Delegitimizing those who win elections is not strictly an American preoccupation. According to this article by Louis Bassets of Spain’s El Pais, the struggle over the debt ceiling that is apparently winding down in Washington has analogues in other venues and countries, and is a trend that is pushing the world toward anarchy.
For El Pais, Louis Bassets writes in part:
Living on the edge and challenging each one another to a game of the “chicken” has become the widespread sport of ungoverned globalization.
For a year-and-a-half, Europeans have been playing our own version of this risky game, over-and-over postponing measures that could have stemmed the sovereign debt crisis that began in Greece in 2010. And now that we’ve reached some positive agreements that could serve to begin straightening out the economy, a storm has arrived from Washington involving Democrats and Republicans that threatens the global economy and erodes confidence in these same European agreements.
In this and many other cases, we can see how politics, which used to be the art of government action, is becoming the art of inaction: preventing government from taking action and impeding decisions that have already been made. Or the art of anarchy: the opposition makes certain that the government cannot govern.
The first and most elementary rule of contemporary politics is to demand, the day after an election, that the winners not be legitimized, and to demonstrate that they cannot govern and that everything they do will be amended as soon as the opposition takes power. The result of such “opposition at the edge” is that no sooner than one has taken office, the credibility of the winners is questioned and there are calls for new elections – with a different end, naturally.
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