Folks, there is no doubt that the kind of democracy being practised by the United States has been touted and branded as a model, which explains why the US Establishment is quick to invest itself in “exporting” that model to other parts of the world and to judge happenings with the yardstick that its military industrial complex uses to destabilize systems considered as undemocratic.
Much can be said in condemnation of that bullying approach; but it cannot be denied that the structures that sustain the US’ democracy are well designed and serve useful purposes to sustain public confidence in the democracy that promotes national cohesiveness, well-being, development, and growth.
I want to pick on one of such structures for comment. That structure undergirds the institutional arrangements for electing Presidential Candidates and the processes that portray transparency to educate the electorate on how to make their electoral decisions in the electoral booth.
Even though the Republican Party and the Democratic Party have stood firm to characterize the US’ political system as a two-party stream, there is room for independents and what-not to have their way. It has been so in our time and will continue to be so till who-knows-when?
The opportunities given to candidates of the two parties to sell themselves through institutional arrangements are not available to the independent candidates, though. Discrimination here? I don’t know. But what I know is that the processes that lead to the Presidential elections are clear enough for one to know how things are done. The three-pronged Presidential debates serve very useful purposes because the Presidential Commission on Presidential Debates is in place to play a crucial role for the candidates to present their ideas and be scrutinized by the electorate.
What we have seen about the Democratic Party’s Hillary Clinton and her Republican Party rival, Donald Trump, has revealed a lot, capped by their exchanges during the Presidential debates, other forums notwithstanding. The voters know where to go, based on the impressions that they have gathered about each candidate within the framework of the national cause.
That explains why staunch Republicans, including two former Presidents (George Herbert Bush and George Walker Bush and the Bush family), Senators, Members of Congress, and several well-placed pillars have denounced Trump and gone for Mrs. Clinton (not because she is infallible but because she has projected herself in a better light to win their favour through the contest of ideas at the debates and other fora). It is a matter of conscience vis-a-vis the convictions that drive one’s participation in national politics.
Those whose conscience is as seared as if with a hot iron will not act judiciously in the national interest. They will put their personal interests above the national ones and endanger the democracy that the citizens uphold by investing their blood, sweat, and toil in, even if they don’t fully know how the democracy came about. What happens if the citizens gain nothing from the democracy and lose interest in it? Anarchy!! A return to the state of uselessness, where life will be short, brutish and nasty. Certainly, not in the 21st century or beyond. Democracy comes across as the abracadabra to all that nastiness in human affairs and should be upheld as such, nurtured with good reason and grown to serve useful purposes for all, not the few privileged ones who know how to walk the corridors of power.
Regardless of the intricacies of the processes in the US system, the exchange of “friendly hostilities” that dominated the exchanges at the Presidential Debates has especially added more vim to the political rhetoric. The last in the series of the Presidential debates, which took place on Wednesday, October 19, 2016, for the most part produced nasty moments that might make one conclude that the 2016 elections would go down in history as the most despicable.
What about Trump’s wild claims that the elections have already been rigged, even before being held on November 8? What about his open insult of Mrs. Clinton as “Such a nasty woman”? Or his threat to jail her if he wins the elections? And many more to create the negative impression that the boat of democracy is rushing toward a tidal wave to be destroyed?
We are even not talking about Trump’s refusal to commit himself to accepting the outcome of the elections, creating the impression that he will foment trouble. Or some faint threats from some of his supporters (as reported in the news) to foment trouble on Election Day? The reassuring fact is that the US’ democracy has grown so much as to have the capacity to deal with such deviance.
Guess what? Despite all the hostility that characterized Wednesday’s event, the two candidates came together again at a dinner in New York today, organized under the auspices of the Alfred E. Smith Memorial Foundation, where they “traded barbs” again!! (See https://www.yahoo.com/news/day-debate-trump-clinton-square-off-again-roast-090558470–election.html).
The rationale behind it all is to bring the two frontrunners to a different forum so they can be further scrutinized on the basis of their presentations. Remember that it’s dinner time!!
Why am I going all this distance? Just to prove that democracy, as practised in the US, isn’t a mechanical process for rubber-stamping candidates. It involves several processes that allow the candidates to interact, bounce ideas off each other, and reach out to the electorate.
So far, what I have gathered from the happenings is enlightening. I wish that a country like Ghana will also have institutional arrangements for candidates aspiring for the highest office of the land to stand on their toes to project their ideals through institutionalized Presidential Debates as happens in the US. Only then will they give the electorate the opportunity to assess them more pointedly before Election Day.
The impulsive and erratic approach by the Institute of Economic Affairs isn’t credible or reliable, which explains why the NDC would disdain it and throw its plans overboard. That explains why despite attempts to get the NPP’s Akufo-Addo to attend the IEA’s forum, he hasn’t been forthcoming.
If we have constitutional provisions regarding the Presidential debates and other steps, the situation may change for the better. Growing our democracy demands that we adopt productive innovations, learning from our failures and designing better approaches for the good of governance. And good governance depends on the calibre of people put in charge of affairs.
Don’t tell me that it has taken the US over 200 years to refine its democracy to give us the crystal that we see today and that we have a young democracy and shouldn’t attempt “copying” what we see happening there. We will be sloppy in our thinking and stupid in our approach if we push everything along that line.
Once we see the good aspects of democracy in any part of the world that exposes our inadequacies, nothing prevents us from thinking deeply about our circumstances and how to improve governance by learning from those happenings. After all, democracy is all about empowering the people to take charge of their lives, using governance by the elected representatives as the means.
Thus, if those elected representatives end up being the cause of the people’s woes, which in itself impedes the democratic growth, why not look for measures to refine the processes leading to the election of those representatives? All we need is the ability to think outside the box.
I believe strongly that once an institutionalized mechanism is established to subject the candidates to public scrutiny based on how they present themselves during Presidential debates, something more beneficial to national cause will emerge.
What we have seen now in the process toward Election 2016 is disheartening because the processes haven’t given the candidates the platform to contest ideas for the electorate to form opinions on. It’s the same old story.
How can we make progress, using the very wrong approaches that have placed us in the doldrums all these years? Why are we so lazy? Doing the same wrong thing over and over again, yet expecting better results? It doesn’t happen that way. Let’s think more deeply than we have done so far.
I shall return… Join me on Facebook at: http://www.facebook.com/mjkbokor to continue the conversation.
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