No images? Click here Barely Gettin' By A Force for Good?Democracy has had an unusually good few days. Jacinda Ardern and the New Zealand Labour Party won re-election last weekend, in a reminder that elections do not need to be overshadowed by fear, suspicion, and corruption. And, last Sunday, Luis Arce from Bolivia’s Movement Towards Socialism (MAS) Party was elected President with a decisive majority, in a stunning rebuke to the right-wing, interim government installed in a coup last November. The Bolivian results show how democracy can work, even against great odds. They are also a sharp reminder that the United States is not always a force for good in the world, as Ronald Reagan once said. In fact, people in many South American nations would argue that America has never been a force for good or democracy in their region. Last week also gave us another reminder of how America has used its power to curtail democratic aspirations in South America, with the 50th anniversary of socialist Salvador Allende’s election in Chile. Allende’s presidency ended in a CIA-backed coup in 1973. Years of mass torture, internment and repression under General Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorial rule followed. Many informed experts, observers and activists believe Bolivia’s recent past is no exception to the US’ track record of interference in South American politics. After allegations of electoral fraud (later comprehensively refuted by independent analyses) three-term President—also Bolivia’s first indigenous President—Evo Morales committed to restaging the October 2019 elections. But, amidst protests and threats from rivals, police and the military, Morales resigned and fled the country. Under interim President Jeanine Áñez, the right-wing government installed by the military immediately embarked on a campaign of violent oppression against MAS supporters, many of them working-class and indigenous. Evo Morales, July 11 2019 The United States—or, more specifically, a certain, small number of Americans and American-based corporate interests—stood to benefit from this attack on democracy and human rights. Elon Musk publicly championed the coup: ‘We will coup whoever we want! Deal with it’ Musk wrote, in a badly-judged tweet to rival one of Donald Trump’s late-night online rampages. Taken together, Musk’s tweet, and the observation that a Bolivian government sympathetic to US interests is far more likely to open access to the world’s largest deposits of lithium (the key material for Tesla’s batteries) do not amount to a statement of intent, let alone evidence of a conspiracy. But they do suggest a harmony of interests and perspective. Elon Musk sees the world as his birthright. So, too, do many influential Americans in the worlds of business and politics. The same assumptions creep into America’s domestic politics, including on the progressive side. This election cycle has seen renewed talk of statehood for Washington D.C., which has no Congressional representation, and Puerto Rico which, as an American territory, has no say in Presidential elections. Both lean Democrat, and the Party sees an opportunity to boost its electorate by giving them statehood. But Puerto Rico and Washington D.C. are very, very different. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez—herself from a Puerto Rican family—put it well in a recent interview. ‘Puerto Rico was a colony and is a colony,’ Ocasio-Cortez said, ‘the way we approach colonized entities is a process of self-determination and decolonization’. D.C. statehood, on the other hand, is ‘an issue of just criminal disenfranchisement’. Critiques of the Trump presidency are rife with accusations that it is Trump who has single-handedly destroyed Reagan’s force for good in the world—that this president has trashed America’s international reputation as a champion of democracy, perhaps beyond repair. But the continuities in American Empire flow through its history, largely regardless of which party is in charge: from Spain ceding Puerto Rico as spoil of war in 1898, through American intervention in Chile, Reagan in Nicaragua, Bush, Clinton, and Bush in the Middle East, and Obama’s drone wars. Today, American pundits despair that the world is laughing at them, or watching on in horror. The other side of this is a stunning nonchalance about empire. Even liberal critics of the Trump presidency seem more concerned with Trump’s embarrassment and incompetence on the world stage, than with the hypocrisy and the costs of America’s global dominance: ‘The Trump-Rubio doctrine of Incompetent Imperialism is a strong wind in the sails of the Latin American left’ tweeted one former Obama staffer after the Bolivian election results came out. President Trump arrives in Arizona, October 19 2020 America’s wars are coming home, too. One of our favourite essays of the Trump era, by the Australian writer Richard Cooke, is about how another President, George W. Bush, reveals his guilt towards the wounded and disabled veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars in paint. Today, former soldiers are drawn into mushrooming networks of neo-fascist militias—like the Oath Keepers, which claims 35,000 members and, after starting as a libertarian revolutionary group, is now readying for the violent defence of the Trump Presidency. The militarisation of police training, tactics, and equipment in the US is well-documented. In many states, police are trained like paramilitaries, and the Defense Department’s 1033 program provides military equipment to domestic law enforcement agencies—because local police departments have, apparently, great need of armoured vehicles and grenade launchers. There has never been a neat separation between American democracy at home, and America’s actions in the world. For the many defenders of American power, appeals to freedom and democracy have long served a role obscuring but also galvanising the economic and security interests that led America to pursue global pre-eminence in the 20th century. Yet 2020 has revealed this for what it is, in a reckoning that was a long time coming for a weakening, world power. We have seen the complete failure of a Covid-19 response in the ‘world’s greatest democracy’ while badly misunderstood East Asian nations managed their pandemics in rational, world-beating ways. In Bolivia, people-led, democratic defiance repudiated both the country’s right wing and American claims to ‘promote democracy, human rights and prosperity’ in South America, as a State Department statement on the elections put it. Democracy had a good week. Let’s see if America can rise to the challenge when its turn comes in November. — |