The Devil We Don't Know

This election season is a funhouse¹–mirror image of another election, in another land. One that I had a somewhat-sideyed professional interest in observing: Chile, 1988. That election wasn't competitive between candidates — it was a yes/no referundum on continuing Augusto Pinochet in office.² Pinochet had little support in urban areas, but considerable (often terrorized) support in rural areas, meaning that the referendum was largely considered a toss-up before the actual election. We'll leave aside, with our 20/200 hindsight, the very real threat that Pinochet intended prior to the vote to ignore an unfavorable result — and would have been successful in doing so.

Even in the poorer areas, where most people live in modest wooden homes and battle to get by on salaries as low as $2.50 a day, voters indicated a preference, as one put it, for “the devil we know.” Few here have been touched by the civil rights issues that arouse emotions in Santiago, the capital. Young people seem as likely as older adults to vote “yes” in the “yes” or “no” poll to decide whether the 72-year-old Pinochet should remain another eight years in power.³

So we have a choice this fall: The devil we reallyreallyreally know, and the devil we don't know very well at all. And in some states, the second-generation devil derided by the other devils as stupid (but he at least admits that worms ate his brain), not to mention a passel of devils less powerful or tempting than Wormwood. Partisan politics — between party apparatus and fundraising imperatives — gives us only devils to choose from.⁴ It's critical to remember that when one chooses the lesser evil, one is still choosing evil.

Anyanka You trusting fool! How do you know the other world is any better than this?

Giles Because it has to be.⁵

Acton was fundamentally wrong: It's not power that corrupts, nor absolute power that corrupts absolutely, but the striving for power that corrupts (and the striving for absolute power that corrupts absolutely). This would have been obvious considering his first name: "Lord." So, I suppose, we should be thankful that we're choosing among devils who didn't get on the ballot due to inheriting their initial power bases.⁶

But we're still choosing among devils. <SARCASM> Just make the wisest choice you can among the lesser of "who cares?" </SARCASM> But do choose; do register and ensure that the devils who want to take that choice away from you — the real evildoers — don't win.⁷

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1. "Fun" meaning "fouled-up nonsense"… or something sounding a lot like that.
2. We will, for the moment, leave aside the role of some… past professional counterparts… in making that referendum possible or even necessary (IMNSHO, there's an aspect of excessive even-handedness to that article, and it's still rather damning). There's a pretty obvious funhouse–mirror image here, too…
3. James F. Smith, Rural Chile Leans Toward Pinochet—'the Devil We Know', Los Angeles Times (17 Sep 1988). I heard that phrase more than once — even from (junior) officials of other Latin American nations, often referring to their own nations' dictatorships.
4. At best — and it's a really, really poor best — we end up with an on-the-surface somewhat well-meaning outsider surrounded by devilish advisers and cronies who themselves wreak havoc after not even being elected. At worst, we end up with "businessmen" and "investment advisors" — like, say, one of the current candidates for second fiddle in Nero's string quartet — whose weltanschauung of "government" has been so thoroughly warped by the combination of "modern accountancy and efficiency studies" and "the boss never needs to compromise" (not to mention self-righteous arrogance seldom seen outside the Spanish Inquisition) that those other advisers and cronies are even more in control.
5. The Wish, 3 Buffy the Vampire Slayer 9 (08 Dec 1998). That this screed cites to an entire program that was, at least on the surface, devoted to "fighting demons" should be entirely unsurprising.
6. Oops. And oops. And yet again oops. Seems we haven't actually learned all that much from our own secession from inherited power in favor of representative democracy.
7. That [representative] democracy is the worst form of all human governments that have ever been tried, except for all the others, should not be comforting. It's not supposed to be comforting: It's a prelude to work and agonizing choices, no matter what form of government there is — most especially including the bullying that inevitably results from replacing a government of flawed accountability with nongovernment strongmen (ask any refugee from the Horn of Africa in the last half century).