Palins Threat to Democracy
by George Turner

In any society, democratic, totalitarian or anywhere in-between leaders must be selected, the major difference lies in how we select them. We like to think of ourselves as a democracy because of the process of how we select our leaders and our commitment to certain institutions and values that we consider democratic. Elections alone are not sufficient, after all many dictatorships from Mugabe’s Zimbabwe of today to the fascist and communist regimes of yesterday held elections in an attempt to legitimize their power.

For the sake of argument I will put forward three conditions that a leader should satisfy in a democratic regime.

1.  Has the leader been subjected to a rigorous selection process, that has been open and fair?

2.  Has the person a commitment the common good, a belief in governing for the best interests of the people they seek to lead? In Lincoln’s words a government of the people by the people for the people?

3.  Does the candidate believe in and have a demonstrated commitment to the core values of democracy and good government?

Now it would be difficult to imagine a leader that did not satisfy any one of these conditions being a leader of a democratic country. In a democracy, we must have a rigorous selection process. The main problem with monarchy, is that it does not satisfy this criteria, the selection process takes place in the seminal race up the birth canal. I will not even go as far as to say this process has to constitute elections, even in the most advanced democracies we have to accept some posts being filled through nomination, no one is suggesting we elect the Secretary of State or Secretary of Defence, and if we were to elect all these posts, the process of elections themselves would become less rigorous.

It would also be difficult to imagine a democratic country choosing a leader that at least had not taken into account the interests of the country, as a whole. Nationalists and secessionists, the very people that Lincoln was fighting against do not believe in the democratic government of the country they live in, although they may believe in the democratic government of another country, yet to exist.

Finally it would be of course absurd to have a democratic leader that did not believe in democracy, although dictators such as Hitler may have been elected, their election represented a choice not of a democratic leader but rather a choice to end democracy.

The most disturbing thing about the selection of Sarah Palin as the Republican nominee for the Vice Presidency, is that she satisfies none of these criteria.

We know that she had met McCain only once before she was shortlisted for the nomination and then for 15 minutes afterwards. Nationally she was almost completely unknown and reporters traveling to Alaska in the wake of her nomination have found that McCain’s team had done little ground work in vetting her.

She has been quoted during her still new governorship of Alaska as saying that she hasn’t thought much about Iraq as she was too busy governing Alaska. If this alone is not enough to disqualify her, as I am sure there is no questioning the statement that the Iraq war is one of the most pressing issues facing the United States, her and her husband’s ties with a separatist party are enough to say without reservation that the interests of the United States are not her primary focus.

Finally, the evidence that she tried to remove state officials for personal and ideological reasons in both the troopergate scandal and her attempts to fire a librarian who refused to censor books, seems pretty damming. This behaviour can in no way be said to be in the sprit of the Constitution of the United States or the Bill of Rights, two documents that are universally held to embody the values of American democracy. In other words, we cannot say that Sara Palin believes in democracy.

How a person like this could ever be selected to be the vice president. What does it tell us about ourselves and above all John McCain and his team that a person like this could even be seriously considered for the position, let alone selected, above a field of infinitely more qualified candidates?

At this point I am reminded of the argument of Slavoj Zizek in his latest book, in defence of lost causes. In it he discusses the recent public debate on the acceptability of torture. He argues that if anyone were to ever advocate rape, they would not even be answered, there would be no debate because the person would be thought of as ridiculous. This used to be the same with torture, although torture has always existed, in civilized countries it has not been debated so publicly because if someone advocated torture they were thought of as insane. Today we are debating torture, we no longer think those who advocate torture are insane, and this points to a degradation in our sense of civility.

The same argument can surely be applied to the nomination of Sarah Palin, the fact that the selection of her as the Republican’s Vice Presidential Nominee is not universally considered to be insane can only mean that America is experiencing a dangerous degradation of its democratic values. If we are to truly claim to believe in democracy surely our only choices are to entirely reject her nomination or to accept that the Republican party no longer stands for democratic government.

Now the obvious weak point in my argument is that by subjecting themselves to a general election the people of the United States would have chosen the McCain-Palin ticket in a legitimate election, that she would have satisfied the first criteria. However, even if we forget about the other two criteria that a democratic leader must satisfy, the electoral process makes no difference. The election is for the President, and it is the Presidents prerogative to pick his or her vice president. In this context the responsibility is on the Presidential nominee to chose that person in a responsible manner, but if her role was nothing more than to be ready to step in if anything ever happened to the president and to lead the country her selection is perhaps one of the most irresponsible decisions ever made. Her nomination itself was the affront to democracy, and by electing McCain-Palin the American people will simply be saying that they are OK with that.

But America must not be OK with that, in the eyes of the rest of the world, American democracy is in serious trouble, and the US can not hold itself up as an example to follow if it continues to be viewed like this. In November America faces a serious test, and for all of those who believe in democracy, and what that means beyond simple elections and ballots, we can only hope that McCain-Palin is categorically rejected by the public.

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