American democracy is in serious trouble. Giant corporate interests are leading contributors to presidential campaigns, be they Clinton's tort lawyers or Bush's energy giants. Money flows like water from donor to committee to candidate. Presidents — and Clinton is hardly the first — flout the very laws that they have sworn to uphold. The rich beat out the poor, the dogmatic defeat the open-minded, the immoral humble the moral. Oh, the corruption, the perjury, the humanity of it all!
Well, before you expatriate yourself, try looking at these defects from a global perspective. If, as Martin Luther King Jr., said, "injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere," justice writ large is facing far greater threats than anything U.S. politicians could possibly present. You're simply lucky enough not to have to deal with them. You get to squabble about soft money and candidates' religious convictions instead, because you live in America.
You could be living in Peru, where the chief of your government's intelligence agency is not ashamed to practice blatant bribery. That's what Vladimiros Montesinos was accused of this month, when a videotape clearly depicting him trading cash for congressional support of his party, was leaked to the press. Is there anything worse than that? Unfortunately, yes. The videotape was made by Montesinos himself, which means he was quite confident that he wouldn't get caught.
You could be living in Yugoslavia, where your former president — the same one who engineered the genocide of thousands of his countrymen — likes to bend the rules. A lot. Yugoslavia's president, Slobodan Milosevic, amended its constitution this summer in an attempt to secure his own reelection. It's alleged that, surprised when he didn't actually win, his government falsified election returns to give him a second chance in a runoff vote. Only after a citizens' revolt in Belgrade did Milosevic consider stepping down.
In America today, you're free to make your own decisions about who should run the country. It's possible that those decisions will not be perfectly informed. The richest, the most privileged, the most well-connected candidates probably have a better chance of winning your heart, and your vote. You may, therefore, make "the wrong choice." But at least your choice always matters.
Imagine living in a place where that choice, right or wrong, is ignored, suppressed or misrepresented by your government. Say your congressmen will change their votes for money, or your president isn't beneath a little bit of election fraud. Which is worse: the chance that voters will make "the wrong choice" when wooed by well-moneyed candidates, or the chance that voters' choices, however informed or misinformed they are, mean nothing? In America, voters are allowed to be dumb, but in many other places, they aren't allowed to be smart.
Our electoral system and its rules certainly have flaws. Many politicians and activists are very admirably spending their time trying to correct them, and we should too. Of course we should care about how our electoral process is run. Of course we should take measures to make it more likely that American voters will choose candidates based on their merits rather than the size of their war chests.
However, we should also take some time, even in the middle of election season, to look outside our comfortable, hyper-pluralistic, free-media-drenched national bubble. In our political system, we are indeed privileged, and with privilege comes responsibility — responsibility for awareness, if not for action. Melissa Waage is a politics major from Johnson City, Tenn. She can be reached at mrwaage@princeton.edu.
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