Left with nothing

My greatest fear is politics. Not because of some high-sounding pseudo-philosophical reason, but because politics, like its greatest practitioners, always looks at things in absolutes. There is always a black or a white. Politicians do deal in the greys, they most certainly do. But that has never stopped them from espousing the two extremes. There will always be either a Left or a Right, a liberal or a conservative and a secular or a religious viewpoint. And then, there will always be a right and a wrong. But what no politician understands is that right and wrong aren't mutually exclusive to a particular shade of political opinion. After all, the Left has always decried the so-called dogma of the Right, which has in turn dismissed as dribble the idealism of the Left. This cycle continues ad infinitum, ad nauseum.

But the long, unending cycle of debate and the divide between the Left and the Right is not what scares me. It is the aftermath of this great back and forth. You see, the weird thing with political democracies is that every so many years, the people get the chance (they think) of choosing someone they believe will lead them to a better future. What really happens plays out in two possible scenarios: one, the people like the way their present is working for them and want to keep things that way, or two, they are unhappy with their present and want things to change in the future. In the first instance, it is obvious that whoever runs for re-election will win. It is equally obvious that in the second instance, things will change. It may not be the change that the people wanted, but things will be different from before, that much they can promise. That is one promise many politicians intend on keeping. And do.

But let's briefly talk about the nature of change. By its very essence, the phenomenon entails the replacement of a certain kind of order with another kind. The two may not be very different, but they are not quite the same either. I mean come on, even in democracies, the mob isn't fooled that easily. So repackaging is the name of the game.

In 1997, Tony Blair swept into power with a landslide victory over the hopelessly decrepit Tories in an election that would see the rise of New Labour; a party that would be bigger and better than anything else before it. But after nearly two decades of Conservative rule, under both Margaret Thatcher and John Major, who could've really expected the Tories to win yet again. It was obvious that people wanted to try something new. And they found what they were looking for in Blair's New Labour. The man even added the word 'new' to the name of his party, how more obvious can you be?

Something similar happened in 2008, when, after two terms of 'Dubya', America decided it had beaten about the Bushes for too long. They voted in Obama, the torchbearer of a new America, an America where even a black man could be president. The media, especially the Right-wing Fox News et al, actually treated it like it was something miraculous or out of a fairy tale. After all, a black man could never have been president of the United States. I mean, come on, it's unthinkable. Nigeria, yes. South Africa, ummmm... fine. But the U-S of A? No way! NO WAY!

But that's what happened. America, the whitest nation on the planet, voted for a black man. And so history was made. Or was it? Maybe it was just repeated. Like Tony Blair being elected after two decades of Conservative rule in Britain. Think about that juxtaposition. I'll come back to it.

Human beings are fickle creatures. We either like something or we don't. There is a brief period in the beginning - when we're just getting to know someone, or just becoming acquainted with an ideology - that we take things as they come, on their merits. But after a certain period of time we must form judgements. We must decide whether to like or dislike something, whatever it is. It is in our nature. The mind must sort everything in our life experience into neat boxes. That's just the way things work.

Coming back to politics, it is a general rule now that every period of plenty (metaphorically speaking) is followed by a period of famine or poverty (literally speaking). In essence, there are good times, then there are hard times, then even harder times, and then even harder times, and finally, just when you thought things couldn't get any worse, the elections are upon you. That's when you say, "Aha! Now I shall have my revenge!" And if you get your way, those who caused you so much pain and misery shall hold office no more, at least in the next four to five years they won't. That's for sure.

I think my more astute readers will have understood what I'm driving at here. The only constant in politics is change. Election campaigns are just the barometer of change, they don't really affect the way people vote. I mean, after all, we knew that the Pakistan People's Party would win the 2008 elections in Pakistan on the sympathy vote. We also knew that the Republicans stood no chance in the US Presidential elections, not as long as the big pile of poo George W. Bush was leaving behind him on the Oval Office desk was still there. Tony Blair, the man who is today condemned as a war criminal and denounced for his role in starting the second Gulf War, also knew when his time was up. That's why he abdicated to Gordon Brown. That move also made things easier for the unholy Cameron-Clegg alliance. What many people don't realise is that this particular bond between the Lib Dems and Tories was not forged overnight after the election, but months before, around a fireplace somewhere in rural England. Both parties knew Labour was done for. It was just their time.

And that's what scares the living daylights out of me. The fact that the so-called political will of the people can be so easily read by those who think about it hard enough. To think that even in democracies, the people have no power over who actually governs them. I know this might sound naive, but, just consider the following: how many times does a ballot paper give you a 'real' third choice? And I don't mean the Ralph Nader-esque Independents or the Green Party-ish ideologues. I mean an actual third choice that you can vote for and be rewarded with a victory for your candidate. The answer, as is painfully obvious, is that there is no third choice. There never is. The mob is doomed to be shepherded back and forth between two malevolent masters. And both are either dumb, selfish or just plain stupid. And that is what scares me the most. That at the end, no matter who the shepherd is or how green the pastures are, it is the people who are left with nothing. And nothing rarely feeds a family of four.