Dismayed by democracy

After a week of relatively mild but rainy weather, today is crisp and clear. I probably won't spend much time blogging before I go out for some manual labor.

It was election time again in the US, and once again I find myself disappointed and dismayed: disappointed that it will now be even harder for President Obama to accomplish anything, and dismayed by the impatience of the American voters. President Obama failed to perform miracles, thus we can turn our backs on him and leave his hands tied. This article (American Public Gets Exactly What it Deserves) seems to sum it up nicely. Yes, I realize that the Onion is satire, and it's not true in a literal sense, but I do believe there is a lot of truth in it. We do want instant gratification. Show me the money, and do it now!

I am also dismayed, no downright shocked, that Californians would once again elect Jerry Brown as governor. He ran the state into a financial crisis the first time. How on earth could people believe he could dig the state out of one? On a more positive note, I'm encouraged that the city of Westminster (near where I grew up in California) has voted to lift the ban on fireworks.

Closer to home, I recently spoke with a friend who was running for city council. "How'd it go," I asked, of course. It's been weeks since the election, so they had finally figured out the results. "Both good and bad," was his reply. There are 49 seats on the city/county council (complete overkill for a county of only about 18,000 people, in my opinion) and he's a member of the traditionally dominant party, so one might expect him to have a chance.

So here's where democracy totally breaks down. In Sweden, one votes for a party. Within that party, candidates are listed in order, and one has the option of checking a box for an individual candidate. These checked boxes can move people up on the list, or that's at least what they're for in a theoretical sense. My friend was in the middle of the list, so he would have to pass some people up in order to make it into the city council for his party. Exactly how many spots his party would have on the council depended on their percentage of the total vote.

It turned out that once again, his party dominated and got quite a few seats. Within the party, he got the second most votes. I started congratulating him, for certainly that meant he would get seat number two, right? Wrong! It turned out he didn't get a seat at all. Apparently all the people who had seats in the previous term got to keep their seats. Only if one of them decided not to continue would a new person have a chance of getting in. It didn't matter at all if anyone had voted for these people in years! Needless to say, they're all old white men, and many of them don't do anything to contribute to the city council except for warming a chair and collecting a paycheck.

Meanwhile, all over the country on all different levels, unholy alliances are being forged in order to keep the newly elected right wing/anti-immigration Sweden Democrats out of power. I'll try to put this into a context that my American readers might relate to. Imagine a system where conservative republicans were on the right, ultra-liberal democrats were on the left, and there were 5 or more other parties in between. Now shift this entire scale so that moderate democrats are on the right, and communists are on the left. Now none of these 7 major parties gets enough votes to lead on its own, so they have traditionally divided themselves up so that 4 are on the right and 3 are on the left. While these parties can change alliances, it's not likely to happen. What happened this year was an eighth party with unpopular and politically incorrect ideas got voted into power not only on the national level but also in quite a few local districts. The election was close enough that neither the right or left alliance got a majority nationally or in a lot of districts, so this eighth party suddenly gets the swing vote. We don't know yet how this is going to work out on a national level. They'll probably have to try to negotiate new alliances for every issue that comes up. However, some local districts have solved this problem in a different way. The largest party on the right and the largest party on the left have formed an alliance and completely shut out all of the other parties. Needless to say, the other parties aren't too happy about this. The worst thing is, many of the people who voted to these two parties aren't too happy about it either. Clearly a lot of compromise will be needed in order for an alliance between conservative republicans and liberal democrats to be able to generate anything. Most likely, the result will be a whole lot of nothing.