The Tribune

With Charlie Harper

Bahamians will go to the polls in a week’s time. How do you feel about that?

Do you feel a strong conviction that the results of the upcoming election will make a significant difference in your life and that of your family? Will those results have an impact on your ability to remain in your job or seek and find a new and better one?

Are you and your family committed by tradition or other ties to one of the two major political parties in the country? What does the upcoming election really mean to you?

Maybe your answer is one based on allegiance to one of our two major political parties. This can be for any number of reasons, including a feeling that life for you and for your family and for the country in general will be better if one or the other party triumphs.

Perhaps you are attracted to the leading personalities of one of the two major parties, or to the local candidate of that party for the House of Assembly. Or – and this is probably the case for many – you have lost faith in one party more than in the other party?

Do you view the political process in this country with an increasingly cynical eye, as if the rascals in both parties are just in public life to enrich themselves with either glory or wealth or power?

Or do you still hold true to the belief there is a tremendous potential for good in public service in general and elective political life in particular?

Whether cynical or idealistic or somewhere in between, however, you do have a vote. And as we all read and watch every day, many people in this world do not have that right. They do not enjoy the ability to freely cast a ballot in the interests of advancing the prospects of themselves, their family or their nation.

We still have that right. So what?

Does it really make a difference to you? Do politicians of both parties seem to understand the circumstances of your situation or that of your family? Do you believe they have your interests at heart? Are you tempted to wonder what is the point of elections, anyhow? What can or does change in the officeholders of power? What difference does it all make?

If doubts about the resilience or even helpfulness of government have started to creep into your thinking about the upcoming elections, welcome to the modern world in the United States of America.

There is evidence everywhere in the US that many millions of Americans have lost faith in government and in the idea of representative democracy. And since they cannot any longer rely on government to be helpful in small ways and to work for the national interest in impartial fashion on the big issues, why not simply try to pursue their own agendas regardless of any effect on the overall course of the nation?

Decades of partisan inefficiency, greed and selfishness in Washington especially but also in statehouses around the nation have instilled a fundamental lack of faith in the positive power and impact of a central or even a state or local government.

Cynicism, loss of faith and general disbelief in the motives of central government is a vital component of the discord and outright refusal to respect Washington and its present Democratic leadership.

This has been attributed to the corrosive, casual, corrupt and cynical views and behaviour of former President Donald Trump, but there is much more to it than that. As many have said, Trump was much more the effect than the cause of the current situation.

Both parties in the US share responsibility for the erosion of faith in government.

The Democrats controlled the House of Representatives from 1933 to 1995, except for four years. That’s 58 years out of 62, two generations spanning epochs from the depths of the Great American Depression in the 1930s through World War II, the Korean War, Vietnam and greed-inspired recessions up to the “Roaring ‘90’s,” those nearly-forgotten halcyon economic times fuelled by the internet boom.

Liberal acolytes may believe those were golden years of upstanding governance and ethical leadership, but there are too many exceptions to those myths for them to retain any durable credibility.

There is little basis for Democrats to feel those years were inspirational, even when viewed through rose-coloured glasses. And there’s plenty of evidence voters in the United States became jaded over those decades of one-party House rule and concluded the best government in Washington is one hobbled by a division of power and influence between the Democratic and Republican parties.

The federal government, thus weakened, would be less able to inflict mischief and damage on the citizenry.

Many observers feel this basic viewpoint is at the heart of more than a few of the issues that beset present-day America.

The reasoning basically goes this way: If a voter has, for whatever reason or reasons, fundamentally lost faith in government as a force for good, then crippling it and pursuing a self-oriented course seems to be the logical, even inevitable course.

Such social lack of commitment and discipline underpins much of the seemingly counterintuitive collective behaviour of many Americans these days.

How can the citizens of Louisiana, Texas and even Florida, for instance, who are most often beset by ferocious hurricanes, persist in electing public officials who are deniers of the climate changes that clearly exacerbate weather patterns?

How can conservative voters across the broad spectrum of red, mostly southern and midwestern states continue to support politicians who pander to their religious or other objections to abortions? How can the sheer inconsistency and hypocrisy persist of an ideological position that pretends to sanctify life while at the same time often legislating to deny the less fortunate a legal and legitimate means of sustaining that life?

Madmen or the merely discontented or disillusioned can get easy access to guns in the nation that is home to more firearms manufacturing and export than anywhere else on earth and shoot innocent victims every day, yet gun control has become as potently divisive a political issue as has abortion rights.

On the other hand, do liberals and Democrats spend and waste too much taxpayer money on programmes with little or no track record of success? Is their reliance on government as a panacea misplaced? Are their leading politicians just as fixated on retaining their positions of power and influence as their Republican opponents? Surely, they do, and they are.

It’s easy, maybe too easy, to throw up one’s hands in frustration and despair at the current state of the American democracy.

The harder thing is to get to work to make the American democracy function more effectively, and to reform the selfishness and greed of the two major political parties.

It’s tough for an individual citizen to imagine how he or she could possibly impact such an imbedded, intractable set of issues.

That’s where leadership can, and must, play a role.

Joe Biden has often expressed the desire and confidence in his ability to play that role. He is trying to govern the country in a fashion that benefits most if not all of its citizens. He is, and professes to be, a throwback to a perhaps illusory past where the national interest and the common good were aims that attracted broad interest and affiliation.

Is Biden today’s version of Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman or even Lyndon Johnson?

The US desperately needs inspired leadership now. There’s still hope Biden can provide it, but his stubborn wilfulness on the matter of the American withdrawal from Afghanistan inspires some scepticism about his leadership style.

But does it even matter what kind of leader Biden becomes? Does America just really need the unifying catharsis of a foreign assault like Pearl Harbour or 9/11 or the common misery of a devastating economic depression to compel its citizens to join together in common cause to emerge from catastrophe to a better place?

These are of course important questions for us here in The Bahamas to watch and consider. And with our own elections next week, the US situation is a timely reminder of the consequences of carelessness and indifference.