Quote of the day
12.3.2013 Leave a comment
This one comes from the word processor of the late Peter Mair:
The age of party democracy has passed. Although the parties themselves remain, they have become so disconnected from the wider society, and pursue a form of competition that is so lacking in meaning, that they no longer seem capable of sustaining democracy in its present form.
The quoted passage can be found in the opening paragraph of Mair’s Ruling the Void: The Hollowing of Western Democracy. Although his book addresses this phenomenon as it can be found in the Western European democracies, I believe that one can successfully argue that the epitome of democratic elections without significance lies in the United States. The last election which posed candidates that were clear alternatives to each other: The 1972 contest between Richard Nixon and George McGovern. And Nixon wins any comparison made with Barack Obama! Democratic accountability, and therefore political legitimacy, always eludes America’s national politicians, especially presidential candidates and winners. Because of this lack of accountability, it would be accurate to claim that America’s political elite represent the federal state to civil society and to America’s citizens in general. The happy relationship has these politicians representing civil society and the citizenry at large in the state. The founders did not care much for the common folk; they thus refused to constitutionally secure the direction and telos of this relationship such that it promoted representative government.
All Tied Up and Nowhere to Go 
George McGovern died today (1992-2012)
10.21.2012 Leave a comment
It cannot be said that McGovern’s star-crossed 1972 Presidential campaign signaled the death of American liberalism (America’s version of social democracy). That death would finally come when Ronald Reagan demolished the politically conservative Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization in 1981. What his 1972 campaign managed to accomplish was the creation of a potent and enduring symbol, one which encapsulated the political impossibility of liberal reform in the United States. It did not matter a jot that McGovern was not a radical in any way at all. His reform program was quite modest. Yet his defeat at Richard Nixon’s dirty hands was so decisive that it suggested Americans in general would not support the political implementation of a just social order, a project which informed national politics in the prior decade. In this sense it can be said that McGovern’s defeat in 1972 ushered in the Age of Reaction in American politics. It was the watershed moment when the silent majority put down the young upstarts who wanted to run the country. Even the Watergate Scandal — which one might have expected to affirm completely and strongly the leftwing of the Democratic Party and which destroyed the corrupt Nixon Administration as well as the Party-man Gerald Ford — failed to deter the hard right turn made by the American elite after the 1960s. Militarism, predatory economics and social reaction would dominate American politics thereafter.
The 1972 Election remains an active and significant component of America’s political memory. Echoes of Nixon’s victory could be heard in Scott Walker’s decisive victory over Tom Barrett in the Wisconsin Governor’s Recall Election of 2012 and, for that matter, in the public and private despair felt by the Democratic Party left over Barack Obama’s reactionary administration. Both situations reflect the irrelevance of a center-left politics in the United States, a weakness revealed by the 1972 Presidential Election. A Heideggerian might consider this despair to be Uncle Sam anticipating his very death.
George McGovern was considered a decent man. I never met him and cannot confirm this observation from personal experience. But, if McGovern had been a decent man during his long life, we who remain alive might affirm his memory by appreciating the fact that his name will always remain associated with the effort to turn the country away from its self-selected destruction. This will be his posterity.
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Filed under Commentary Tagged with 1972 Presidential Campaign, air traffic controllers, american elite, american liberalism, Barack Obama, George McGovern, nixon administration, PATCO Strike, Political Reaction, Politics, Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, Social Democracy. Liberalism, Tom Barrett, Watergate Scandal