GoldingBernard Headley, Contributor
Poor bruce golding! After being raked, mauled and mercilessly hauled, non-stop, over smouldering coals, his entire carapace must be ablaze with agonising sores, his now presumably miserable condition akin to the Old Testament's Job. Mr. Golding's seemingly only honourable deed left is for him to "Curse God and die," the apparently most reasonable advice Job's unsupportive wife could, under the conditions, suggest to her disgraced husband. One of Mr. Golding's one-time fellow travellers, Brascoe Lee, has indeed in his diverse rant soliloquising come pretty close to urging this dire denouement on his former friend.
Much valuable radio air time and printer's ink have been exhausted, spewing forth nothing but scorn and condemnation on Mr. Golding's about-face including, rather auspiciously, from my respected colleague and friend (and former National Democratic Movement spokesperson) Professor Stephen Vasciannie. Instead of holding firm and fighting "the good fight," Mr. Vasciannie writes in a recent Gleaner column, Mr. Golding "turned - to various schemes designed to chart his return to the JLP house."
Mr. Golding may well now be pondering the finer ethical matters in his turnabout. And, astute person that he is, he ought to have calculated the kind of unfavourable fallout his decision could cost him personally: rather than move forward any possible political ambition, it may send him into oblivion, a fate for someone in his position far worse than death. But, seems to me, that a larger public good is still being served by the widely held Golding "disgrace." And it's simply this: Underhanded and woefully opportunistic as Mr. Golding's move may have appeared, its manifest function is to make more operationally salient the fundamental idea of democracy.
NO PERFECT GOVERNMENT
The notion of a perfect Government runs counter, and is overtly anathema to, the democratic impulse. A "perfect Government would be suited only to a nation of Gods," Jean Jacques Rousseau wrote in The Social Contract. Among mere mortals, we ensure the vibrancy and the very essence of a democratic system by changing regularly those who govern us. Change, then, is not just a Jamaica Labour Party (JLP) catchword. It's an absolute in the pursuit of the civic and common good. A Government that, though democratically and cleanly elected, stays on too long invariably gets fat, pompous, corruptible, intoxicated with power, contemptuous of the common good, and inevitably thinks of itself as almighty and infallible. It stagnates and may even suffocate on its warmed-over ideas, policies and practice. The democratic mission requires periodic infusions of fresh imagination, bold new directions and alternate streams of thought. There comes a time in the democratic venture, in other words, when it's critically necessary to see the back of the folks who have held sway in directing the affairs of the polity. Even in situations where a Government has proven itself good and worthy of continuing public trust, the democratic imperative has still insisted on change, or at least some kind of term limitation. United States Presidents are barred constitutionally, for instance, from seeking a third term, a decision taken by the American people in the interest of sustaining the vibrancy of their democracy. That, in the wake of the electorally unstoppable Franklin Roosevelt and his Democratic Party, in the years following Roosevelt's masterful leadership out of the Great Depression and successful war on the forces of Nazism.
Consider, conversely, situations such as in Kenya, Zimbabwe and other select African countries where enduring one-party (and typically one-man) rule has been the norm, the end result being floundering democracies and creeping backwardness. Public opinion polls continue to indicate that the Jamaican people do indeed desire the kind of maturity in their democratic system implicit in the idea of changing Governments when their time is up - highway or no highway, progress or no progress. Time then to let the temporary rulers we've elected go back to their normal activities and simply be like the rest of us. Problem is, and it's a source of profound angst to an electorate ready on principle to throw the People's National Party's (PNP) saints and rascals out, is flagging attraction to the one likely alternative - the JLP.
Bruce Golding's possible self-immolation is therefore of inestimable service to the larger project of making real the cause of Jamaican democracy. While his re-entry into the JLP may well turn out to be nothing more than Professor Vasciannie's "dead cat" tossed onto the PNP's unstoppable vessel, it could just as likely give new wind to the JLP. And increase in the stock of the JLP - by whatever expedient and hence politic means - would be the key to freeing the electorate to break with an old order of more than 13 years of one-party rule; a break that is essential for advancing our own democratic enterprise. Such a development would in my estimation place immense value on Mr. Golding's torturous turnabout, regardless of whatever happens to him in some future political life.
STATE POWER
It is this very matter of Mr. Golding's press to achieve state power, by whatever means necessary, that some pundits have badly, and misguidedly, mauled him. He could from the ground floor of civil society play an equally meaningful role in leading a third force to bring about change, they have argued; you don't need to be in Government - or a Government - to effect change. One commentator has specifically reminded him that neither Martin Luther King Jr. nor Mahatma Ghandi led, or were part of, a political party. Gandhi and King managed nonetheless, in leading from the ground, or the street, mass movements that have advanced the cause of freedom and democracy.
Having spent critical years of my life on at least one hotbed U.S. college campus in the late years of the civil rights struggle, I know this commentator has got his basic conclusion dead wrong.
One grand objective of Martin Luther King's struggle was precisely that a politically disenfranchised people be included in the political mainstream, and at the fountain heads of state power. The march of the thousands he led (in which white racists shot and killed at least two people) from Selma, Alabama, to the state capitol some 50 miles away, in Montgomery, was for no other objective than black people securing the right to vote.
Black Americans will readily tell you that the numbers of blacks elected, a generation after King's death, to positions where they can effect real change - to city councils, state legislatures, the U.S. House of Representatives, mayoralties, judgeships - are the prized fruits of his lifelong struggle. The same is true on a more grandiose scale of Gandhi's great effort. His end goal was to get oppressive British rule out of India. The ultimate fulfilment of the Ghandhian movement was when, months prior to his assassination, the departing British overlords handed over state power of an Independent India into the hands of one of his young acolytes, Jawaharlal Nehru, who'd been elected President of the Indian National Congress, a political party. Let live, therefore, for the sake of a realistic change alternative, the so-called "Golding factor."
Bernard Headley is a professor in the faculty of Social Sciences at UWI, Mona.
