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  • The Future of Unconscious Political Form in Mexico
  • Carl Good (bio)

[Democracy] is not just about a future state that we try to achieve and that once we have achieved it we can declare ourselves finally and truly democratic . . . but consists of the promise, now, of repeating the promise of democracy , and doing so at every moment without committing ourselves to the perspective of a continuous and asymptotic progress toward the Idea (in a Kantian sense) of democracy . A full realization of democracy . . . would be the end of democracy and politics. In fact, democracy operates as such and is more properly itself when it is limited in one way or another in relation to its apparently natural destiny; that is, when it is not wholly itself. . . . Of course, that opens a question that can in no way be decided a priori, about what are the best and most appropriate ways to carry out in practice this measure of restriction, limitation or interruption. I'm inclined to say that democracy is precisely that: the debate about the necessary restriction, limitation or interruption of the apparently teleological impulse of democracy; this debate is democracy in its inhibition or limitation itself, democracy now, today, always to come.

—Geoffrey Bennington1 [End Page 4]

It was a familiar election-year story for Mexico and the United States. In one country, with the electoral machine plagued by voting irregularities, the contest was eventually settled in favor of the conservative establishment candidate—a favored son of a powerful political family—in a judgment widely denounced as politically motivated. As the new president was sworn in, his once popular and powerful predecessor was disgraced by accusations of unethical enrichment in office and rumors that he had granted clemency to drug traffickers and tax evaders in exchange for political contributions. During the transition, economic indicators fell and citizens' faith in their government was tested. Meanwhile, in the other country, the opposition party candidate won the presidency in a clean vote, with the defeated party maintaining a stable congressional majority. In an orderly transfer of power, the outgoing president graciously conceded his party's loss. Despite anticipated opposition to the victorious party from certain quarters, the general mood in the country was optimistic and the economy maintained its strong levels of growth.

A familiar story, except that the tables were turned. Last fall, the electoral success was Mexico's and the electoral mishap pertained to the U.S., in a bizarre reversal that interrupted the political ideals and tendencies of both countries. On the U.S. side, the Florida election debacle polarized the nation in a political crisis whose outcome was not the usual electoral catharsis of surrender to democratic fate following a political battle over the peoples' vote, but rather a feeling that democracy had been reduced to an unmediated struggle between ideological factions. The feeling came not just from the extreme polarization among the voters, but from the circumstances of the final decision itself, which, in contradiction with the democratic ideal, did not reflect the candidates' negotiation with the (unrepresentable) will of the people but seemed to have been imposed "in the raw" by one competing ideological faction on the other. In short, without any alterations in the structure of American democracy, the mediation of "otherness" in the electoral decision, at least on this occasion, seemed to have disappeared from the process. At worst, it was a sign of democracy' s decline; at best it was confirmation that in a democracy anything can happen, including undemocracy.

In Mexico, the dominance of the world's longest-ruling political party came to a sudden end with the election of Vicente Fox as president and the rise to full opposition status of his conservative PAN party. Fox's pro-business, pro-American and pro-Catholic stances, but also his puzzling ideological eclecticism, his "outsider" image and his informality, stood in striking contrast to even the [End Page 5] most neoliberal and technocratic reformers of his pro-establishment PRI party predecessors. Overshadowing even the novelty of Foxism, however, was the international euphoria over the achievement of what most witnesses perceived as clean national elections. The Mexican people finally seemed to have...

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