It's your fault (II)

By Deauwand Myers

"Toute nation a le gouvernement qu'elle mérite." (Nations deserve the governments they get). ― Joseph de Maistre, French counterrevolutionary.

On the dreaded Book of Faces, otherwise known as Facebook, good friends and family members have posted more articles, essays, missives, and cries of discontent about Trump's nascent presidency than they have about anything else in recent memory. Notifications from posts fill up my tablet and smartphone without ceasing.

Koreans experienced the same thing on social media platforms about President Park's alleged misconduct and subsequent impeachment.

People are not happy.

I get it. I mean I cared right after the US presidential election. It felt like I experienced a great trauma, a kind of death in the family, or of a good friend, and then the funeral, with all the expected grief and sorrow attendant to such things.

My days were married to shadow, my nights accented with melancholy, angst, and misery.

I felt this way, though much worse, after the Sewol Ferry disaster in Korea. Even now, I can see the young, beautiful high school girls and boys, slowly, surely, drowning. I can see their panic and fear. Once their bodies were recovered, all three hundred of them, autopsies revealed the grim toll of their avoidable ends: some had broken fingers because they scratched and banged in desperation and agony at the hull of the ship, trying, in vain, to find some way out.

Yet, unlike death, disease, and accidents resulting in mass causalities, the fall of Park and rise of Trump were much more avoidable, and mercifully, reversible.

"Democracies deserve the governments they get" is a loose and incorrect translation of Maistre. It's ironic that Joseph de Maistre, a lawyer, diplomat, and a proponent of monarchies and organized religion over democracy, is most remembered for a quote that can be interpreted to admonish citizens to cherish democracy.

Empirically though, Maistre is wrong about monarchies and rigid social hierarchies being ideal for peaceful and prosperous societies. Capitalist democracies have produced more wealth, freedom, and an increased quality of life for more people than any other form of human governance on record (an exception being China's economic rise).

So what's exactly wrong with our democracies today? Why are so many developed, advanced democracies experiencing an uptick in nationalism, xenophobia, and distrust of their public and private institutions?

Neo-liberalism, surely, is one of the root causes of our woes. The fetishization of free markets and unfettered, deregulated capitalism; ascribing mystical, magical powers to wealth and its pursuit; the privatization of public services that should not be perceived as profit-making entities (like healthcare); the demonization of poverty as a sin of the individual, when we know, empirically, that poverty is a sin of the state; implementing austerity measures during economic downturns; and the belief in the repeatedly debunked voodoo of trickle-down economic theory, where wealth, through tax policy, is transferred to the wealthiest in the hopes said wealth will sprinkle down to the unwashed masses, are all constituents of neo-liberalism.

Korea even tried this tax policy in the late 90s onward. It hasn't worked.

What this has meant is a slow and steady hollowing out of the middle classes in most industrialized countries.

But deeper than neo-liberalism, most fervently pursued by American conservatives as a kind of theology, is the weak, apathetic, anemic and ill-informed electorate. Korea, Japan, and America all have voter participation in the 30 to high 40 percent range, lower still for young adults within said countries. Over half of Americans eligible to vote chose not to in this last US presidential election.

Neo-liberalism, subscribed to varying degrees by most political parties, thrives most vigorously when people do not vote. Conservative and backward-looking governments: President Park of Korea, Prime Minister Abe of Japan, and yes, Mr. Trump, is a logical, reactionary, and totally avoidable outcome of low voter participation and poor civic education.

Marches in Seoul, Tokyo, Washington, D.C., and elsewhere, boycotts, rants, raves, commercials by celebrities, essays, columns, cries, and the cacophony of tears and telephone calls to representatives and senators are, in the end, I'm sorry, meaningless, without political organizing and most importantly, voting in an informed fashion requisite to one's self-interests.

Too many of my well-educated friends and associates did not vote, or voted for a third party, nitpicking at Secretary Clinton's past sins, both real and perceived, when, objectively, she was an exceedingly better presidential candidate than the embarrassment of horrors embodied in the corpulent, corrupt, and mendacious façade of Mr. Trump.

President Park is your president. President Trump is my president. And like Lord Sauron, he has gathered all evil and darkness to him. He has the power and the pen. Despair.

But despair is the beginning of it, not the end. Did you vote? Will you vote? If not, sit down, and do be quiet.

Deauwand Myers holds a master's degree in English literature and literary theory, and is an English professor outside Seoul. He can be reached at deauwand@hotmail.com.