It was sometime in the 1960s, early on in that decade, when some disturbance in some Central American country took place. I was too young to notice what or where the event was. But I do remember what one of my aunts said: “Those people are too immature to handle a democracy.”
I’m not sure who “those people” were supposed to be. After all, we all were sitting comfortably somewhere in Coral Gables, where we found ourselves after we were incapable of handling our own democracy back in Cuba. I’m pretty sure that I came to think of “those people” as meaning all Latin Americans, all of us too immature to manage the delicate politics of a democratic polity.
Later I started to think more carefully about the idea of “democracy” in a Latin American context. Certainly in Cuba what we had lost in our move to exile was not a democracy. Fulgencio Batista, the “president” of the country, was straightforwardly a strong man who had led an initial rebellion against a duly elected president back in 1940, and then, after a period out of the country, returned in 1952 to halt an election and appoint himself president. Not exactly the most democratic of polities, it turns out—and perhaps evidence that “those people were too immature to handle a democracy.”
In a myriad of ways the same strong-man politics, caudillo power, governed the realities of almost every single Latin American country, from Trujillo in Santo Domingo to Rawson and Perón in Argentina and the coffee baron Paulistas in southern Brazil. Except for Costa Rica, where the actions of the military led to the abolishment of the armed forces and so the end of caudillo politics, all of the Latin American world was “too immature to handle a democracy.”
Or was it only Latin America? The framework of European colonialist traditions in Latin as opposed to non-Latin American countries suggests otherwise. In North America, French and British ways of governance militated against caudillo politics. To be sure, the French Revolution was late enough so that some vestiges of European latifundism wriggled its way into French colonies. But the pressure in France, as in its colonies, was away from strong-man rule and towards liberté, égalité, fraternité. Certainly that spirit invested the slaves of Haiti, who successfully deposed their colonists—only to have France set out systematically to oppress, repress, depress the new nation so that, two hundred twenty years later Haiti is still incapable of sustaining itself.
Fortunately for the British colonies in the New World, the English Civil Wars and the Glorious Revolution had taken place early enough so that the idea of strong-man rule had become anathema to British subjects everywhere. Of course, the idea of being British subjects did not include the natives of the lands the British conquered, or the slaves they imported to support their economic interests. But from the perspective of the polities they established in the New World, democracy was the default state of affairs.
Or so it seemed. There were exceptions to the rule of a more or less egalitarian polity even in what became the United States. The latifundist impulse is clear enough in the plantations of the American South, which echo the same phenomenon in the Latin American world. But even in those circumstances, the latifundists saw themselves as privileged in the same way that the landed gentry and aristocracy of Britain were privileged. So the franchise was restricted to the land owners and the rich.
From that sense of privilege, anti-egalitarianism wormed its way into the American polity. In the American context, rotten and pocket boroughs that give the landed gentry so much power becomes the inegalitarian two-senators-per-state rule and the domination of presidential elections by the inegalitarian Electoral College. Americans celebrate the idea of one man one vote, but in practice the Constitution, not to mention the rulings of the Supreme Court from Citizens United onwards, dictate that the rich and the landed control the government. It is a late postmodernist version of latifundism.
In Britain much the same thing applies. To be sure, rotten and pocket boroughs no longer exist in law. But the next best thing is the domination of public spaces by the wealthy and well-heeled, whose power and authority is as dominant in the 21st as it was in the 18th century. The same kind of reality obtains in India, in China, in South Africa, in Russia, in Japan, in Nigeria, in Australia, in New Zealand, in Indonesia, in the Philippines—the world belongs to the latifundists.]
Except for the initial demonstrative adjective, my aunt was right. It’s not “those people,” but rather “we people are too immature to handle a democracy.”
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