By way of a clarification of my points in the last post, here are two quotes from the New York Times about the swearing-in-to-office of Mexico's new President:
The courts determined Mr. Calderón, 44 years old, won the election last July 2 by about 240,000 votes out of 41 million ballots cast. But his principal rival, Andrés Manuel Lopéz Obrador, has insisted that the official results are tainted and has never conceded defeat.
Mr. Calderón reached out: “To those who voted for other political options, I will not ignore the reasons and causes for your votes,” he said. “And I ask you to let me gain your confidence with acts.”
I think it is time here to make clear the subversive point about democracy that I was trying to make in the last post: it is about LOSING. Democracy is not a rule by majority. It is about the losers accepting the will of the majority. I am not "for" democracy. This is why the question of a one-party rule (update from Gourevitch's book-- Uganda ended its "non-party" system in 1995, allowing semi-competitive elections which kept Museveni in power) is interesting, because the difference between a rubber-stamp parliament and a strong majority in a party system is to be seen in the willingness of the opposition to continue to participate and legitimate the system after their loss. So, I would say, with no interest in "finding out" whether the Mexican election was legitimate or not, that they will have a democracy only when the leftists concede defeat, and that if there is never a support by the left constituency of the new political order, there will be a huge problem--half of the country would be "outside". Democracy is not just counting votes. Here we see why the definition I am giving is not a happy definition.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
4 comments:
have you been reading jacques ranciere?
I thought your point was that it doesn't matter if they concede defeat explicitly, that by the fact that they implicitly respect the authority of the new government by not, say, rioting in the streets, that they have conceded defeat and play their part in democracy.
you should check out some german politics. I'm not exactly clear on how the full system works but when a majority of seats is not won (i.e. a majority of the votes not won), the parties must come together into coalitions in order to have majority rule and therefore be able to apoint the chancelor. this allows for more than two actively governing parties because belonging to a minor party doesn't mean you never see a candidate in office that represents your party. (but then again a conservative german is still more progressive than a u.s. democrat.)
1) Who is Jacques Ranciere? These are all just the musings of my Henry James-addled mind.
2) Sure. The implicit carrying-on of legitimate authority is what matters most. Here I would point to Giorgio Agamben's "State of Exception," a state which Mexico has NOT had recourse to.
oh, jacques ranciere is a metapolitical philosopher. that is, he studies politics as it doesn't exist on earth. but democracy and communism actually work when theorized in a not-earth environment, so he ends up being rather provocative and good for footnoting in papers and such. academia is so ridiculous. okay, back to the paper(s) at hand.
Post a Comment