As my classmates have pointed out, Please Vote for Me does not depict a full democracy as we understand it. The students did not get to pick the candidates up for a vote; if they didn’t like Cheng Cheng, Xu Xiaofei, or Luo Lei, they were basically out of luck. But even with its limited democratic scope, the class election in Please Vote for Me is instructive as to the applicability of Machiavelli’s concepts in electoral settings. In The Prince, Machiavelli wasn’t laying out the tricks by which one gains power in a democracy; he was running through how a prince kept his power once he had assumed it. The broader point was that politics is not an area for the virtuous; some degree of ruthlessness is required to obtain and consolidate power. Xu Xiaofei did not intuit this notion, and spent a campaign offering earnest pleas for support without undermining her opponents. She quickly fell behind. Cheng Cheng displayed an alarmingly natural grasp of subterfuge, plotting to undermine his foes from the moment his candidacy was announced. His dictatorial ambitions were similarly clear: he wanted to become class monitor because he liked to “order people around”. Luo Lei, while authoritarian – his previous tenure as class monitor was not free of shirt-tugging and shoving to the end of discipline – wanted to be class monitor to allow students to do what they pleased. When his campaign faltered, he promoted his cause with gifts to his fellow students. Cheng Cheng, by contrast, could only resort to further insults when his electoral prospects hit a downturn. It’s better to be feared than loved while ruling, perhaps, but to get elected one needs a mix of both; this is why Luo Lei won the privilege of harassing his fellow students to orderliness while Cheng Cheng remained a brooding back-row tyrant. Of course, it doesn’t hurt to have family that runs the police department, allowing one to curry favor with ones classmates by taking them on a monorail trip. Xiaofei, daughter of a single mother and seemingly unable to be mean, never had a chance.

The recent trend of the United States towards illiberalism can be explained by the increase in political polarization. Zakaria distinguishes a liberal democracy as one that respects the rights of the political minority. Certain countermajoritarian structures are by necessity built in – think the Constitution in the U.S context, the domain of the by design least democratic branch of the government: the judiciary. But others existed informally, shot throughout our democracy. The Senate had traditions, never codified, that dictated how the chamber operated; those are now eroding rapidly, as exemplified by the ending of the judicial filibuster soon after Trump’s election. The norms of American democratic life more broadly are to diffuse to summarize, but they too have been lost, as seen in the World Values Survey cited in the Foa and Mounk reading that claimed Americans have lost faith in democracy and its institutions.

Why has this occurred? The first explanation provided by Foa and Mounk seems persuasive. Citizens are less materially secure than they were in previous generations. That insecurity has translated to a distrust of institutions –  government and the system can no longer be relied on to provide the benefits that once made life stable. This sets up one of the antidemocratic conditions Professor Malekzadeh talked about in the lecture: people believe that every election might have dire consequences for their way of life. If your ideological foes win, history might end. This partisanship is translated into who citizens vote into the Senate. The partisanship currently seen is not contrary to the people’s wishes – it is reflective of it. While most Americans are dissatisfied with Congress as a whole, they hold their own Congressperson in high esteem. They are fine with uncompromising positions, and even prefer them, as can be seen in the spate of primary challenges from the outer ideological fringes of the parties. Party apparatuses are now seen – correctly or incorrectly – as checks to the strident ideological demands of their voter bases. I don’t see this changing until the voters themselves return to a level of security close to the one currently enjoyed by members of Congress.

Lerner’s last paragraph indicates the relative myopia of political modes of analysis – they’re ineffective ways of representing the whole of a culture. They’re certainly useful , both in terms of highlighting differences within a society – why do the four remaining small farmers vote for the Halk party, and only them? – and between societies – why are Balgat men overwhelmingly Demokrat voters? – and understanding to some degree the preferences of its members. But understanding the only the political breakdown of Balgat would not give a full description of the town – indeed, it would lead to a distorted view, such as that of the newspaper man whose party required a Balgat with “their male ‘corners’ and their retail stores”, a perspective shaped by the need for ideal town that blended traditional notions with an acceptance of the new political order instead of a village with real, sincerely-felt history (Lerner 42).

To get a full, clear picture we need the thick description Geertz recommended. Lerner provides this in his nuanced, insightful analysis of Balgat, his faithful rendition of local culture, his understanding of the views of the Balgati towards modernization, and in so doing reveals the flaws of the analysis of Tosun, whose work he built on. Tosun also peered at the city through a political lens, not in the way of party politics but instead through an (at least partially) anti-capitalist framework. In approaching his study in that way he set himself up for misunderstanding – he scorns the worldview of both the chief and the grocer in order to justify his view of the town as filled with struggling, simple folk. Lerner, approaching the village with the intent of understanding, managed to better realize than either political observer the perspectives of the society’s members towards the town, its changes, and the political system closely tied to both.

I think there is some value to the idea of a truth beyond any form of science because the scope of any discipline is necessarily incomplete. An anthropological approach will give insight into the human effects of social change but is limited by the number of people it can reach; a historical analysis will net valuable data on societal trends while neglecting the personal impact of those trends in every way but outcomes. This doesn’t mean we shouldn’t see the truth. A blended approach, one combining a macro understanding of trends with an eye for the human detail, can move closer to the truth than any single method alone.

This type of synthesis is attempted by Masha Gessen in “The Dying Russians”. He examines the work of both an anthropologist and an economist to try to understand why Russians are dying so young after the fall of the Soviet Union. Parsons, the anthropologist, provides a compelling answer: they feel unneeded. The transition from Soviet-communism to capitalism and the plunder of the Soviet coffers by western businesspeople rapidly shifted the views of the average Russian towards their job – they went from feeling needed and secure to superfluous and exploited. Their early deaths are a product of their alienation. This explanation is persuasive in context, but, as Gessen notes, fails to account for the previously high rates of death in Russia. According to Eberstadt’s statistical analysis, Soviet mortality rates spiked in multiple periods before the fall of the Berlin wall. These increases cannot be explained by a feeling of uselessness after the implementation of robber-capitalism. Instead, Gessen suggests, they’re a product of hopelessness. The Soviet system ground down Russians, who started to perish from despair; this was not stopped by a transition to capitalism, and indeed increased. The feelings of Parsons’s Russian subjects are not wrong, but are poorly contextualized. With a combined approach, a shrewd examiner can mesh the experiences of people with their historical frame to better understand a society and its outcomes.

Orwell’s need to maintain an image of domination in front of his subjects means the Burmese had the power in the account of shooting the elephant. However, this does not translate to the Burmese having significant power in the situation overall – their acts of rebellion did little to undermine the ultimate claim to British authority in Burma.

As an imperial police officer, Orwell was well-positioned to observe what Scott called “weapons of the weak”, the subtle methods the oppressed had to fight back in some measure against those subjugating them. The jeering, tripping, and general ill-reception Orwell was met with in public seem little more than minor irritants, but they made an impression on him, building up into some truly passionate and racially tinged hatred – the Burmese were “evil-spirited little beasts”, the worst of whom he wished to “drive a bayonet into” (Orwell 1). This sets the stage for what comes next: a performance of power where the audience has control, the principal actor helpless to do anything but follow the script they’ve laid out. Orwell “did not want to shoot the elephant” but felt that he must to maintain the facade of control he had over the natives; not doing so would have invited their laughter, a humiliation a “white man in the east” could not bear (Orwell 3). In forcing Orwell to maintain his public performance against his will the natives have power.

Scott addressed this in his piece on public and hidden transcripts. He specifically cites “Shooting the Elephant” and its discussion of the mask of power, how its wearer’s face “grows to fit it” as an example of the power the oppressed have over the oppressors in terms of enforcing a symbolic politics (Orwell 3). However, Scott’s writing makes it clear that there are limits – sometimes unmasking an oppressor as a fraud does not diminish their power. It is most effective when their mask-slip reveals a contradiction to their claim of authority; this does not happen in the case of Orwell. He describes the British as “clamped down” on Burma, implying a rule justified by force and the threat of it (Orwell 1). The humiliation of a British officer, while personally unfortunate, does little to undermine the basis of imperial domination. It is important to remember that the power dynamic seen in “Shooting the Elephant” is not applicable to most other situations in the British occupation of Burma – it’s an uncommon case of the need for a public transcript backfiring on the oppressing class.