Nach dem 3. November hat niemand mehr einen Anreiz, hohe Ausgaben abzusegnen – schließlich können die Wählerinnen und Wähler sie wegen ihres Nichtstuns dann nicht mehr strafen. Aus Bidens Umfeld verlautet bereits, dass man möglicherweise vor leeren Kassen sitzen werde und deshalb wenig Gestaltungsraum habe. Und die Republikaner dürften nach einer möglichen Wahlniederlage Trumps in alte Muster verfallen und sich gegen alles sperren, was die Demokraten vorschlagen.
Deshalb wäre es dem US-amerikanischen Volk zu wünschen, dass sowohl Trump als auch Pelosi ihre Egos überwinden und endlich zusammenfinden – nicht nur um den Menschen zu helfen, sondern auch um eine weitere Erosion des Vertrauens in die politischen Institutionen zu verhindern.
This last phrase struck me as quite odd. Trust which political institutions to do what? When hundreds of American billionaires are raking in record profits, the Democratic Party refuses to work out relief for an American populace facing bankruptcies, evictions, and starvation during a worldwide pandemic. After this latest spasm of voting what will it be realistic, what will it be sane for the American public to trust the Democratic Party to do?
To criticize one’s country is to do it a service and pay it a compliment. It is a service because it may spur the country to do better than it is doing; it is a compliment because it evidences a belief that the country can do better than it is doing. „This,“ said Albert Camus in one of his „Letters to a German Friend,“ is „what separated us from you; we made demands. You were satisfied to serve the power of your nation and we dreamed of giving ours her truth…“
—Senator J. William Fulbright
My dad had the Fulbright quote up on the wall over his desk in our home during Vietnam, when I was young, and I posted it over my own desk years later, after America’s Second Gulf War, hoping it would inspire my son as it had inspired me. It’s the first paragraph in Fulbright’s 1966 The Arrogance of Power. Part I, The Higher Patriotism, begins with Chapter 1, The Citizen and the University. I read The Arrogance of Power in the mid 1970s, before I had any experience of university. Fulbright continues
In a democracy dissent is an act of faith. Like medicine, the test of its value is not its taste but its effect, not how it makes people feel at the moment but how it makes them feel and moves them to act in the long run.
For decades faith in US democracy seemed to me a virtue, sacrifice in the service of which was noble. At what point though does unredeemed virtue become naïveté, when are actions no longer sacrifice but rather self-harm? It seems to me that the moment when one realizes one is married to a psychotic further acts of faith are misplaced, and the better part of valour entails simply getting out.