It Goes Deeper Than Bush

What better time than the eve of the American presidential election to wonder whether those of us who have been critical of George W. Bush have not missed a larger issue: The problem may not be him alone but America itself.

I put the proposition to two of Canada's sharpest political minds: Janice Stein, professor of political science at the University of Toronto, and Lloyd Axworthy, former foreign affairs minister and now president of the University of Winnipeg.

Before we get to them, here is the hypothesis and the arguments for it.

America is becoming a dysfunctioning democracy.

It is captive to corporate and other vested interests.

It is crippled by political partisanship that has all but eroded the common good.

It is in the grip of a dangerous patriotism, fuelled by faith, militarism and a moral superiority that assigns little or no value to the rest of humanity.

This has had disastrous consequences, at home and abroad.

Bush and John Kerry have had to raise $1.2 billion (all figures U.S.) for their campaigns.

Lobbyists paid for the Republican and Democratic conventions, at $100 million each. Most of the $3.9 billion cost of the various federal elections this year, including the congressional races, is borne by private interests.

With so much indebtedness to so many, no party and no elected official can ever be independent.

Polarized politics has diluted the democratic principle that, once elected, you govern for all citizens. Members of Congress, as well as administrations at both the federal and state levels, cater mostly to the constituencies that elect them. This has created the politics of division.

Incumbents gerrymander ridings into bizarre contortions, rather than leave redistricting to independent commissions. Lately, they've even abandoned the pretense of fairness.

Elections, too, are in the hands of the partisan. Hence the shenanigans over who can or cannot vote, and the arguments over hanging chads. Hence also the varied standards from state to state, even county to county.

And hence the army of Bush and Kerry lawyers marching into closely contested states.

Only half the electorate votes, though there are hopeful signs of a greater turnout this time. Many don't seem to know how to cast their ballots.

Can't vote, can't count. That's what the U.S. electoral process looks like to a bemused world.

Democracy is said to have a civilizing effect on contestants. But most American electoral contests resemble war. Bush and Kerry TV commercials push the limits of human forbearance with stark images of terrorists and grieving families.

Post-9/11 developments have exposed even bigger weaknesses.

As much as one empathizes with our neighbour's trauma, it is difficult to see how America can credibly claim to be the world's greatest democracy when it can get so unhinged by 19 madmen as to allow itself to be persuaded, contrary to all evidence, that Saddam Hussein had a hand in that terror.

Or be scared into bestowing blind support and infallibility on its president through a compliant Congress.

Or be manipulated with Orwellian assertions into abandoning its democratic ideals.

It is a measure of the shrinking space for discussion and debate that Kerry has dared not challenge any of the above.

Iraq, too, tells a lot about America — far more than it tells us about Bush's bad judgment and deceptions.

It is about the American war machine killing innocent Iraqis — not 15,000 or 20,000, as we had thought, but 100,000, as estimated by the John Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and Lancet, the London-based medical journal.

It is about torture and other human rights violations committed at home and abroad.

It is about the criminal incompetence of the American political and military machinery, which snatched defeat from the jaws of victory.

All these shortcomings cannot possibly be all Bush's fault.

Axworthy broadly agreed with this formulation, and added three more concerns.

The separation of church and state is "getting obliterated" by the new axis of faith between Bush and the religious right.

The population shift to the south and southwest is moving "the political centre of gravity" to the right. "Americans acquire the spots of their habitat."

Dwight Eisenhower's warning about the military-industrial complex is truer than ever.

"If you are spending $500 billion a year on the military, you do develop the mentality of a garrison state," Axworthy said. "You see everything through the eyes of patriotism and militarism. Every war becomes a noble exercise."

Axworthy noted that the "right wing in Canada" also wants to spend more money on the military. "But most Canadians would rather spend it on peacekeeping. What's happening is a separation of values" between Canada and America.

Stein spoke of yet another "fundamental cleavage of values," this one in America itself:

"Those of faith are going with the whole values package offered by Bush, and those who are secular are going with the Kerry package."

This divide is getting bigger. It overrides partisan politics and even bread-and-butter issues that used to dictate the fate of incumbent presidents.

Overlay that with post-9/11 fears and the intense patriotism sweeping across a broad spectrum of America, "and you can see why Kerry has been campaigning the way he has been. He has nowhere to go."

In a way, America has returned to the insecurity of the 1950s, when it felt threatened by Moscow, Stein said.

Now, the enemy doesn't even have an address.

Hence the fear, the vulnerability to political fear-mongering, the closing of ranks — all at the expense of democratic accountability at home — and the resort to American exceptionalism and projection of military strength abroad.

It is not that democratic institutions are failing, Stein said. The media are slowly coming around to questioning Bush and the courts are speaking up.

Rather, the issue is: Has American political culture adapted to the idea that America is not immune to the dangers of the world in the 21st century, which is interconnected and interdependent?

Has it?

"The answer has to be, no."

Haroon Siddiqui is the Star's editorial page editor emeritus. E-mail: hsiddiq@thestar.ca