With elections around the corner, there has been much talk about Guyanese democracy. Cheddi and Janet Jagan have ‘single handedly’ been responsible for the political dysfunctional context we now call Guyana that exists without that level of democratic culture that is essential for transforming groups of different people into nations. Look around: unlike our traditional Caricom partners who began their democratic experiment in about the 1950s, the socialisation process of Guyana and its political elites over the last three quarters of a century has been within an autocratic context that resulted from the naive unilateral political behaviour of the Jagans.
Recently, I read an article stating that some American academics were planning to migrate to Canada because of ‘American descent into fascism’ under the present Donald Trump administration. It reminded me of my time at the University in Wales in the United Kingdom, when Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher was in a ding-dong battle with the trade union movement, particularly the coal mining unions, and in 1983 was about to run for her second term as prime minister.
A few academics considered her a threat to British democracy and stated their intention to migrate to Australia, etc. if Thatcher and her Conservative Party should win the elections. She won and later defeated the trade unions, but to my recollection, no one migrated and although under tremendous stress from the dynamics arising from globalisation, migration and cultural adaptations, democracy, with which the British have been experimenting since the Magna Carta of 1215, is still alive.
According to one academic, the ‘The United States is in the process of an autocratic takeover and it’s directed by a regime that I don’t think will want to leave power’ (https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/yale-professor-moving-to-university-of-toronto-trump-administration-1.7494704). Others view what is taking place as reminiscent of the 1934 to 1945 Nazi capture of the German state that led to intolerable conditions and ultimately to the loss of some 80 million lives in World War 11.
Like the UK, the people of the USA have had a substantial association with the democratic process, and for this reason my position is more optimistic. While America has had nearly 250 years of democratic governance, the first German democratic constitution was enacted in 1918 and lasted until end of the World 11 in 1945. Indeed, just about 65 years before Hitler came to government, what we today call Germany was a mishmash of warring independent principalities.
It is thanks to Chancellor Otto von Bismarck that they were brought together as a single state that he ruled from 1871-90, but he ‘failed to rise above the authoritarian proclivities of the landed squirearchy to which he was born’ (https://www.britannica.com/biography/Otto-von-Bismarck). For the most part, then, dictatorship was still the natural order of things when the Nazi party was formed in 1910 and when it took government in 1934.
America has had centuries of democratic socialisation and cultural diversity, the latter being fundamentally buttressed by the former. One only needs to consider the difficulties the Trump administration must overcome at the judicial, state, and national levels to get its way on some of its more questionable policies to understand that much of the freedoms modern Americans cherish rest on a democratic foundation. My assessment tells me that most of those who supported Trump did so with the understanding that he would improve and not destroy the democratic process.
For example, their attack on the ‘deep state’ is in their perception an attack on bureaucratic malformations they believe are undermining the democratic state. So, like the British, the democratic groundings of the US are too strong and it is highly unlikely to give way to the autocratic extremes some predict. Perhaps too, it is not such a bad thing for the resilience of the democratic state to be periodically tested and progressively reformed.
What the above teaches is what is well known: ‘political traditions play a crucial role in shaping governance, influencing political behaviour, and maintaining cultural continuity within societies.’ If democratic socialisation is so important for the formation and maintenance of a democratic state, Guyana’s autocratic status in not surprising. Unlike any other British Caribbean state, its entire history has been that of autocratic rule. At the level of the state, Guyana modern political history, starting from around the 1950s, consisted of about 15 years of colonial political manipulation to keep the PPP from government, 3 decades of the PNC’s continuing this process, about one decade of democratic experimentation and 3 decades of PPP autocratic rule.
In his West on Trial Cheddi Jagan complained that the British had gerrymandered the 1957 elections against him so badly that he had a meeting with the colonial secretary and accused him of rigging the system so that the PPP will lose. The colonial secretary agreed that such had indeed been the intention! Of course, such a brazen response was clearly intended to send the message to the Jagans that the West was in possession of his 1951 letter to the international communist movement requesting help to take not only Guyana but the entire Caribbean into the dictatorial communist fold. What Cheddi did not understand was that no one would have allowed him to use his ethnic base to introduce Soviet communism and thus end liberal democracy.
By even preventing the introduction of alternative democratic pathways when it was offered to the PPP by the colonial authorities, its behaviour set in train not only the Venezuela border problem, but the autocratisation of the Guyanese mind and both are still with us today. Forbes Burnham did not begin election manipulation: he was merely the benefactor of a quite legitimate position.
At the level of the parties, both the PPP and the PNC began their lives as a form of that democratic centralist monstrosity in which the party leadership, and particularly the leader, has total control over the members. About a decade ago, the PNC discarded democratic centralism and is today much more transparent and democratic than the PPP. If nothing else, the factional struggle that has just been taking place within that party is a testimony to its better democratic credentials and the teething problems it still faces.
For the most part the entire population and the political elite in Guyana are more like those of Nazi Germany; they only have a most tenuous intellectual commitment to democracy. When this is added to decades of ethnic political disassociation, it is no surprise that the PPP, like the Nazi party, has captured the state and at this election time has unleashed all the elements of elections manipulation: gerrymandering, vote buying, digitally hacking to change the narrative of the debate, spreading fake news or simply inventing the results, and seeking to dupe the international community into legitimizing a poor-quality poll.
