Sex, Drugs & Electoral Rolls Part XX: Voting in Self Defence

I'm sitting here writing this on September 11th. A day that I once heard referred to as "The Day Democracy Died".

And yes - it's certainly true that a hazy Wednesday morning in early Spring 2001 represented something of a watershed no-return transition point between the bright, halcyon promise of the 1990s to the gritty, drone-surveilled, NSA-monitored epoch of the War on Terror and today. What had before seemed a zeitgeist of bipartisanship and optimism throughout the Anglosphere so powerful that a certain political theorist dubbed us to be in the "End of History" ... was replaced almost overnight by a lingering culture of latter-day McCarthyism (remember "You're either with us ... or you're with the terrorists" as a line to repudiate criticism?) and combative recriminations.

History, it seems, wasn't over but was instead anew and afreshly on the march. Considering some of the things which ensued over the next few years as the direct and attributable result of that day, it's perhaps not surprising to see it eulogized with such infamy as the semi-mortification of much of the bedrock of our tradition of governance.

But it's not September 11th 2001 which was the day I first heard referred to with that particular sobriquet.

That dubious honour instead belongs to September 11th 1973 - a date which may be vaguely familiar to some of you as the occasion of the US-backed coup against Salvador Allende in Chile. If you haven't heard of this (and really, it's the sort of historical episode which is often in-fashion and in-vogue to somewhat downplay these days, for a number of reasons), a basic run-down is thus:

In 1970, despite considerable external interference, the Socialist candidate Salvador Allende won that year's Chilean Presidential Election. The democratic elevation of a far-left political leader is, even these days, not something which happens easily - and the Americans found themselves outraged at the very idea of a potential Soviet-stooge or independent enclave setting itself up in 'their' hemisphere. So in the wake of Allende's government undertaking serious economic structural reform designed to transform Chile from a quasi-colonial resource-market adjunct to North America into a more fair and self-determining state ... it is perhaps unsurprising (albeit unendorsable) that the CIA, Henry Kissinger et al moved to encourage, foster and support armed efforts to remove Allende from office (with the CIA's Project FUBELT actually attempting to cause an anti-Allende coup to take place before Allende had even assumed office in late 1970).

The much-anticipated anti-democratic action finally happened on the date cited above (after some weeks of buildup and an escalating sense of crisis due to a previous attempted-putsch a month and a half before). And the rest, as they say, is history.

Allende made a beautiful final address as the Presidential Palace fell around him - and then, either died by his own hand using an AK-47 gifted to him by Fidel Castro, or was murdered by a confederate of the incoming Pinochet coup-regime.

Following on from this, a chap by the name of General Augusto Pinochet took power and set about establishing a more friendly and amenable economic environment for US-backed interests. This he did by inviting down to Chile a certain, rather prominent economics professor by the name of Milton Friedman - and quite literally letting the new school of 'Chicago Boy' economists write his economic policy for him - as well as dispatching the armed forces at his command to engage in the mass repressive round-ups of tens of thousands of 'dissidents', both alleged and actual, with the purposes of rooting out any potential indigenous opposition to this impending wave of economic 'rationalization' he sought to preside over. The phrase "helicopter rides" as a sort of implied threat (a term of art frequently deployed by some of the more unwholesome militant libertarian folk you might encounter online or at the wrong corners of the Owen G Glenn Building) derives from a favoured manner of execution employed by the Pinochet regime in service of its agenda.

We, here in New Zealand, often think of ourselves as having been the 'guinea-pig' state for (undemocratically imposed) ardent neoliberalism - but as it turns out, our disastrous flirtations with that economic paradigm was evidently something of an epimethean experiment rather than the breaking of entirely new ground.

But one other element from the dark after-events of the 11th of September (1973) stands out to me, some 46 years later. And that's what happened for some considerable distance afterward (some fifteen years, in fact) while Pinochet ruled.

Being entirely unconfident that they could prevent the forces of the left from once again coming to power via legitimate and democratic means - and also fearful of such a rudimentary thing as mere 'democracy' interfering with the Chicago Boys' ongoing economic machinations - the coup-government outlawed Chileans being able to vote.

This might seem something of a truism. Of course an anti-democratic government or one which has come to power this way and fears losing office via the ballot in answer to the bullet is going to be ill-disposed towards the actual levers of democracy.

But as we head into Local Body Election season here in Auckland - and with the General Election already looming well large upon the horizon for some time next year - I have found myself confronted on an increasing basis with sentiments which basically boil down to: "if voting actually changed anything, then they'd make it illegal".

My riposte to this has always been: "And so 'they' did - many, many times."

Of course, I am something of a cynic. I have seen enough of the way Politics actually works up-close and personal to know that 'mere' voting is only the "necessary but not entirely sufficient" basis-bedrock for engaging with democracy. But I have ALSO seen how much glee various right-wing forces almost invariably have when low voter-turnout rates help to avail them unto victory. What Pinochet (and other nasty regimes throughout the 20th and 21st Centuries) have sought to do by faux-'legislative' imposition, in many local polities we have managed to achieve by force of (lack of) will alone. There is only a minimum modicum of difference, after all (in some views) between being unable to vote and simply choosing not to exercise the right-and-privilege - as somewhere around 6.5 out of every 10 Aucklanders did back in 2013 (or as more than a million New Zealanders did a year later in the Generals).

In an earlier piece, I put together a quotation from the late, great Hunter S. Thompson - that politics, at its purest, is "the art of controlling your environment" - with one from The Departed: "I don't want to be a product of my environment. I want my environment to be a product of me".

These are both worthy maxims. And it's not hard to see how even with something as seemingly less glamorous as local body politics, they thoroughly apply. Electing people to represent our interests who are directly responsible for the local areas and authorities we live both in and under, is pretty much one of the most direct ways we're able to exercise 'control' over our immediate environment, and make the resultant future a tangible product of what we believe.

But there's another side to it, too - albeit one which probably applies with more frequency and ferocity at the national level. The reason why Pinochet and all those other autocrats habitually outlaw voting is very simple.

It allows 'the little people' to fight back. To resist. To represent their own interests. Against unelected bureaucrats, ideologues and tyrants.

Hunter S. Thompson called it "voting in self defence". Ironically, an expression he deployed against the W. Bush administration; but one which has obvious and serious import even here in New Zealand.

So when your ballot-papers arrive later this month - and even more so with the General Election sometime next year - do something radical. Vote. Vote in Self Defence. The one thing that Governments fear.