To win the people, always cook them something savory that pleases them. Aristophanes
Numbers by themselves cannot produce wisdom and may give the best favors of office to the grossest flatterers. Will Durant
Good governance in a democracy is impossible without fostering in our communities and the electorate, an appetite for leaders who are committed to respectful conduct. Diane Kalen-Sukra
The wish to be elected cannot be more important than the wish to do the right thing. Victor Bello Accioly
An election must be more than a search for honesty in a snake pit. Stewart Stafford
Apparently, a democracy is a place where numerous elections are held at great cost without issues and with interchangeable candidates. Alfred E. Smith
This is likely to be news to none of you, but the US is holding an election for president in a bit over two weeks.
And while national elections are frequently held with greater and lesser degrees of integrity – voting results New Zealand and Bolivia have recently attracted a fair amount of attention in the global press – the US presidential race has become something of an obsession (if not a circus), especially for policymakers and poll watchers in many global regions.
Despite (or perhaps due to) our commitment to weigh in on national issues only to the extent that they impact multilateral effectiveness, we have shared more of this obsession than would normally be the case. It is a temptation at the ready to spend endless ink critiquing one’s own country under the guise of interrogating multilateral processes. It is a temptation we have largely avoided over the past 20 years, though challenges to multilateral cooperation on pandemics, food insecurity and climate change have never seemed as daunting – and untimely – as they do at present.
Some of this recent obsession has a “bull in a china shop” feel to it. Even after the past few years of attempting to roll-back US engagements in the world, my country retains an outsized influence in economic, military and even to some extent in diplomatic circles such as the UN Security Council. And as citizens and leadership gawk in amazement (at times even pity) at the acrimony and disinformation that has infected our political life – or at least forced it out into the open – many fear the implications for small states and vulnerable peoples when rich and powerful states see their often sub-optimal checks and balances heading completely off the rails.
When the largest animals scuffle, the smaller ones have the sense to move away. But in a world that is as interconnected as this one now is, there is simply nowhere to run. Many smaller states – in Latin America certainly but also in other global regions – have had to adjust with alarming frequency to the political and economic whims of their northern neighbor. But in this time of pandemic and security unpredictability, when that neighbor seems to have less and less interest in honoring agreements and championing core norms and values meant to bind states in collaborative action, the chills felt across multiple global regions are no trifling matter.
And so this US election does matter to many beyond national borders as well – a referendum not on our hegemony so much as our sanity, not on our irascibility so much as our reliability. Despite our laundry list of hypocrisies and self-exemptions based on some perverse notion of exceptionalism, there has been some sense at least that the values we say we admire – and that infuse most of the multi-lateral charters that we once sponsored and from which we now seek our distance – were deemed ours to uphold as well to champion for others. There was some sense, albeit one now largely relegated to our rearview mirror, that to whom much is given, much is expected; that blessings are to be shared more than hoarded and that others have a right to judge us as we often judge others — by our deeds and not by our carefully and often self-righteously crafted brands.
As elections draw near and anxiety levels rise within and across borders, a couple of points on where we currently stand. First a reminder that Article 25 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights – to which the US accedes — conveys to all people “universal and equal suffrage,” which pertains not only to the right to vote, but to participate in civic life and have access to public services. These are rights which the US has steadfastly – if imperfectly – sought to encourage in other states.
Thus the shock from many global quarters as measures to disenfranchise domestically have been as numerous and shameless as the disinformation that accompanies them. Thus the shock as our pre-electoral discourse lays out political competition among erstwhile domestic enemies seeking each others’ ruin rather than among citizens who share a franchise and a constitution. Thus the shock as domestic gun sales go through the roof as though we were preparing not for a peaceful transition of power but for a violence-prone showdown among people whose differences – real and provoked — can no longer be reconciled.
As the agencies of the UN know full well, elections, are a pre-condition for good governance, not its guarantor. But elections matter most when they are conducted with proper regard for rights of access, and when they are free of fraud and intimidation, as they can then contribute to elevating the legitimacy and authority of the duly elected government. To those ends, many millions in the US are now determined to cast their ballots, even if it takes a full day to exercise their right to do so, and even if it is often with fingers crossed that their ballots will not arbitrarily be discarded or “harvested;” fingers crossed that the local heroes who have committed to deliver massive numbers of ballots by mail, who will count and certify ballot totals, and who strive to minimize illegal impediments to the legal exercise of a franchise, can somehow help produce a result that we can, quite literally, all live with.
In this context, the campaign season for this election is as troubling as any potential outcome itself, for it reminds us once again of how far we have fallen from the grace that our founders sought to bestow on those who would follow, a grace that we have sullied through selfishness and willful ignorance, through self-justifying lenses of partisanship and a corrupted nationalism which, as lamented this week in the General Assembly’s Third Committee by UN Special Rapporteur Okafor, “obscures multilateral benefits.” Added to this is our propensity for short-termism that soils our own bed and risks a world for our progeny bereft of any bed at all.
Though we are hardly alone in this, we in the US have slowly chipped away at the effectiveness and credibility of our structures of governance. We seem more willing than ever in my lifetime to gouge and humiliate each other in order to “win” and, if victory eludes us, to then deliberately and systematically undermine those who prevail even before they are formally inaugurated. As the Washington Post wondered this week, can any election promise a viable path out of the extreme partisanship that has marooned us on ever-distant islands of opinion and practice?
We’re about to find out. If you are in the US and legally able to do so, please vote. If you are not so authorized, help us prepare for the possibility of fresh assaults on the integrity and legitimacy of multilateral processes that we and so many others have strived to uphold. In either case, we would do well to prepare as best we can for choppy seas that will take all our wisdom and patience to calm and will leave more than a few immobilized with some incarnation of post-electoral nausea. This election might actually result in a path that takes health disparities and climate threats more seriously, that honors more of our international commitments and shares governance-related information more transparently. But an election alone will not be enough to rebuild trust in each other, to restore credibility within and across borders where it has been discarded, or to heal domestic divisions that have in some instances been festering for years.
A commitment from elected leadership to “respectful conduct” would surely be one desirable electoral outcome, as would leadership more interested in “doing the right thing” than in consolidating political power. But these outcomes require common undertakings by the rest of us as well: a pledge to respect each other across differences and to uphold rights and dignity of those beyond the boundaries of our tribe better than we have done to date. Whether we recognize it or not, we’ve mostly all been swallowing pills of partisanship and self-interest. If upcoming elections are to achieve the larger result we need them to achieve, it’s past time for us to toss away that bottle.
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