What can American society do?

The most important slogan guiding Barack Hussein Obama's election campaign was "Yes, we can do!" It seems that this slogan captured very well, and spread very well, a mood that has gripped the whole of society in American democratic history for at least the last fifty years.

Over the last fifty years, as far as we know, turnout in elections has rarely exceeded fifty percent or so. Low election turnout is one of the best-habituated matters in American society. So much so that in Turkey, questions about the representation or legitimacy of a result reached with turnout above seventy and below eighty percent can be answered at once by reference to this customary practice in America.

Yet it is now much better understood that low turnout in the US too is related to a pessimistic belief about election results. Because there is no hope that election results can change anything, people are not very willing to take part in elections, and the democratic process turns into an unexciting and routine procedure in which at most half the population can be involved even at the election stage. In this respect, more important than Obama's emerging from the US election with an impressive victory, with the qualities he represents, is that such an excited and extensive participation in the election took place. Had the result gone the opposite way, that is, in favor of McCain, with the same turnout, the same meaning would hold.

Until these elections, there was, in a way, a dead soil sprinkled over American society. Recently sociologists had begun to produce typologies, concepts and models about this society such as "carefree society." It is stressed that America, which Tocqueville in the early 1800s described as "the paradise of civil society," has today become a society made up of selfish individuals who, if someone were chopped to pieces in front of their home, would watch the event without batting an eye and turn back to continue watching their television, and that its social capital has reached the point of exhaustion.

One of the best-known causes of political alienation is that people lose their belief that they can change things with their actions. When people embrace the life they live as a fate with no possibility of change, whether positive or negative, they also move away from every kind of participation.

In contrast, the fact that Obama based his election campaign on the slogan "Yes, we can!" owes a great deal to the American society's seeing in Obama's discourse a real possibility of being able to do something, a possibility of a way out, even though it had embraced what it lived as a fate.

It is very important in this respect that Obama noted that he had broken the shell of his campaign not in the streets of Washington but in the back parts of Des Moines, in the living rooms of Concord, on the porches of Charleston. He convinced masses who regarded themselves as "helpless victims of fate" in the face of an immutable, fixed system that they could do something, that they could change their own fate. In his victory speech he said that "America's true strength rests not on its weapons or its economy but on democracy, freedom, opportunity and an unyielding 'hope.'"

Perhaps this election, which Obama entered with his personal qualities and discourse, gave the feeling that, for the first time in American history, voters would be choosing between genuinely very different options. Because a visible difference had arisen between choosing Obama and choosing McCain, the voters of both sides rushed to the ballot box feeling that they could truly take part in the realization of this difference. In fact we know examples of this from Turkey too. When serious differences are felt between parties, people's participation in politics becomes at once more tense, more exciting and greater.

So, what can Obama do? By electing Obama, what can American society do? Can it really make a difference?

I believe that in politics everyone's participation surely has a real counterpart. How much and what Obama will change is of course a separate question, but to say already that the system in operation will carry on as if nothing had happened is nothing but simple political fatalism, incurable cynicism. Obama may display an even worse performance than Bush in his policies toward Turkey or the US. But we do not know this yet. Moreover, to say the exact opposite we now have much more data.

That Obama has been able to be elected to the White House with the values he represents can be characterized simply as a victory of the system or the power centers in the US, but doing so, while possible, is not permissible. It is not permissible from the standpoint of a political creed that holds even a measure of faith in the human being. No system is clever enough to launch so many factors into such a great operation. To assume such a mind also goes against the belief in divine unity (tawhid) that Islam, Christianity and Judaism still carry to the extent that they do. There is not even a devil that binds the human will and renders everything he does ineffective.

What we should now know better is that politics requires a minimum of "hope," and that the US election has hoisted a sail, in the eyes of its own society, upon hope, the greatest resource that makes politics, and thereby human existence itself, possible.