Democracy In Action Around The World, Sort Of

By Dan Rattiner

The big news this past week was that Venezuela held a vote where the leader there asked the people if it would be all right if he had the right to be the lifetime President. He'd done a good job. Indeed, he said those that would vote against this proposition were traitors to Venezuela and he took that very, very personally. In the end, the vote was defeated by the razor thin margin of 51% to 49%. Oh well, the leader, Hugo Chavez, said. I guess the people have spoken.

Has it ever occurred to you that Democracy might not be all that it is cracked up to be?

Surely, it hasn't fared very well in recent years.

Eight years ago this past month, for example, more people in America voted for Al Gore than George W. Bush. But George W. Bush became President.

I know. It was the exception that proved the rule. That had happened in 1888 when Grover Cleveland got more votes than Benjamin Harrison but Harrison got to be President. That was another exception that proved the rule.

In both these cases, the man with the most votes said oh well, I guess I lost. It was my turn to be the exception that proved the rule. And it was. And so the person with the most votes made a gracious concession speech and everybody went home.

Then the whole thing almost happened again in 2004. In fact, there are those that think it did. But then again nobody is really sure.

In any case, in 2003, George W. Bush, after having us invade Iraq, said that as soon as we came marching in the Iraqi people would line up to thank us for bringing them Democracy. People everywhere have an innate thirst, a virtual hunger, for Democracy, is what George W. Bush said at the time. They would wave American flags and thank God for what we had done for them.

Well, we all know what happened after that. They waved American flags, they went in to vote, and then, with big smiles, they showed us the imprint of the ink on their thumbs. Unfortunately, they never did vote again. But no Iraqis are complaining about how they lost their rights and how much they miss it. As commentators have said from that day to this, Democracy might have been a good idea for Americans, but the other 99% of the world has other priorities.

Whose brilliant idea is this, anyway? Think about it. You put 25 people in a bus. And you ask them to make a decision. Do you have the bus driver go east or west? The vote is 13 to 12, in favor of east. So the 12 then say okay, we'll go east. And they do. But does that make it the right direction? The rest of the world probably would say ask the bus driver. We say no. We vote and majority wins.

It is, indeed, a very gentlemanly approach and I do have to say that it works just fine here in the United States, just as our founding fathers - Jefferson, Madison, Washington and Franklin - predicted it would.

Except, wasn't the Electoral College put into place in 1796 to make sure that only the votes that got counted were from landowners, all of whom were white men? As for the slaves and the women, well, let's not go there.

I guess that too was the exception that proved the rule. At least until all the slaves were freed in 1865 and women got the right to vote in 1908. They didn't count until then, I suppose, and that wasn't so long ago.

In 1917, in explaining why we had to go to World War I, President Woodrow Wilson said we had to go to war to make the world safe for Democracy. It was a better system, he said, than any other. And then later, in 1950, President Truman said it was better than this Communist system where every person was considered as important as every other person and they were all treated equally.

What?

There are so many systems out there. There is the brutal dictatorship. There is the benevolent dictatorship. There is the strongman. There is the chief. And there is the wise man. And then there are these very civilized people who all get together and vote, and if one man gets one more vote out of a million than the other man then everybody says he is the winner. And the man who has lost by one vote makes a concession speech, smiles and says, well, back to the drawing board.

Or else the loser says look at the Electoral College. I'm the winner. And so the other guy makes a concession speech, smiles and says, back to the drawing board.

Here's something I read in TIME last week.

There's this zoo in Indiana that has a gorilla habitat. The gorillas roam free. Every evening, the keepers go there with buckets of meat to feed the gorillas. They've been doing this for a long time, and because they don't want to spend all day trying to get ten gorillas to eat, they have a rule. They call the gorillas over. And only when all ten come over do they feed them. It has to be everybody. That's the rule.

Recently, two teenage male gorillas joined the herd. And they didn't want to eat when everybody else ate. The keepers would come and they would hang back. The keepers would wave the meat, they'd laugh and make faces. It would be a frustrating holdup until the teenagers finally came over and all the gorillas could eat.

The following day, when the two new teenagers held up the meal, three full-grown male gorillas in the group looked at one another, then walked over and beat the crap out of the two teenagers.

The next day, the two teenagers were first in line for dinner.

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