Democracy and Its Crisis - AC Grayling Flashcards
Preface
We have two great rights as citizens - the right to vote, and the right to good government.
Winston Churchill - ‘Democracy is the the least bad of all systems’
‘The strongest argument against democracy is a few minutes’ conversation with any voter’
Representative democracy is about the form of a political order as the vehicle for carrying democratically expressed preferences into good government for all.
Ancient Greek demokratia, from demos ‘the people’, kratos ‘rule’ = ‘rule by the people’
Plato thought it could too readily degenerate into ochlocracy (mob rule).
The power of demagoguery, of manipulation of crowd sentiment targeting emotion and prejudice are inimical to producing sound government.
H.L Mencken: ‘Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance’
The dilemma of democracy is the reconciliation of 2 key aims:
1/ The ultimate source of political authority should lie in democratic approval
2/ Government should be sound and responsible
China is a functionally cosmetic institution of democracy. Much theatre is made of a national ‘people’s congress’ which is wholly without influence on the executive.
Each vote should have equal weight - a condition NOT satisfied by a first-past-the-post electoral system.
Allowing democracy to be corroded is a serious dereliction of our duty as citizens.
The History of the Dilemma
In the Republic (book 8), Plato describes a set of political regimes arranged in descending order of merit:
1/ Aristocracy = rule by the BEST / ‘Philosopher Kings’ with knowledge and virtue
(not understood as hereditary nobility - a much later misappropriation of the term)
2/ Timocracy = seek honour, status and military glory
3/ Oligarchy = rule by the few “Money, money, money”
4/ Democracy = rule by the people
4a/ Ochlocracy = mob rule
5/ Tyranny = strongman/despot in power
Aristotle thought that Plato’s version of aristocracy was impractical because it ignored human nature. Can there really be ‘philosopher kings’ remote from normal human desire for affection?
Aristotle’s own idea for the best kind of political order was one in which every citizen - where citizen is a restricted notion - is virtuous, equipped to attain excellence of character, and therefore able to live a life of eudaemonia.
Aristotle defined a citizen as a man who has the right to take part in the assembly, to hold office as a magistrate, and to sit on juries.
As more citizens become educated and better off, so a democracy evolves into a polity, defined as that political order in which the pooled wisdom of reasonable and informed citizens might result in dispensation only one notch below an aristocracy (the best).
The Beginnings of the Solution
John Locke’s Two Treatises on Government - one of the most influential political tracts written in the 17th century
The crucial question for political thought is: what confers authority on government?
Democracy as ‘the people’ and how their will finds expression.
After feudalism, a new justification was needed, and it was provided by the ‘doctrine of divine right’.
This view originated in the Church’s view that Christendom is a single domain to which individual kingdoms are subordinate.
Kings were divinely appointed and allegiance to them was a religious duty.
The Glorious Revolution of 1688 in England was a complete rejection of these doctrines, and in their place was substituted the principle of parliamentary government.
Parliament had taken the place of God as the source of political authority.
A major reason why Locke’s views are so influential in the American and French revolutions is that he introduced the idea of power as trusteeship, held by the consent - however bestowed - of those on whose behalf it is executed.
Locke took it to be essential that the legislature (parliament) and executive (government of the day) should be separate,
Locke said that these two organs of the state should not only be separate, but the people involved in them should be different also. (this is not the case in the UK, where government (PM + cabinet) is formed by members of the parliamentary majority.)
The legislative, executive and judicial arms of government must be kept separate. If they are mutually independent they will counterbalance each other. If they are in the same hands there is no safeguard against possible tyranny.
The legislature should be bicameral (have 2 chambers), each of the houses having the power to block laws proposed by the other house.
The UK’s constitution (unwritten) has been aptly described as a ‘set of understandings which no one understands’.
Solutions Proposed
The founders of the US took their lesson from Montesquieu and designed the constitution of checks and balances intended to ensure that although ‘the consent of the people’ would be sought as a part of the authorising basis for government, the institutions of government would be a combination of elected, indirectly elected and appointed bodies.
These bodies would ‘refine and enlarge the public views’, in effect filtering out the self-interest, lack of information, short-termism and prejudice of the many. The government must be in the hands of those competent for the job i.e. an elite.
The FPTP system effectively disenfranchises every voter whose vote does not go to the winner.
In Montesquieu’s meaning of the term, a republic is a political order in which government is delegated to a small number of citizens elected by the rest.
De Tocqueville’s recommendation was for a solution to the deficits of democracy framed in terms of filtering institutions, conveying the suffrage of the people by indirect means to government insulated from the ‘pitfalls’ and ‘small passions’ and ‘vices’ that unqualified democracy is at risk of falling prey to.
Alternative Democracies
It is precisely the point of the representatives that they are representative and not delegates - that is, they have powers in their own right to decide what shall be done, independently of the wishes of those who voted for them.
Populism is prompted by the feeling that government is too remote and too unresponsive to concerns at the grass-roots level, and accordingly takes the form of an upswelling of indignation and a desire to get attention and remedy.
Populism claims to express the emotion of a people that feels beleaguered, diminished and lost. Its discourse is nostalgic for past power and wedded to a frantic defence of identity.
Hannah Ardent distinguishes between the ‘masses’ and ‘the people’ in her Origins of Totalitarianism. The latter wish to see their views and wishes make a difference; the former hate the society which they feel has marginalised and excluded them. They are therefore ripe for harvesting by demagogues for totalitarian causes.
Populist sentiment is the element in which demagogues swim.
Epistocracy - rule by the knowledgeable
Voters suffer from a wide range of cognitive biases that prevent them from thinking clearly about politics
The question any government has to answer is: ‘By what right do you presume to make laws and direct our society? Who has given you the authority to do this?’
The answer ‘because the majority of us agree’, has come to be where the justification stops.
Why has it gone wrong?
1/ Failure of the systems constituting representative democracy to operate as the theory prescribed
2/ Failure of civic education to make representative democracy work
In the UK, the de facto sovereign is the executive commanding a majority in the House of Commons.
This constitutes an elective dictatorship due to the concentration of powers in an executive government formed out of one party, which does not always fairly represent the popular will.
Independence of members of the House of Commons has decreased under the system of party discipline known as ‘whipping’. Rebels are warned that they will not be offered ministerial posts, or will not receive support for re-election.
Proportional representation is a simple matter of fairness and appropriateness; the moderating effect of coalition in government is a simple matter of desirability.
The question at hand is whether our democratic process can endure a hyper-personalised data-driven media and propaganda environment that our founders could never have imagined. Deploying hyper-targeted voter media that constructs narrow or outright fabricated versions of the truth to influence small subsets of voters in strategically important locations is a scenario our founding fathers never imagined.
Bertrand Russell famously said, ‘Most people would rather die than think, and most people do’.
Making Representative Government Work
The enfranchised must be informed and reflective.
The first defence against both is a thorough understanding of the institutions and practices of the democratic order and the government it licenses.
Voting should be a civic responsibility from 16 years of age for 2 reasons: what people learn at school about these matters can be applied straight away, and there will be a greater chance of responsible and thoughtful voting continuing thereafter.
The People and the Constitution
Representative democracy should have no truck with referenda. A referendum is an opinion poll, in which the profile of sentiment in the population is measured.
It puts a complex question to be answered by a yes or no.
The representatives in a representative democracy are charged with getting information, listening to arguments, forming a judgement, and justifying it; none of this is required of a voter in a referendum.
The UK’s FPTP system is hopelessly unrepresentative, regularly producing governments with large majorities in the House of Commons on not much more than a third of total votes cast.
There is no justification for whipping the support of members unless when the government’s election manifesto promises are at stake.
Conclusion
Representative democracy is not perfect; but other forms of democracy, and all forms of non-democracy as not as good, by quite a margin.
There are simple and direct remedies that would rescue representative democracy from the distortions it has been subjected to:
1/ Complete transparency on individuals and organisations involved in election campaigning, on what basis and by what methods
2/ Complete transparency about funding and a funding cap
3/ The press should be subject to strict fact-check monitoring and stiff fines levied for purveying deliberate misinformation
4/ Betting on elections should be banned
5/ Voting should be compulsory for all citizens, and the voting age should be 16.
6/ Civic education should be obligatory
7/ Replace the FPTP system with proportional representation
8/ Reform the party discipline system in the UK to make it impermissible to apply the whip to MPs for matters other than election manifesto commitments.
The people have a right to vote. The people have a right to good government. The dilemma of democracy was how to get from he first right to the second right.
Representative democracy, if true to its intended nature and properly and transparent carried out, is the resolution of that dilemma.
