Monday, April 7, 2008
The Next American Revolution
to a Latin American Eye
By Sergio Aguayo Quezada
· An absorbing electoral contest in the United States may be the prelude to a transformation in the country's
profile in Latin America and beyond, says Sergio Aguayo Quezada.
The United States presidential election
on 4 November 2008 will presage the departure of the conservative right from the White House, a process that will culminate
in the inauguration of the country's forty-fourth president on 20 January 2009. This will also be the end of a cycle of history.
It is appropriate at such a moment both to draw a balance-sheet of the receding political period and to anticipate the possible
shape of the next.
On the surface the liturgy of transition is – to a Latin American eye – familiar to
the point of tedium. The process remorselessly champions the exceptional character of the "American dream," choreographs endless
mini-dramas against the backdrop of the nation's flag and colors – while battering the egos of all those who aspire
to the post. It is as if religion's judgment of character has been transplanted to the political cycle, whereby any inconsistency
or infidelity is an occasion for the country to remind its candidates that they are ultimately at the service of the citizens.
The public dissection is carried out, moreover, with that very American mixture of Puritanism and acid wit, mixed with a bit of superstition.
In a democracy, great political transformations
find expression, in one way or another, during elections. This year, on the Democratic front, a woman and an African-American are engaged in an epic tug-of-war for the banner of "change" which has already broken box-office records in
the United States and the world. This dispute – and the fact that the Republican candidate is in a different mould from
the ideological current that has dominated the White House for eight years – emphasizes the fact that a chapter of history
that has transformed the United States and humanity is coming to an end.
The
shifting tide
The retreat of the neo-conservative hegemony in Washington is a historic event. The ideological
right will leave the White House comprehensively discredited as a result of the invasion of Iraq and the economic recession. In either case, its somber record can be rendered in numbers – by counting
coffins or adding zeros to the budget and trade deficits.
At the same time, an impressive and enduring element
in United States political culture is the capacity to recover from disarray by a form of activist self-encouragement (the
"can-do" syndrome). That ability to rethink and reinvent oneself is an integral part of the American experience, and precedents
abound.
At the turn of the 20th century, Theodore Roosevelt embodied the "progressive" reformism that moderated some of the excesses of the untamed capitalism that had
so exacerbated social discontent. During the 1930s, Franklin D Roosevelt responded to the great depression with large-scale schemes of state intervention that both reactivated the country's economic life and redefined the state's own role in
the larger political economy.
The next United States president may be obliged to play a comparable major role as the
architect of a new domestic order. But the drama that will culminate in George W Bush's departure from the stage has significant
international dimensions too. The next president will inherit from President Bush a society confused as to its role and place in a world
that, for the most part, consistently rejects conservative and neo-liberal policies. This represents a retreat of the tide
that carried Ronald Reagan to the US presidency in 1980 to lead what became in effect a worldwide political and economic revolution (whose
gospel to the collectivist world had two basic commandments: "thou shalt have clean and trustworthy elections, and thou shalt
make structural adjustments in order to establish a market economy even more extreme than ours").
Now, almost thirty
years on, the paradigms are changing. This is becoming obvious even in Washington, where the series of reports that recognizes
the mistakes and excesses both of the neo-liberal years and of the Iraq war is increasing in volume month by month. The Inter-American Development Bank's annual report, for example, recognizes that social exclusion – an indicator of the appalling imbalance
in the distribution of income in the region, just one legacy of the entire conservative era – is the "most dangerous
threat that democracy faces in Latin America and the Caribbean" (see Gustavo Márquez,
¿Los de afuera?, Informe de Progreso Económico y Social ; BID,
2008).
The lost superpower
History has
never been either uni-causal or predetermined. If the approach to the second world war created a propitious context for Mexico
to nationalize its oil, and for Juan Domingo Perón to make it into power to twist the already twisted Argentinean psyche, the result of the invasion of Iraq has been to broaden Latin America's margins of autonomy – in
a way that the left has taken advantage of. The most extreme expression of multi-causality can be observed on Cuban territory.
The United States’ military base at Guantánamo Bay on the eastern tip of the island has seen the establishment of an infamous jail for prisoners of a distant war
that in turn opened spaces for the Cuban regime in Latin America.
These are, then, promising times to imagine what new political balances might be emerging.
The relevant questions include:
• Where does the western hemisphere
as a whole stand in relation to the readjustment of world power in these first years of the century?
• How will the United States try to recover its diminished influence – and lost spaces – in Latin America?
• How will those countries that took advantage in order to occupy those void spaces react?
A couple
of decades ago, when the Berlin wall started to crack, American conservatives boasted that history had ended and that they
had won. Their country is still a superpower but it would be absurd to place bets on the place that the United States will
occupy in a decade. In part, that will depend on what happens in this year's presidential election – the focus of a
competition so fascinating, so novel and so charged that, at times, what is truly relevant becomes obscured. But even if its
essence can only be glimpsed amid the spectacle, Latin Americans too can continue to appreciate a passionate and educative
contest.
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Sergio
Aguayo Quezada is a professor at Mexico’s El Colegio de México. His website is http://www.sergioaguayo.org. This article
originally appeared on openDemocracy.net on April 4, 2008, and is published by Sergio Aguayo Quezada and openDemocracy.net under a Creative Commons license.
This article was translated by Alfonsina Peñaloza.
