219 – Country over Party; Patriotism over Person: A Liberian Example that Counters Creeping Fascism, and a Shock Triumph in Argentina
President Biden rightly called China’s President Xi Jinping a “dictator,” but then stumbled a bit when defining what that label actually meant. “Someone that rules over a country,” he said, implying that such rule was entirely personal, based – especially in the case of today’s China -- on very individual, even idiosyncratic, interpretations of what national decision paths should be followed or opportunities embraced.
Biden could also have explained, even to Xi, that dictators typically don’t allow “voice” – the opinions of their people – to influence decision-making. Voluntary political participation, the hallmark of democratic endeavors, is absent in dictatorships. Elections in dictatorships are only for show – as they are today across the globe in autocracies (like Zimbabwe and Tunisia) as well as clear-cut dictatorships.
Another hallmark of wannabe dictators like Trump and Javier Milei, who won an election yesterday in Argentina, are their constant undermining of democratic practices by deriding the electoral process as unfair (to them) and as riddled with process errors that only they discover or know about.
In Argentina, Milei, a confused libertarian with bizarre ideas on how to rescue his country from high levels of inflation and masses of corruption, claimed ever since he came in a distant second to Sergio Massa in September’s first-round presidential vote that he had been roundly cheated. But he and his campaign could never produce any evidence of cheating or of ballots being lost (echoing the 2020 American experience). Nor have they in the runup to yesterday’s second-round poll in Argentina.
Now, with Milei’s triumph (56 percent to 44 percent) over outgoing economy minister Sergio Massa, he no longer need complain. Instead, he must try to govern a country with 140 percent inflation and numerous other deep problems. Milei is pledging economic shock therapy, including shutting the central bank, ditching the local peso in favor of the U.S. dollar, and slashing spending -- potentially painful reforms that swayed voters angry at Argentina’s overwhelming economic malaise.
Trump, increasingly unhinged in his denial of Biden’s 2020 electoral victory, and increasingly loud in his racist, anti-Muslim, mostly anti-Semitic, thoroughly anti-immigrant, and wildly anti-Biden vituperations, has produced nary a shred of evidence that he was even remotely cheated by officials, by machines, or by even the most imaginary of manipulations.
Both Milei and Trump, and persons like former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, appeal to the basest conspiracy hallucinations of their followers. Unable to accept defeat – a fundamental notion of constitutionalism and rule of law undertakings – Trump and acolytes like Milei systematically undermine the fundamental principles of democracy. Their chicanery makes the fantasy wheels go around. (Milei, it turns out, is a massive plagiarizer, having substantially copied a Mexican physicist’s writings in his book Pandenomics [2020].)
Everything they do – and Trump’s following is based on the efficacy of bigotry and the power of repeated lies – besmirch the democratic process. That is its goal, with hitherto unruffled democracies like the United States being somewhat powerless to prevent social media from magnifying deceits or to maintain the original founding fathers’ assumptions that democracy could flourish with comparatively few detailed rules because “gentlemen” would behave well, underhanded dealings would be rare, and those who tried to cheat would be “outed” by polite society and by citizens determined to prevent “cads” and would-be autocrats from taking over.
Vice-President Al Gore graciously bowed before a Supreme Court that wanted to discard his victory in the popular vote in favor of George W. Bush’s narrow lead in the electoral college. Gore could, and probably should, have contested the shift to Bush more vigorously. But Gore had a feel for the national good more than the party good and certainly far more than the personal good and becoming president himself.
We have had too few such examples of disinterested public service in recent years. In an era of military coups and fake elections in Africa and Asia, and during a despair-making decade when a dictator like Putin has trampled on freedom in his own country and is attempting vaingloriously to reduce Ukraine to helotry status, it is therefore refreshing when a young, precarious, democracy like Liberia shows the world that the national interest can sometimes triumph over personal ambition and greedy denials of empirical truth.
George Weah, an international soccer star of renown, succeeded Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf a two-term president of Liberia, in 2018. At that poll he roundly defeated Joseph Boakai, her vice-president. But Friday’s runoff contest between the two contenders gave Boakyi a very slim, 1.5 percent, victory over Weah.
We might have expected Weah and his supporters to have cried foul, to have torn a loud leaf from the Trump and Milei textbooks (and from recent experience in Nigeria and Sierra Leone) and to have demanded recounts, called the loss a result of massive cheating, and the like.
But Weah is a democrat. He believes in country over narcissistic bleatings. When Weah very narrowly lost last week he said “Liberia has won. This is a time for graciousness in defeat, a time to place our country above party, and patriotism above personal interest.”
His 5.5 million fellow Liberians are now benefiting from a desire to avoid undercutting Liberia’s rather new (2006) democracy, albeit one based on the nation’s independence in 1847, having been founded as a refuge for American and other freed slaves in 1822. Liberia is thus a nation derivative of the United States. (Monrovia, its capital, is named after President James Monroe.) But for more than a century, the freed slaves ruled over Indigenous Liberians rather haughtily and without a full democratic apparatus. Now, thanks to Weah, Liberia can hold its process head high even as it faces economic and social headwinds.
A thin majority of Liberia’s voters apparently believed that Boakai would be tougher on corruption and drug dealers and that Weah and his associates were complicit in corrupt dealings. The voters also believed that Boakai could generate economic growth more than Weah, based on the latter’s comparative failures during his presidential term. About three-quarters of Liberia’s people are food insecure, and poverty is rife.
Liberia also voted for age (and experience) over incumbency and youth. Boakyi is 78, Weah 57. Biden, take note.
Liberia is a small, comparatively inconsequential country, even in Africa. But, thanks to the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) and the United Nations, plus Johnson-Sirleaf’s sterling leadership, it came back after vicious intrastate conflict (250,000 deaths) caused by murderous warlords (1989-2003), survived a calamitous Ebola epidemic (2013-2016), and produced a new democracy under Johnson-Sirleaf. Weah has now consolidated that choice of democracy over autocracy by his gracious bowing out.
Let Weah’s example move Africa and the Americas forward, and let it renew our faith in the live and let live foundations of democratic practice everywhere.