THIS ARTICLE has been prompted by the January 21 American and global protest of women against United States President Donald Trump, less than 24 hours after his official swearing-in as president.
The natural democratic instinct which propelled the mass mobilisation of such large, determined numbers of American citizens at the very commencement of the term of a new president stood in stark contrast to the tendency in the Caribbean to equate mass demonstrations with an attack on democracy.
I have often encountered this limited Caribbean understanding of democracy in my role as public political commentator whenever I offer critical analyses of newly elected Caribbean leaders and governments. Partisan and even neutral persons often angrily insist that I should “give the governments a chance” since they “have just been given a mandate” from the people.
As a region which only tasted formal democracy in the 1950s to 1960s, we are yet to accept that populations have a right to democratic action, beyond the act of voting.
We still have not understood that populations have a legitimate right to protest against governments and leaders to whom they are opposed. We have made much of John Locke’s idea of majority rule, but we downplay his equally important and related idea of “government by consent of the governed” and the “right to revolution” against governments which betray the public trust.
Conservative Caribbean publics baulk at Locke’s notion of the right to revolution, since to them, it is equated with anarchy, chaos and instability. The main area of doubt in Locke’s formulation is the important question of the criteria for determining when a government has lost the legitimacy of the people. The democratically limited Caribbean response to this question is that we should “wait for the election”.
Last weekend, on Errol Barrow Day no less, it was indeed gratifying that the American women were able to demonstrate that a far more mature, progressive and democratic response is possible.
Like Trotsky, their response seems to have been that “the only justification for the mass uprising is the mass uprising itself”. Indeed, there is little doubt that the global anti-Trump mass movement is justified and legitimate, since his campaign provided ample evidence of bad government.
We, the Caribbean, have developed the strange habit of picking and choosing our favourite aspects of “America”. We imbibe its low culture, its mind-numbing movies, its crass materialism, individual greed and unhealthy eating habits, but we ignore its revolutionary democratic tradition. We constantly praise American democracy, but we sit like sheep and accept bad government. In recent times, we appear to have totally forgotten our traditions of mass democratic, progressive politics.
Perhaps the main benefit of a Trump presidency is that it might have ignited a global social movement which can potentially advance Caribbean social democracy from its current defeatist state.
•Tennyson Joseph is a political scientist at the University of the West Indies, Cave Hill Campus, specialising in regional affairs. Email: [email protected]
