The Tribulations
of an Old Democracy

Arnaldo Testi

I think, after all, the sublimest part of political history, and its culmination, is currently issuing from the American people. I know nothing grander, better exercise, better digestion, more positive proof of the past, the triumphant result of faith in human kind, than a well-contested American national election.

—Walt Whitman, Democratic Vistas, 1871

Perhaps that was not so for the 2000 presidential election, to non-American as well as American eyes. Or was it? After all, delays and disputes in counting votes, inaccuracies, partisan maneuverings, and even, God forbid!, irregularities and downright frauds are far from unknown to the history of electoral democracies anywhere they exist. So, what's the fuss? Certainly there was the abrupt 5-4 decision of the federal Supreme Court that ended the long postelection agonizing "in the worst possible way" (here I agree with the legal scholar Ronald Dworkin).1 There was the public realization that the presidency of the United States might be secured, and indeed was eventually secured, by the candidate who ran second in the popular vote; that outcome is intrinsic to the system and has occurred in the past (albeit a distant past), but it came as something of a shock to contemporary American citizens and international observers. There was, finally, the extraordinary media coverage of the event that reached anybody who cared to watch at home and, through the United States–dominated international media conglomerates, abroad; many abroad watched and passed judgment, arriving at two antithetical conclusions. Some thought they were witnessing the collapse of the hypocritical Yankees' way of conducting their so-called democratic affairs, a collapse that disqualified Americans from lecturing the universe on their superior polity, on their being the perfect "city on the hill" shedding light on an imperfect world. (Leftist Italian political cartoonists reveled in the ironies; Vauro's cartoon for the November 10 Il Manifesto, Rome, shows tough-looking Serb "observers" arriving in Washington to "monitor" unruly local elections.) Others, on the contrary, hailed the umpteenth triumph of American democracy, a system able to deal with its fiascoes openly, for all to see. Both reactions were neither particularly surprising nor particularly illuminating. The United States is, to an extent that Walt Whitman could only dream of more than a century ago, the self-appointed beacon of democracy and freedom and the arrogant center of an empire, the "indispensable nation," the last and only superpower—and therefore, inevitably, an object of passionate, often slavish, admiration or passionate, often blind, contempt.2

1

The top line reads: "Irregularities in the U.S. Elections." The bottom lines read: "Washington, D.C.: The Arrival of Serb Observers." Courtesy Vauro for Il Manifesto (Rome), Nov. 10, 2000.   . . .