US elections: have the people spoken?
An electoral dead-heat between Republican presidential candidate George W Bush and Democrat Al Gore left the US in limbo. Though Gore won the highest number of votes by a slender margin, the US constitution provides for an electoral college with states voting representatives in proportion to their population. With most other states declared, the result depended upon Florida's vote. Initial results gave the Electoral College to Bush, but only after broadcast TV had put Gore in the Oval Office on the basis of exit polls. Now the Florida constitutional provision for a recount in the event of a small margin has kicked in, leaving no one sure who is the president - least of all Al Gore who conceded the election and then took it back in a phone call to his rival.
The Gore team's attempts to challenge the poll results only disguise their frustration with the electors who failed to give a clear endorsement for another Democratic administration. On this bandwagon have jumped a number of frustrated Democrat activists who want to re-run the Florida election altogether. They should have got angry before the election, not after. Re-running the election in one part of the country, in the knowledge of how the rest of the country had voted would give Floridians an unfair advantage. Protests at the Electoral College system might be well made, but reform had to come before the election, or after it, but certainly not between vote and declaration.
It is conceivable that a dead heat election could arise out of a hotly contested race. But in this case it was the lack of political differentiation between the major candidates that left the voters undecided. In the absence of political distinctions personality came to the fore, to Vice President Gore's disadvantage.
Where the political process fails the appeal to officials, lawyers and perhaps even judges to resolve the deadlock is the inevitable consequence. Rushing to fill the vacuum left by politics, officialdom will step in, to the detriment of popular decision-making.
Ralph Nada
The Gore team's protests at the Green presidential candidate Ralph Nader for 'splitting the vote' are a case of blaming the messenger not the message. If Nader took votes from the Democrats it was because he could. Instead of blaming Nader Democrats need to ask why they could not stop people voting for him.
Nader, however, is not a real alternative to Gore. Quite the opposite: Nader's programme amounts to nothing more than holding Gore to his own ecological outlook, criticizing him from the standpoint of his own green conscience. Environmentalism is coming to be the only acceptable opposition in the West, Ideological debate is reducing to a German-style squabble between 'realos' and 'fundis'. Both wings of this debate share the underlying belief that growth and consumption must be restrained: whether it is Gore v Nader in America, Blair v Greenpeace in the UK or Joseph Fischer v his old Green colleagues in Germany.
Magical thinking about the weather
The United Nations climate conference at the Hague adds to the sense of shock surrounding recent stormy weather in the UK. It is pointed that the weather has become a point of anxiety in developed countries as it has less direct impact upon our lives. With rural employment falling to less than one per cent of the population, very few people today experience seasonal variations, rainfall and drought with the same immediate consequences as they used to. With agri-business and supermarkets handling the production and distribution of food few have to worry about natural shortages, spoiled crops or waterlogged fields. But just as most people have been freed of nature-imposed necessity, they fixate much more on the uncertainty of the natural environment than those whose livelihoods really do depend on the weather.
The practical abolition of hunger has not been accompanied by a new sense of certainty. Just as science and technology have given men the means to master their environment, the market system has taken these away. Buffeted by forces more alien than any natural disaster, people understandably project their social uncertainty onto the environment. Without control of the means by which we are housed, fed and kept warm, these systems of production and distribution remain opaque. Into that blank space the imagination sketches a worst-case scenario that in truth reflects man's alienation from his society, not from nature.
Anthropologist James Fraser identified the tendency of primitive peoples to engage in 'magical thinking'. Without actual control over natural events, they thought that they could be influenced by human intentions and interventions, appropriating in imagination what they could not control in fact. The spirits of the woods, streams and skies were appealed to and directed in the imagination. The fantasy that human restraint could influence the course of 'global warming' is magical thinking for the twenty-first century.
-- James Heartfield