Tough Crowd: The democratic tree’s once wholesome fruit has been poisoned by the malodorous blight of populism. A toxic virus composed of three-parts racism, two-parts misogyny, one-part homophobia and four-parts malignant nationalism. Small wonder that so many young people, struggling to free themselves from the fear of fascist-populist intolerance and violence are increasingly giving up on freedom of speech – which only serves to spread the deadly disease.
GIVING UP ON DEMOCRACY, thankfully, remains unthinkable to
most – if not all – New Zealanders. Ever since the triumph of democratic values
in 1945, our political system’s moral superiority over all other governmental
regimes has simply been assumed by those fortunate enough to live in liberal
democratic societies.
The veterans of the global war against fascism needed no
persuading. Their children, convinced by the Cold War rhetoric of freedom and
justice, demanded its extension into every last corner of the world. Those born
in the post-Cold War era, however, seem less enthused; less willing to take
Democracy at its face value. Some are even demanding to know if Democracy is
worth preserving.
They may have a point. Though the American President who led
the United States into World War II, Franklin D. Roosevelt, had promulgated the
“Four Freedoms” (Freedom of Speech, Freedom of Worship, Freedom from Want,
Freedom from Fear) as the core war aims of the Allies, he did so in a land
where those freedoms were neither universally acknowledged nor enforced.
It was Roosevelt himself who had given the order to inter
all American citizens of Japanese descent in what were essentially
concentration camps. The armies that fought Japanese militarism in the Pacific,
and German and Italian fascism in Europe, remained racially segregated
throughout. African Americans migrating from the Jim Crow South to the North
and West in search of wartime employment were welcomed with white-inspired race
riots. A great many of the otherwise progressive American trade unions
maintained a rigid colour-bar right up until the 1970s.
Nor was it considered tasteful to acknowledge too
forthrightly the indisputable fact that Hitler was not defeated by the
democratic armies of the West, but by the armies of the totalitarian Soviet
Union. No democratic leader, and certainly not Winston Churchill or Franklin
Roosevelt, would have dared to squander human life as carelessly as the Soviet
leader, Joseph Stalin. The almost incomprehensible Soviet military and civilian
losses – 24 million dead – only hint at the unprecedented ferocity of the
fighting on the Eastern Front. In essence, the Second World War turned out to
be a titanic struggle between two equally abhorrent dictators. The total number
of American and British soldiers who died for Democracy is considerably less
than a million.
To make matters worse, the gun barrels had hardly had time
to cool before the Western nations decided to interpret the Soviets’ extreme
defensiveness vis-à-vis Eastern Europe as proof of their intention to roll
Stalinism all the way to the English Channel. As if the Soviets, bled almost
white by Hitler’s Wehrmacht and Himmler’s SS; its cities in ruins and its
villages charred piles of rubble; were in any state to threaten the sole
possessor of the atomic bomb!
The western capitalists states’ deep fear of communist world
dominion, however ill-founded, was nevertheless real enough for them to spend
the best part of three decades curtailing the democratic rights of their own
citizens at home, while denying them entirely to human-beings living abroad.
It was only when the Soviet Union blipped ignominiously off
History’s screen in 1991 that the peoples of the West began to understand just
how many of their economic and social rights had depended upon its existence.
Absent the restraining influence of its principal geopolitical and ideological
competitor, free-market capitalism could finally and unceremoniously jettison
the “social” democracy which had made the post-war lives of western workers so
secure and prosperous. Their unconscionable drag on corporate profits was no
longer justifiable.
And so we come to the political environment in which the
young people of today are required to contemplate their future. A world in
which it is seemingly impossible for the edicts of the market to be gainsaid –
at least, not through the ballot-box. No matter which Jeremy or Bernie they
vote for, neoliberalism always wins.
The democratic tree’s once wholesome fruit has been poisoned
by the malodorous blight of populism. A toxic virus composed of three-parts
racism, two-parts misogyny, one-part homophobia and four-parts malignant
nationalism. Small wonder that so many young people, struggling to free
themselves from the fear of fascist-populist intolerance and violence are
increasingly giving up on freedom of speech – which only serves to spread the
deadly disease.
Seventy years ago, E. M. Forster could muster only “Two
Cheers for Democracy”. Today, it barely rates one.
This essay was originally published in The Otago
Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 12 June 2020.
