Proponiamo oggi un articolo di Dani Rodrik, economista di Harvard, sulle elezioni americane e su come sia malridotta la democrazia in America. Colpa soprattutto di un Partito Repubblicano (che conquista comunque quasi il 50% dei voti) che sembra vivere ancora in un mondo pre-moderno. Ma certo anche i Democratici non sono proprio un esempio di bella politica
di Dani Rodrik
With its presidential
election over, the United States can finally take a breather from
campaign politics, at least for a while. But an uncomfortable question
lingers: How is it possible for the world’s most powerful country and
its oldest continuous democracy to exhibit a state of political
discourse that is more reminiscent of a failed African state?
Maybe
that is too harsh an assessment of Africa’s nascent democracies. If you
think I exaggerate, you have not been paying close attention. The
pandering to extremist groups, the rejection of science, the outright
lies and distortions, and the evasion of the real issues that
characterized the most recent election cycle set a new low for
democratic politics.
Without
question, the worst offenders are America’s Republicans, whose leaders
have somehow become enraptured by ideas that are beyond the pale in
other advanced countries. Of the party’s dozen presidential candidates,
only two (Mitt Romney and Jon Huntsman) declined to reject scientific
evidence concerning global warming and its human causes. But, when
pressed on it, Romney was sufficiently uncomfortable about his position
that he
wobbled on the issue.
The
Darwinian theory of evolution has long been a dirty word among
Republicans as well. Rick Perry, the governor of Texas and an early
frontrunner in the Republican primary,
called it
just a “theory out there,” while Romney himself has had to argue that
it is consistent with creationism – the idea that an intelligent force
designed the universe and brought it into being.
Likewise,
if there is an archaic idea in economics, it is that the US should
return to the Gold Standard. Yet, this idea, too, has strong support
within the Republican Party – led by Ron Paul, another contender for the
party’s presidential nomination. No one was surprised when the party’s
platform gave a nod to the Gold Standard in its convention in August.
Most
non-Americans would find it crazy that neither Romney nor Barack Obama
supported stricter gun-control laws (with Obama making an exception only
for assault weapons such as AK-47s), in a country where it is sometimes
easier to buy guns than it is to vote. Most Europeans cannot understand
how, in a civilized country, both candidates can favor the death
penalty. And I won’t even get into the abortion debate.
Candidate
Romney was so cowed by his party’s obsession with low taxes that he
never put forth a budget that added up. It was left to his spinners to
explain, as
The Economist put it, that this was “necessary rubbish, concocted to persuade the fanatics who vote in the Republican primaries.”
Obama,
for his part, catered to economic nationalists by attacking Romney as
an “outsourcing pioneer” and calling him an “outsourcer in chief” – as
if outsourcing were evil, could be stopped, or Obama himself had done
much to discourage it.
So
rampant were the equivocations, untruths, and outright lies from both
camps that many media outlets and non-partisan groups maintained running
lists of factual distortions. One of the best known,
FactCheck.org,
an initiative of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University
of Pennsylvania, confessed that this campaign had kept them
exceptionally busy.
Some of the most
egregious examples
included Obama’s claims that Romney was planning to raise taxes by
$2,000 on middle-income taxpayers and/or cut taxes by $5 trillion, and
that Romney backed a law that would outlaw “all abortions, even in cases
of rape and incest.” Romney went even further, claiming that Obama
planned to raise taxes by $4,000 on middle-income taxpayers; that Obama
planned “to gut welfare reform by dropping work requirements”; and that
Chrysler, bailed out by the Obama administration, was moving all of its
Jeep production to China.
None of these claims was true.
“It’s
been that sort of campaign,” FactCheck.org’s analysts wrote, “filled
from beginning to end with deceptive attacks and counterattacks, and
dubious claims.”
Meanwhile,
over the course of three televised presidential debates and one
vice-presidential debate, climate change, the signature issue of our
time and the most serious problem confronting our planet, was not
mentioned even once.
One
can draw two possible conclusions from America’s election. One is that
the US will ultimately be undone by the poor quality of its democratic
discourse, and that it is merely at the start of an inevitable decline.
The symptoms are there, even if the disease has not yet infected the
entire body.
The
other possibility is that what is said and done during an election
makes little difference to a polity’s health. Campaigns are always a
time for cheap populism and kowtowing to single-issue fundamentalists.
Perhaps what really matters is what happens after a candidate takes
office: the quality of the checks and balances within which he or she
operates, the advice offered, the decisions taken, and, ultimately, the
policies pursued.
But,
if American elections are nothing other than entertainment, why is so
much money spent on them, and why do so many people get so exercised
over them? Can the answer be that the outcome would be even worse
otherwise?
To
paraphrase Winston Churchill, elections are the worst way to select a
political leader, save for all other methods that have been tried – and
nowhere more so than in America.
fonte: http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/the-us-presidential-election-and-america-s-debased-democracy-by-dani-rodrik
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