‘The punishment we suffer, if we refuse to take an interest in matters of government, is to live under the government of worse men.’ So wrote Plato.
Politics and government are different creatures. At election time they interact and most fail to see the difference.
However, most responsible politicians recognise the difference between managing the complexities of country, whether large and populous or not, and the political endeavour of persuading voters to continue to give their support.
The public sees only part of the external face of government. Its ordinary tasks, even those that are done well, rarely find mention in the media, which is hungry for mistakes, problems, lies, evasions, difficulties, conflicts, quarrels, arguments, disasters, miscalculations, personality clashes, and anything else that makes a good story.
In consequence, the public gets a low impression of politicians. Most politicians are indeed temporisers and opportunists, being either natural-born second-hand-car salesmen, which is why they chose politics in the first place, or having been made that way by the gruelling and pitiless dog-eat-dog character of political life.
Yet even if, improbably, there were not one single well-intentioned politician in the land, there are two connected things, which in the end constrain those who conduct the government: freedom of the press, and the final sanction of the ballot.
If the press is free to seek and exploit the quarrels, difficulties, etc., aforementioned, it is by the same token and sometimes in the same breath able to expose genuine problems.
It often enough goes too far, conjuring mountains from molehills (or from nothing), but excess is better than deficit in this instance, because unless the press were absolutely vigilant, the politicians would use their time-honoured methods – cover-up, sleight of hand, rationalisation – to get away with things.
In consequence, consumers of the media have to exercise their own watchfulness. They have to exercise judgement concerning whether the media is offering a good story or a good point.
They also have to balance what they read and hear of political strife with some acknowledgement of the difficulties of running a complicated society.
The easiest thing in the world is to complain from the sidelines.
The importance of politics to government lies in the spirit, the aspiration, which would-be governors claim they will bring to the task of governing. That is what electors choose between: different visions of how the vast laborious machine will be geared and run, and what directions it will be pointed in, if turning it is a possibility.
Genuine differences ensue, because small touches of change at the centre, radiating out into the lives of real individuals, have big effects. One can judge between candidates by remembering Georges Pompidou’s remark that a statesman is a politician who puts himself at his country’s service, whereas a politician is a statesman who puts the country at his own service – or that of a group, or class, usually his own.
Among the worst of those who fail to distinguish between politics and government are those who proudly proclaim their determination not to vote.
‘Nobody will ever deprive the American people of the right to vote except the American people themselves – and the only way they can do that is by not voting.’ So said Franklin D. Roosevelt.
A major theme in American and British elections at the turn of this century was the question of voter turnout. It is remarkable that in countries that pride themselves on their democratic credentials, as these two do, there should be problems with turnout.
In fact, it is not so much remarkable as a scandal, given the often bloody strivings by which the right to vote was wrested from history – and given the fact that the contemporary world, for example in China and Burma, give examples of the brave and bitter struggle for democracy.
Memory cannot be so short that people have forgotten the long, hot but happy lines of newly enfranchised South Africans queuing all day long to cast their vote in the first-ever proper elections in their country, when apartheid had at last been overthrown.
The reason that so many are so neglectful of their democratic privileges is that they know no history. They do not realise how recently such privileges were won on their behalf, and at what cost. They do not, for example, connect their own freedom to vote with the excoriating image of the lone white-shirted demonstrator blocking the line of tanks in Beijing in 1989. If they grasped these points they would not be so cavalier and irresponsible about their democratic duties.
The United Kingdom achieved universal adult suffrage in 1929, when women were at last allowed to vote on equal terms with men. France attained the same democratic heights in 1944. When blacks were enfranchised in the United States in the 1960s, that great bastion of democracy – where all men are born equal – at last itself became democratic.
These amazingly recent achievements were built on dead bodies. For centuries ordinary people struggled for a say in the running of their own lives. They did it on barricades, in demonstrations charged by sabre-wielding mounted cavalry, in sit-ins crushed by tanks. These people are dishonoured by stay-at-homes on polling day.
The required solution is that voting should be compulsory. One has to respect civil liberty arguments to the contrary, but the fact remains that citizenship imposes duties, many of them already embodied in laws requiring observance on pain of sanctions.
There are few more important matters than electing a government. Dissenters from the process can spoil their ballots as a way of abstaining, or can pay the fine if the walk to the booth is too much effort; or if they really wish to live somewhere that exempts them from democratic responsibilities, they could emigrate to Burma or China and see how they like it.
Sceptics and idlers think that their one vote will make no difference either way. They are wrong – wrong both in practice: some elections turn on mere handfuls of votes, as witness Al Gore’s fate in Florida; and in principle: for every refusal to vote is an act of self-disenfranchisement in which a citizen, betraying the endeavours of history, demotes himself or herself, into a serf.
Name withheld by request
Related Videos
