Who would have thought that it would take a woman and a Methodist, Hillary Clinton, to give us some first-hand insight into what it must have been like to support a Renaissance pope – to be under no illusions about the venality but alsoto recognise that the self-serving, nepotistic opportunist was better than the available petty cruel tyrants parading themselves as kings?
And who would have thought that it would take a crass New York real estate mogul to give us first-hand understanding of the dilemmas faced by the senators dealing with one of the worse Roman emperors – or, for that matter, a Middle Eastern or Latin American strongman?
How many insults to bear for the sake of staving off the collapse of order? How to decide when the line between order and chaos has been crossed by the strongman himself?
Only in the US could a single general election have given us two such figures as Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. That is, two politicians who, in any other political system without the checks and balances of the US, would conceivably be much deadlier enemies to cross.
And there lies the lesson to draw from the exhausting, mind-numbing election that comes to a close next week. Conventional wisdom says that we only know what an individual is like when they wield power over others. Power reveals the man (or woman). Perhaps; but the reverse is also true and more important. The man reveals the nature of a political system.
A quarter of a century or more of scrutiny by the media has told us a lot about Clinton and Trump. Enough to be able to say with near certainty that either of them would feel at home operating in a political system with far less democratic scrutiny.
Trump’s sympathy for Vladimir Putin has been dwelt on by many commentators. But, arguably, the secretive, cold-eyed Clinton resembles the Russian dictator more: never missing a chance to shake a businessman for a donation, aware she is mistrusted but not caring, calculating she can mobilise enough support through her control over the party and media machine. No wonder no love is lost between them. They can read each other perfectly.
But the system in which Clinton and Trump operate is completely different to that which Putin dominates.
Trump might well wish to block all Muslims from entering the US. But the US Constitution prevents him from doing that. He might well wish to deport all undocumented immigrants by picking them off the streets and dumping them over the border – it does happen in some other countries. But the country’s laws prevent him from doing that without giving each migrant his or her day in court – a process that would take decades to complete if all migrants were tried.
Conventional wisdom says that we only know what an individual is like when they wield power over others
Clinton’s behaviour shows that she manifestly does not care for the laws that check her ability to operate. Her setting up of a private server in her home was not a naïve mistake. Her experience of the White House during her husband’s term in office taught her everything that was expected of high office and standards accountability. It was those standards that she sought to circumvent.
Despite her disdain for the law, however, the system still requires her to respect the rituals and protocols of the rule of law. Hence why she did eventually cooperate (to some degree) with the various inquiries into her multiple dealings.
Whatever her attitude, despite her network of influential friends, the US federal institutions still function with enough autonomy, and enjoy enough authority, to command even her compliance.
In most other liberal democracies, the lesson to be learned is banal but not in Malta: fixing the system, the checks and balances, should take precedence over the search for the personal saviour, the charismatic politician, heart in the right place, who’ll set things right because he’s not bound by the rules. The first is the cure. The second is the disease.
We are a country in perpetual search for the political leader who would grant us clean government; at the same time, we like knowingly to shrug and complain about something vague we call ‘Mediterranean culture’.
More mature democracies, however, do something else: they focus on strong institutions and watchdogs, giving these institutions all the prestige and backing by the media that they need. It is not that they have better, more moral people to begin with. It is the laws and the system that make gross abuse costly.
Contrast that with our confusion even as we talk about civic mindedness and a desire to clean up our own political system. More than once, we have pinned our hopes on a ‘third party’ (sometimes it’s actually a fourth) to act as a watchdog on the parties of government. How confused is that?
A political party is a player in the game; it cannot also act as arbiter. A political party has a legitimate right to be partisan – indeed, it is not a party if it is not. But a watchdog cannot be partisan. It is only a gross failure to appreciate how things work in a functioning democracy that can lead us to disregard the sheer incompatibility between being a political party and a democratic watchdog.
Despite all the unsavoury details that we have learned about the collusion of the major US media organisations with establishment politicians, the US press still gets a lot right.
It understands the US Constitution – and cares for it, not seeing it as a minor detail if the highest law is deemed to have been abused or broken, but a major story to be pursued.
It fact-checks its politicians – and grades them on the scale of their truthfulness and mendacity. During this election season, the New York Times has decided to ditch an old policy of never accusing a politician of outright lies – because it felt it would betray the truth not to call the lies told in this campaign by their name.
The US press respects high office – in many ways the US media are more formal than ours – and for that very reason has a strong sense of behaviour that is appropriate and inappropriate. Trump’s crassness has long been known – but what passed for a reality TV star is not acceptable in a Presidential candidate, and the press did call him out on it.
Good laws, autonomous watchdogs. We’ve seen them both vindicated as well as weakened in this US electoral cycle. Both the highs and the lows, however, gave us something to ponder about our own current system.
ranierfsadni@europe.com