It’s over for 20th Century Democracy.

Democracy can claim to be the best form of government by virtue of what it prevents rather than what it produces. The Hitlers and Stalins and Pol Pots of this world cannot tolerate it. The oil-rich sheikdoms pay petrodollars to keep it at bay. African kleptocrats, like Robert Mugabe, tear it down if they cannot pervert it. The Junta in Myanmar prefers to see its citizens die rather than risk the entry of aid workers than might even smell of democracy.

Democracy has a freeing power. It legitimizes opposition and gives it a voice that is not so easy to drown out. Once installed it is difficult to destroy.

Nevertheless, in much of the free world, democracy has been subverted, derailed and replaced by a form of plutocracy. In many countries big business has sunk its hooks into government and now pulls many of the strings of legislation. There is a rational edge to this, because it ensures that the expertise of big business can be leveraged by government and its concerns are known. However, big business has a tendency to corrupt, given half a chance, and when it holds the reins of power, it writes its own “contracts of behavior” and makes its own laws against the interests of the citizenry. Democracy is circumvented.

This is what happened in the US, particularly in the past 8 years:

Government of the people, for the plutocrats, by the plutocrats.

We have witnessed the tearing down of firewalls in environmental protection, in the financial sector, in the energy sector. The vested interests have sung the same song in every corner of the nation. The lobbyists have written the legislation and the voters have been ignored or kept in the dark. The decency of America, and the constitution itself, have been compromised - by Guantanamo, by military outsourcing and by officially sanctioned torture.

This malleable form of 20th century democracy, is coming to an end, and rightly so.

The Obama Factor

It is fairly clear that, barring “an October surprise”, Barack Obama will be the next president of the United State. Those with strong political views, who are backing him, may have particular goals in mind for his term (or terms) of office. However, it is fairly clear that whatever Obama’s cherished goals are, a great deal of his administration’s time is going to be devoted to the repair work that now needs to be done; to damaged social structures, to a damaged economy, to a damaged foreign policy and to an ecologically damaged world.

Only when he moves beyond these urgent tasks will it be clear where exactly Obama lies on the broad spectrum from liberal to conservative that is used to define political color in the US. We can fervently hope that Obama’s presidency, should it come to pass, will find its place in the history books as one that resonates with the ideals of the founding fathers and the spirit of America.

But in one very important way - it may not matter too much:

The Obama campaign has already broken the democratic mold.

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