Tuesday 14 November 2000

Pic of the day: Time to consider monarchy? :)
Screenshot from the RPG Daggerfall, featuring the King and Queen of Wayrest.

Detestable elections

I live in Norway, which is across a mighty big pond from the USA. Despite this, even here we get a seemingly endless stream of news reports about the US presidential election. I guess it really is important to the world. Not least to Norway, which has strong ties to the USA in many ways: Culturally, military and in trade. We are the most Americanized nation on our continent, as you may already have noticed. Our economy is very open, dependent on international trade. And the USA is the main engine of that trade, and so indirectly of our own economy. In the New Economy - IT and communication - the ties are even more direct. So I guess it really matters.

And besides, the entertainment value is just enormous.

***

Unlike many other journal writers, my sympathy is mostly with the rightmost party, the Republicans. I dislike their unholy alliance with religious fanatics who consider ignorance a good thing. But I love their historical support for free trade, and their scepticism to unconditional handouts. You can see in Europe what happens if you pay people generously for not working. You get a permanent "non working class", and eventually it is inherited. You get children who grow up with only vague notions of what it would be like to earn your own money. That's a scary thought.

Free trade is not a minor issue either, if you thought that. Look at when the world last fell into a spiral of protectionism and isolationism, after the stock market crash in the late 1920es. It gave us the Great Depression, and later it gave us the flowering of nazism and fascism. Dark powers thrive on human misery, and the breakdown of trade creates misery and plenty of it.

More is the pity that the Republican party could not come up with a better candidate than Bush Jr.

I must concede that I have a bias based on my personal history with dumb jocks. But even apart from that, I really think that being the leader of the free world (such as it is) requires much more than the average. Bush is slightly above average. Let us face it, the long string of funny quotes must make his father wince. Either the boy is not nearly as bright as you and me and Al Gore, or he gets confused under pressure. I'm not sure which is the worst, take your pick.

Now that Bush seems to be winning on a technicality, without a mandate from the people, he ought to be a paragon of humility. If anything, he should instigate a slow-moving process to consider possible revision of the election system. Nothing that would be finished within the next four years, of course, and very vague. But still enough to make him a hero. Instead, he is acting just as shrill and angsty as Gore, who is losing quite unfairly.

***

Not that I believe for a moment that there is any actual tampering in favor of Bush anywhere. It's just a bad case of ossified election system. We have similar flaws here.

In electing the legislative body here in Norway (the Storting), votes in some provinces count for more than in others. Generally the rural provinces with dwindling population retain a high number of representatives, while the growing urban areas have fewer. Like the USA, we have also quite often a distribution of voters that hovers around 50% leftist and 50% rightist, though we have more parties and so there is more like a continuity from left to right. Our government typically exists on the sufferance of the legislative branch, a situation called "parliamentarism". And so our ossified election system could have even more dramatic consequences than in the USA, where power is more equally distributed between the different branches: Legislative, judicial and executive.

Luckily, Norway is a small and quite peaceful nation. Even when we have trouble putting together a government (and this seems almost the rule lately), we're not descending into anything like civil war. And besides, with a smaller population than central New York, we're mostly harmless anyway! :)

But hopefully these election antics can wake up some more people to see the need for more direct democracy. It's time to trust the people, for you can't trust the system.