In this political season, the Republic’s security is tested as the voters choose.

The ballot is essential to the survival of the Republic. Yet it is provides a silly season when candidates play “gotcha” at the lowest possible denominator of invective and taste, drawing voter’s attention away from monumental issues he, ultimately, must decide.

It is not an American monopoly. Everywhere democracies, old and new, are being tested in just this way. It would seem to be a time of unique crisis. But the process is a continuum, inevitable given the characteristics of democratic ethos.

Only occasionally can historians look back and see a turning point was played out at a particular time. Whether we are living through such a period seems clear now as the world confronts Islamofascism — but only time will tell.

That’s why, of course, Iraq’s situation is quintessential. Even though Baghdad has never had democracy, even though it is being introduced at the point of a bayonet, and even though it may not be a fertile field, the stirrings of this peculiar democratic test are already underway.

Iraqi politicians are using presence of a foreign occupying force to sustain their infantile democratic efforts against religious fanatics, thugs who would return a Sadam-like rule, and ordinary criminals. But simultaneously they exploit xenophobia and incipient nationalist feelings against the occupiers to build a partisan electoral base.

In the process, of course, they make neutralizing the enemy nigh impossible, maximizing his efforts to inflict casualties on Iraqis, to kill young Americans and Coalition soldiers, and to further confuse Washington. In essence, recent conversations between President George W. Bush and Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Mliki must have explored the outer reaches of this issue. Or, again, as Speaker Tip O’Neill had it, all politics are local. But local for al-Maliki means local for Bush’s Republican Party at mid-term elections.

All over Asia you see similar contradictions between maintaining democratic ideals and winning elections.

In Malaysia, Prime Minister Adbullah Badwi’s effort toward reform, to end the “crony capitalism” he inherited, is opposed by his chauvinistic, xenophobic [and liege lord] predecessor, Mohammed Mahathir. Now, Mahathir’s most famous victim, Anwar Ibrahmi, is returning to the arena, triangulating between the two – for votes..

In India, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, who as an economist had an epiphany for market economics when the Soviet Union imploded, is trying desperately to unshackle the economy for a run against China. But to keep his parliamentary majority, he has to outmaneuver the anti-market rhetoric and Sinophilic proclivicites of his Bengal Communist supporters.

In Japan, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, reinforcing his predecessor Junichiro Koizumi’s populism, reinforces the office of the chief executive and disables the “iron triangle” among Party leaders, bureaucrats and business.Gone would be old Japan, Inc., making decisions top down, but Abe would introduce new vulnerabilities by creating a more powerful but fickle electorate.

Even in the older European democracies, Germany now suffers from a battling coalition with its chancellor for one foreign policy, its foreign minister, with another. France is entering an electioneering season with a wounded president-party leader, his chief adversary in his own party, and tempted, as he has been accused of in the past, defeating him by splitting the conservative vote. And Britain, with a much too long goodbye for its prime minister, suddenly has a Conservative candidate playing to voter Iraq-fatigue by spouting anti-Americanism of the departing prime minister’s leftwing Laborite critics!

Winston Churchill, Britain’s great wartime leader rejected at the polls shortly after victory, said it best:

We accept in the fullest sense of the word the settled and persistent will of the people. All this idea of a group of supermen and super-planners, such as we see before us, “playing the angel,” as the French call it, and making the masses of the people do what they think is good for them, without any check or correction, is a violation of democracy. Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time; but there is the broad feeling in our country that the people should rule, continuously rule, and that public opinion, expressed by all constitutional means, should shape, guide, and control the actions of Ministers who are their servants and not their masters.

Not to be forgotten, however, Churchill was at the time speaking in favor of preserving the hereditary character of the House of Lords, fearing as many democrats have, “parliamentary supremacy” without a written constitution makes even Britain, the mother of modern human rights, vulnerable to the erosion of elections, however bedrock that instrument is to democracy.

Sol W. Sanders, (solsanders@cox.net), is an Asian specialist with more than 25 years in the region, and a former correspondent for Business Week, U.S. News & World Report and United Press International. He writes weekly for World Tribune.com and East-Asia-Intel.com.