Democracy
What is the role of government? A Republican political nation-state is based on a constitution with popular suffrage guaranteed through an electoral process. Within this broad definition lies a nation's greatest strength, protection, and weakness. The role of government must be perpetually debated so that each generation can address the most pressing questions of its time. We cannot rely on the past for exact answers but for guidance in understanding where we came from and what we believe in, so that we can best address our present and prepare for our future. Currently the present is in crisis and most Estadounidenses claim to be worried for our posterity.
Today both Mexico and the United States who have been reluctant, but intimate partners since both former colonial societies took on the ambitious objective of nationhood in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, now seek to overcome the failures of deregulated capitalism. The difference between this economic crisis and the 1929 Great Depression is that since 1994 Mexico has been formerly connected to the global economy unlike the 1930s when Mexican leadership was striving to develop a closed economic system that could fend off Yankee temptation.
Mexico is led by an administration that claimed the mantle of leadership on a .58% victory in the last presidential election. Although the exact numbers can be debated unnecessarily since most Mexicans have moved on and we know that the PRI were never in serious contention. But for Mexico democracy exists in a painfully congested manner. For a Mexican society that is accustomed to government inability the post modern threat of unchecked drug trafficking is unprecedented and consequently requires bi-national if not multi-national cooperation to control; realistically it is not a problem that can be solved. Although Mexican leadership believes or at least is trying to prove that a solution is possible, and that is why the Mérida Initiative is in place, but will it work, probably not.
In the United States we fear all things south of the Mexican/U.S. border and ignore most north of the Canadian/U.S. border. That was true then and serves true today. And yet we wonder and complain about the merits of comprehensive immigration reform. All sides including those who don't have a side want the government to solve this problem, yet U.S. society does not understand the problem and worse assumes that someone else does and that THEY have the solution. And then there is health care reform and its little friend or nuisance (depending on your political leanings) Representative Joe Wilson (R-S.C.).
According to some pro-immigrant groups the other side has scored a major victory.
But some on the political left say that the White House -- wary of more damaging battles with the right -- has given in to Wilson and other conservatives. Wilson "acted like a buffoon, and everybody criticized him -- but then at the end of the day he sort of got his way," said Brent A. Wilkes, national executive director of the League of United Latin American Citizens.
"It rewards bullying in a way that begets more bullying," said Frank Sharry, who directs the pro-immigrant group America's Voice and has been advising the White House and congressional Democrats on broader immigration issues.
But the left including many Democratic congressional leaders, i.e. the Congressional Hispanic Caucus threaten to hold health care reform hostage if an immigration bill does not go forward soon. So we have a chicken and an egg paradox. Well folks that's what democracy is all about.
