act as a priest despite violent harassment, and volunteered to be starved to death in an underground bunker in place of a man with a wife and children, being finished off after two weeks with a lethal injection of carbolic acid. The man he saved at Auschwitz survived. His feast day is on 14th August.
