Farrukh Dhondy | Chump returns! Democracy sets off nightmares across the globe

Will open closed doors on your next day

Though we know that all the planets and stars

Are rocks and gases, burning away

We all crave patterns in our lives

That stars predict, or the lines on palms

Will tell who prospers, fails or survives

True as the gospel, true as the psalms…”

From Cynicology, by Bachchoo

O Democracy, what have you done??? Breeding nightmares across the globe.

Yes, 2024 has been the super year for global elections. People in 70 countries, half the world’s population, went to the polls. If you discount the populations of Russia, China and North Korea, whose “democracies” have infinite quotation marks around them, then the voting nations exceed that 50 per cent.

The trumping of Donald Trump and his MAGA (Make America Gaga Again) campaign is only the latest example of the overthrow of incumbent governments. Forty out of 54 voting nations kicked their incumbents out. Very many surveys and analysts attribute Chump’s victory (and this applies to other triumphant Oppositions) to his constant refrain during the campaign asking voters if they had more money in their pockets when he was POTUS or when Joe Biden and Vice-POTUS Kamala Harris had their term.

Certainly, the scare stories of immigrants making nations poorer, spreading crime and eating pets, and consequently the promise to deport millions of illegal immigrants from the United States, was a determining factor in the devastating reversal.

Analysis of the other elections attribute this tendency to dismiss incumbent governments and parties to precisely the same two factors -- the rise in inflation and prices caused by the Covid-19 pandemic and the fuel crisis after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the fear of an immigrant “invasion”.

But is that the whole picture? Certainly, the UK voted in Keir Starmer’s Labour Party with a huge majority, humiliating Hedgie Sunak and the Tories by presenting them with their greatest electoral defeat since 1832 in their long and nasty history.

Keir Starmer’s Labour is very centre-left with more crowd-and-capitalist-pleasing-centre than left. His government’s chancellor of the exchequer, Rachel Reeves, presented her first Budget in October. The theme of the Budget was economic restraint. She said Labour was not raising taxes on working people, but only on employers. Economic commentary concludes that the rise in National Insurance she imposed on employers will be passed on, in one way or another, to employees and consumers. In the wake of the Budget after Rachel Reeves’ pronouncements and Keir Starmer’s follow-up support for the Budget, they were asked to define whom they meant by the word “worker”. Answer came there none.

At the Labour Party conference, as Ms Reeves was speaking, a heckler interrupted saying that Labour was continuing to sell arms to Israel and contributing to the genocide in Palestine. He was promptly dragged out of the hall. Ms Reeves responded by telling the audience that Labour was not any more a party of “protest” but one that sided with the working class. Not much of answer or even excuse for the continued support to the billionaires of the British arms industry?

Across the Channel, in France and Germany (tragically “isolated” now, through Brexit), the voters didn’t quite overthrow the governments but gave a very favourable vote to extreme right-wing parties. Italy voted in a party formerly associated with fascism. Hungary and Turkey (though the latter has not yet been admitted into the European Union but is in Nato) have elected right-wing governments, apologists for Russia’s invasion and bombing of civilians in Ukraine.

Democracy, with its traceable origins in Athens -- though undoubtedly there must have been other societies which pioneered government through majority franchise of allowed personnel which didn’t have a recorded influence on subsequent history -- was supposed to reflect the material concerns of the classes that voted.

If one believes the analysts who say that the Covid crisis and the wars which the West expends funds on are responsible for high prices, welfare cuts, etc, then yes, the majority who feel a pinch in their pockets voted in the hope that the opposing right-wing parties would loosen the pinching fingers.

But then, there are the other elements that distort the democratic ideal of classes voting for their material and social benefit. They vote for religious prejudice, they vote to keep foreigners out of their country, they vote out of fear that some current ideology is distorting their culture…

Gentle reader, I confess I voted for the losing side in the Brexit vote. Some of my left-wing friends voted for Britain to leave the EU on the grounds that Polish plumbers, for instance, were coming to the UK and undercutting the wages of British plumbers. I am using “plumbers” here as one category of craftsperson, though of course it applies to a myriad other trades.

Yes, Brexit kept the Polish plumbers out. British plumbers could now charge what they wanted to. Millions of working-class families who needed some plumbing in their homes had to pay their price. British plumbers and their unions were served and happy. The working-class families who needed their drains unclogged or taps refitted were not.

This “best of all worst systems”, as Winston Churchill said, is not free from the distorting influence of irrational nationalism, religious loyalty or bigotry, racism, xenophobia, conspiracy theories, plausible deceit, the lure of demagoguery and even superstition.

These, as we now witness, make for demockracy.