The Problem With Really Existing Democracy

            There is a popular bumper sticker that reads “Don’t blame me, I voted for X”.  In Maryland, where Democrat Martin O’Malley (an odd mix of a very poor man’s John Kennedy and Jon Bonjovi if he sang Irish bar tunes) occupies the governor’s mansion, the bumper sticker currently reads “Don’t’ blame me, I voted for Ehrlich”, a reference to erstwhile governor Bob Ehrlich, the Republican ousted by O’Malley in the last gubernatorial election.  In addition to voicing the bumper sticker affixer’s (BSA) displeasure with O’Malley, “Don’t blame me, I voted for Ehrlich” is a clue to the problem with representative democracy.

           

 The key word in the bumper sticker’s formula is “blame”.  To accept blame is the ultimate act of responsibility; only those in power have the authority to say “the buck stops here.”  To accept blame is to accept responsibility for and, by extension, exercise power over the community in which you exist.  The denial of blame gets one off the hook for responsibility, but unmasks a powerlessness beneath the blamelessness.  You can only deny blame if you abdicate the exercise of will.  It is the absence of will that marks the masses who participate in democracy.

           

Everything comes at a price, and democracy is paid for by the transfer of the will from the population at large, the voting public, to its representative government. Representative government holds out the promise of duly elected officials carrying out “the will of the people.”  What gets lost in the ideology of representative democracy is that in order to carry out the will of the people, the government must have in its possession that very will.  This is, of course, guaranteed by the process of free and fair elections; if elected representatives fail to carry out the will of the people they are summarily replaced by those parties who can, for the time being, act as more trustworthy surrogates for the people’s will.  But while the major parties take turns exercising the will of the people like basketball teams alternating possession, the people are relegated to the bleachers, mere spectators.

           

The subtext of “Don’t blame me, I voted for Ehrlich” is the implication that the BSA’s obligations as citizen end in the voting booth.  The BSA need not serve her community because she has met her responsibility in the act of casting her vote.  From that moment on she is blameless.  This passive stance is necessary for the blame, and all of the responsibility that accompanies blame, to be shifted onto the democratically elected government.  There is no reason for the BSA to serve her community, because the responsibility for the welfare of her community is not hers, it is her representative government’s.  Re. the well-being of her community, the BSA’s will is in absentia.  You can find it at City Hall.

           

Ironically, the conservatives who rail against the intrusion of “big government” into the lives of the citizenry are far more likely to display “Don’t blame me, I voted for X” bumper stickers than their liberal brethren.  Conservatives may take their ideology in and out of the voting booth at their leisure, but they leave their will in the ballot box like everyone else.  As liberals prefer naivete to bitterness on their bumper stickers, they must find other means to express their lack of will.  A frequent favorite is the empty gesture of threatening to move to that great white utopia to the north, Canada, where health care is free and the national identity consists of Not Being American.  Liberals, of course, never actually move to Canada.  But what they express in threatening to do so is that they have absolutely nothing to do with the conditions on the ground, which is exactly what the conservatives are saying with “Don’t blame me, I voted for X.”  Void of their will, the liberal instinctive fantasy is flight.  Conservatives, bound by another bumper sticker’s credo, “America, love it or leave it”, encounter the void of their will with the instinctive fantasy of fight, on full display in this recent bumper sticker: “Nuke Iran before Iran nukes us”.  (Perhaps an equivalent liberal bumper sticker might be “That’s it, I’m moving to Canada”, which would of course circumnavigate the highways of America in an endless loop, as endless sign of the American-bound liberal’s escapist fantasy.)

           

“Don’t blame me, I voted for X” can be translated as “Don’t blame me, I voted for Daddy.”  In transferring their will to the representative government, the voting public has regressed to the role of child, with the two major parties assuming the role of Mommy and Daddy.  The child-like fantasy that maintains the transfer of the will of the people to their government is that Mommy and Daddy will take care of everything.  Whether you prefer Mommy or Daddy is ultimately beside the point, as what you really want, as evidenced by the aversion to blame at the core of our bumper sticker’s formula, is to be completely unaccountable.  We will gladly hand over our will if we are allowed to suckle at the breast forever.

           

“Don’t blame me, I voted for X” can also be translated as “Don’t blame me, I didn’t ask to be born,” the common adolescent rallying cry in the face of adult authority.  It is the ultimate passive stance: not only am I not responsible for my actions, the responsibility is yours and became eternally so the moment you created me.  Translated thusly, “Don’t blame me, I voted for X” takes the more radical step beyond emptiness of will to emptiness of being: I do not even exist, except as your creation.  The flight from blame reaches its apogee.  The representative government is left to its own devices; there is no will of the people to enact, as there are no people.

           

As we no longer exist in relationship to our government, and as our government no longer has any use for our will in its current state of self-sufficiency, a space has opened up in which we might reclaim our will.  Of course, by doing so we take the risk of blame, and the risk of forfeiting escape, to Canada or elsewhere, by taking our stand here and now.  We are irrelevant to our government, and our complicity in this irrelevance is total.  As the government, in feigned representation of our will, consolidates global interests with a will that is exclusive of the people, we are left in possession of our “useless” wills.  That is the position from where we start.  What shall we will?