The Road Ahead: It’s Not Perfect, But Democracy Is The Best Instrument We Have

Democracy is about reconciling individual goals with collective good, liberty with order, and short-term needs with long term prosperity

I am writing this piece on November 2, just days before the bitterly contested, highly polarising election in the United States. In some ways the US election resembles our own elections in India. Increasingly, mistrust and animosity bordering on hatred have become the staple of politics and election campaigns.

As I reflect on the US elections, I am reminded of the year 1974. On August 9, 1974 President Richard Nixon resigned from office. Relative to what is happening in the US today, and our own experience of habitual abuse of power in India, Nixon’s infractions were minor. He was essentially accused of obstruction justice in the aftermath of the Watergate Hotel burglary. Nixon had no knowledge or role in the bungled burglary of the Democratic National Committee headquarters in the Watergate Hotel. It was the folly of overenthusiastic minions who wanted to steal the secrets and strategies of opponents for electoral advantage. Nixon was regarded as a successful president and was hugely popular in 1972; he was reelected by a landslide receiving 60.7% of the vote, sweeping 49 states and winning 520 of the 538 electoral votes. The Watergate burglary was a stupid blunder. Nixon’s culpability was that after he came to know of it, he did not order full investigation and prosecution of the culprits in his own reelection committee; indeed he was accused of using CIA to obstruct FBI investigation. Nixon denied the accusations. Both houses of US Congress acted with remarkable bipartisanship and thoroughly investigated the scandal. The FBI acted independently. Judge Sirica, a federal district judge, acted with fairness and firmness going into the roots of the incident. When Nixon refused to release the Oval Office tape recordings of the President’s conversations on grounds of executive privilege, the Supreme Court directed the release of the tapes. The public was outraged that the President lied to them about attempts to obstruct justice. Senior Republican leaders including the arch-conservative Barry Goldwater informed Nixon that most Republican Senators would vote for his removal. Nixon chose to resign even before the House of Representatives voted to impeach the President, and before the Senate began impeachment proceedings.

Many of my generation — then in our teens or twenties — were profoundly influenced by the contrast between the strength of American democracy and its institutions of accountability, and the endemic abuse of power, partisanship, corruption and obstruction of justice in our own country. That changed the course of our lives. I, for one, decided to dedicate my life to the cause of democracy, opportunity and prosperity in India. Now, when we look back over the past half a century, there has been vast improvement in our lives on account of technology and economic growth. Both the US and India retained democratic freedoms and there is fierce political competition. There has been peaceful transfer of power and some degree of civility prevailed in political discourse. But increasingly elections are fought like wars, and as in war, all is treated as fair. There are permanent campaigns. Abuse and vitriol have replaced reasoned debate. Lies and slander became the staple of politics. There is increasing propensity to reject election verdicts.

The US elections are the business of the US citizens. Those of us outside the US have no say in US elections; but the world has stakes in US election outcomes, policies and processes. As the first democracy and republic in the modern era, the US is widely seen as a standard bearer of liberty and democracy. As the world’s largest and most diverse democracy with longest continuing civilisation, India is seen as an example a successful democratic experiment in a post-colonial society.

Democracy is about reconciling individual goals with collective good, liberty with order, and short-term needs with long term prosperity. Democracy is not a perfect instrument; but it the best instrument human history has come up with. Plato argued in ‘The Republic’ that if philosophers are kings and kings are philosophers, there is no need for laws. We can trust the philosophers to decide for us. But as a wiser and older man, he realised that a philosopher rarely become a king; if he becomes a king, a philosopher-king rarely remains a philosopher for long; and in any case people rarely obey a philosopher. That is why he wrote ‘The Laws’, and imagined Magnesia as the best attainable city given defects of human nature. We don’t need the unattainable Utopias based on ideal vision. We need practical Magnesias to make most of the opportunities that today’s world offers. No matter what the outcome of the US election is, let us hope good sense will prevail, and democracy will triumph.