What we’re Hearing is the Howl of the Disempowered

Curious, on a continent where there are laws like France’s Article 49.3, and a treaty of the fate of the sovereignty of their national governments isn’t put to a vote, that these very people give themselves reason after reason to be fearful and start howling about not being able to manipulate the United States Presidential election. Perhaps it’s this very perversion of the legitimacy of their own democracies that gives them the breathing room to have impassioned opinions about the state of the state at all, because with US elections one is more likely to feel that they actually matter in a way that their own don’t.

Indeed, there can be no doubt that a President Obama would represent the most dramatic conceivable break with George W. Bush and the widespread European perception that America has turned into a trigger-happy rogue state run by a fundamentalist Christian nut job. In electing a young black politician with a Muslim father, Americans would do something that is pretty much unthinkable in any country in Europe, where politics are traditionally dominated by a white old boy's club (notable exceptions like German chancellor Angela Merkel notwithstanding). In this context, however, Europeans must not forget that Obama (despite having a very Europe-savvy foreign policy team) is not known to be an Atlanticist.

Now if they’ll only come to find some reason to have a similar faith in their own access to a reasonable form of pluralism, they might stop helplessly trying to poison our elections in the way they’ve succeeded to manipulate the political life of societies over which they have actual influence such as those of sub-Saharan Africa.

Euro-thumpers need to stop putting lipstick on a pig. The standing of solid democracy is as vacuous as the public understanding of it, and yet so many of them feel qualified and compelled to think that they want to have a hand in ours’ at the expense of the very notion on sovereignty.

In contrast the bombastic overblown popcorn rhetoric of the Constitution of the European Union is routinely debauched by a largely self-perpetuating oligarchy which mouths the mantras of democracy and transparency but which behind closed doors subverts that very same democracy. And given the deliberate obscurity and bloated nature of its language, no citizen of the Union will find himself inclined to use the Constitution as a touchstone for anything: he is, given its sheer size and weight, more likely to use it as a door-stop.

In Reality, they’re no less tyrannized by their governments as they were in the 20th century. What we’re hearing is the howl of the disempowered yearning for their own civic life to be meaningful, and they only way they know how to express that need is in the resentment of a straw man of their own making.