In two days' time, voters in the Great American Republic will decide for either 'John Obama' or 'Barack McCain' to be president. They will do so on behalf of the rest of the world, which has no vote but is behaving as if it does. The differences are not nearly as great as so many people seem to believe. The non-American world prefers Obama to McCain by nearly 4:1, sometimes by run-away margins, as in the case of this extremely anti-homosexuality country where 94.3 per cent of Jamaicans in an online poll back Obama who backs same-sex civil unions.
The reasons for Obamamania are not difficult to sum up: For black people, the race factor is the overwhelmingly dominant one. Full stop. For the underdogs of this world, the majority of humankind, Obama is a champion of their cause in their quest for status.
Dreams for change
For the youth of the world, Obama is close to their generation, one of them speaking their language and articulating their dreams for positive change in a degenerating world. For the humanist dreamers in search of a new, peaceful multilateral world order, Obama is the man to lead the global village in that direction. For the haters of Old America, Obama represents a wind of change for the emergence of a new America.
McCain is almost totally an American candidate, bereft of any real global standing. And the reason for the strength of his American support is easy to sum up: McCain stands for nostalgic Old America, for safety behind the border, backed by military might, to pursue the American dream in the land of the brave and the free with a manifest destiny to lead the free world. He is a military man, a decorated war hero, one who sacrificed and suffered on the field of battle for the grand ideals of the Republic, ideals which are under severe pressure from both internal change and external challenge.
Neither camp will get what they think they are voting for, should their candidate win.
However America decides on Tuesday, its next president will be only the titular head of a vast bureaucracy with a supermind and stubborn will of its own. The massive growth of the modern state over the course of the 20th century, a growth fuelled to a large extent by mega-wars for which the state hijacked massive amounts of resources, has made heads of state and government mere managers of huge, complex bureaucracies.
This growth of the state has been comprehensively documented by British historian and social commentator, Paul Johnson, among others, in his work, Modern Times. And the introduction to a collection of papers on The Politicization of Society noted that the papers were concerned with politicisation, the central problem of modern society, the growth of the state and the significance of this for the individual. Politicisation is "that pervasive tendency for making all questions political questions, all issues political issues, all values political values, and all decisions political decisions".
Delusional madness
Accompanying politicisation was the decline of rationality and an increase in the millennial expectations of the governed. These features are palpably evident in the US presidential campaign. There is a collective global delusional madness over the American presidential election, which is darkly ominous and which I have been assiduously trying to avoid.
As an Associated Press 'America Decides' story carried by The Gleaner last Wednesday succinctly put it: "Economy overshadows all."
America and the world are facing the most severe financial crisis since the Great Depression, which began in 1929. On January 21, 2009, the day after the swearing-in of either John Obama or Barack McCain, the first order of business will be dealing with that crisis, which has already seen an unprecedented state ownership of financial institutions. And America, with either candidate as president, will be looking after its interests, first, second, third ... . No president will have the kind of latitude of a Franklin Roosevelt for the new deal, which itself magnificently contributed to the growth of the American state. Ronald Reagan, a recent great president committed to taming the state, was not able to alter in any sustained or fundamental way the Great American Drift.
And while Obama and McCain are debating tax cuts, and Medicare, and Joe the plumber, a far deeper fundamental issue is how either of them will deploy the power of the world's sole hyper-power. Contrary to the audacious hope of the Obama world, great powers have never been constrained by multilateralism, and the United States will be no exception, certainly not by a toothless United Nations.
In the face of a number of critical threats, the American state can be expected to respond in essentially the same imperial way, whoever is president. The system will not allow otherwise. Among those critical threats are terrorism, supplies of critical resources, including energy, the global economy and trade, and, internally, social and environmental decay, increasing disorder, and cries for safety and security.
Personal powerlessness in an omni-competent state combined with factional hatreds and passions in a decaying moral order, is a recipe for increased social strife as the contributors to The Politicization of Society so clearly saw and warned.
Mounting disorder
Arthur Shenfield, British economist and lawyer, picked up the theme in a Modern Age article years ago: As democracy decays, mounting disorder will arise in which even committed democrats will come to believe that only the agonising choice between authoritarian and totalitarian government remains open to them. The trends are too clear in the United States and Western democracies to be missed by thoughtful persons not caught up in political manias.
The process of democratic degeneration, Shenfield argues, proceeds as the general interest becomes subordinated to various sectional group interests. It is not the desire of the majority which prevails, but those of fluctuating coalitions of minorities - a precise description of the American state and its politics today. The system is unstable. There is mounting discontent, which, of course, attracts more and more repressive measures.
"We have no government armed in power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Our Constitution was made only for a religious and moral people. It is wholly inadequate for the government of any other," one of the framers of the Constitution and second president, John Adams, frankly told the US Army in a 1798 address.
America has largely abandoned this basis for the functionality of its Constitution.
In terms of the truly major and relentless trend lines of American society and politics, with the rest of humanity tagging along in mass delusion as the whole world wonders after the Americans, there really is very little to differentiate 'John Obama' from 'Barack McCain'.
Martin Henry is a communications consultant who may be reached at medhen@gmail.com. Feedback may also be sent to columns@gleanerjm.com.
