There's alot we can learn from India. When I think of the countries that are most like our own, India comes in about 5th, behind England, Israel, France, and Germany. But that's another blog.
There is one specific parallel from Indian history that we can see today in our country. All movements have two types of leaders: princes and prophets.
Prince are executive or military leaders, subject to all the powers and pitfalls of those positions. Prophets, on the other hand, don't have the burden of leadership, so their clear and articulated conscience serves as a motivation for, or a warning to, the princes.
In India, the prince was Nehru and the prophet was Gandhi.
Gandhi's prophecy was so powerful that he actually achieved the ends usually reserved for princes: he expelled the occupier. He did so without official office and without force. But once this was achieved, somebody had to run this continent masquerading as a country. A prince was needed.
India's prince was Nehru. While imprisoned by the British, Nehru wrote a 5,000 page history of the world which became a bestseller in the West after his release. He had access to zero books while he wrote. Yeah.
So anyway, Nehru takes over and, lo and behold, is immediately confronted with difficult decisions. Decisions which often did not offer any option that would be approved of by the prophet. And this is the price of power.
Once power is seized in a democracy, ideals lose all practical value. By definition, all democracy is compromise. Even if all 300 million Americans want pizza, we probably don't all want the same topping. Governing is compromising.
This compromise is often taken for treachery by "purists", but compromise is literally the most human impulse after survival. Gandhi was a pacifist. But Nehru had to govern a country surrounded by well-armed antagonists. Peace out, pacifism, time to arm.
America's prophet and prince did not coexist as did India's, but there are some interesting parallels.
Gandhi and King led the largest successful non-violent political movements in history, and they did so against the most well-armed adversaries imaginable in both cases. In a very real sense, both men liberated "their" people with remarkably little bloodshed and were subsequently assassinated before they could witness the fruits (or the horrors) of their triumphs.
Suffice it to say, Gandhi and King were great men, and among the very few great men with no blood on their hands. Nehru was a great man as well, a man mostly unknown in this country but whose influence outweighs many historical figures who we know well.
And as for the Ameican version of the prince, Obama is no Nehru. Not yet. This blog is actually directed at those who made the mistake of mistaking Obama for King redux. Obama is no prophet. He never was one. He could, however, become a prince.
The first clue that Obama is a prospective prince rather than a prophet is that he decided to run for president. Let us not underestimate the level of je ne ce quas that it takes to make that decision. It's not arrogance or egomania necessarily, but it is obviously a willingness to compromise.
When a person decides to run for president, he or she has implicitly sacrificed his or her ideals by choosing to lead a democratic government which will necessarily compromise on everything, even if it is ruled by a single party.
Obama is not a revolutionary. He is not a prophet. King was. Can we imagine King running for president? No. And not just because he couldn't have been elected in his time. King would never have held any political office. Martin Luther King wouldn't have run for mayor in an all-black Baptist village in Georgia.
And if King had been president, rest assured, he would have found it very difficult to "end" the immoral war he would have inherited, a war which he had opposed from the beginning, an ideological and moral lobotomy launched by a reckless Texan. No, something tells me that King's 1969 Vietnam policy would look a lot like Obama's 2009 Iraq policy.
The problem with American politics today is that princes and prophets have become indistinguishable and, as a result, we are left with a deficit of both.
1 comment:
Your democracy is comprise comment is a very important one to make that I think gets overlooked much of the time. Perhaps one of the pitfalls of the current campaigning situation is that many successful candidates place as prophets for the people. We want a man who can deliver the future we collectively want to see. In a sense we almost expect our leaders to be the messiah. Someone who rails against the oppressor in words and brings about there downfall in a sweeping election. Someone who will mount the parapets of the castle and bring sweeping salvation to the oppressed. We expect that drama and epic. But instead the reality is that governance when done well, viewed from the outside, is boring: no wars, no protests, no editorial screes.
Good article.
Post a Comment