—political wisdom from our Professor—
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| Democracy is born in Egypt |
Democracy is a good thing, right? This is what we’ve always been taught in our
history and civic classes through school.
It is what we tell cultures around the world as they seek alternatives
to despotism or single-party rule. It is
invoked in political speeches right along with motherhood, apple pie and
baseball. It must be a good thing,
right? The only trouble is, we find
ourselves following the news around the world, and what we see sometimes gives
us cause for pause: the “Arab Spring” brought elections to Egypt—and an
increasingly radicalized Muslim Brotherhood government. Civil unrest has followed as the Egyptian
military weighs the benefit of intervening and the rioting can be ignited by
something as innocuous as a football match.
The “freedom fighters” of Libya were victorious in their battle with the
backers of Col. Khadaffi, but our ambassador is now dead and Libya’s resources
lie in disarray. We introduced democracy
into Afghanistan, but the Karzai government seems hopelessly corrupt, not to
mention its feckless behaviour as a supposed “ally” in fighting the
Taliban. Democracy seems to have its
challenges around the world.
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| This is democracy? Really? |
Fear not, the reader must be thinking: just
turn your eyes to the inventors of democracy (the Greeks….ah, we’d better not look
there. All right then, the French….well,
after four tries at democracy I guess they managed to do something. Well, there
is the British…but they still have the queen (God save her) and a hopelessly
fractured coalition government…
Yes, but what about the world’s most prominent and
insistent advocate of democracy, the USA?
How is this democracy thing working out for us? I would think few observers would dispute
that we are caught up in a time in which it is easy to question whether our
form of national government is fully up to the task. The “fiscal cliff” melodrama merely
illustrates a dysfunctional Congress that has consistently failed to deal
effectively with a number of issues of grave national importance—most
particularly the budget deficit—but also issues of energy, nuclear waste
disposal, immigration, and growing economic stratification. Who among us is willing to present our
current Congress and say to the people of the world: “See? You should have one
of these!”
What gives?
Has democracy’s “five minutes of fame” (in historical perspective) run
out? Is its instability and deliberate
inefficiency incapable of dealing with the rapidly changing,
ideologically-charged times in which we live?
Given the examples presented above, one is nudged toward doubt.
In responding to the question of democracy,
though, one has to subdivide the problems, for the challenges democracy
presents in the middle-east, for instance, are quite different from those
presented to us in the US. There is a
very intriguing theory that for democracy to work, one must have a significant
and stable middle class. In other words,
for “majority rule” to work, the majority of the population needs to feel they
personally have more to lose through social instability than to gain. If one has a significant amount to lose, your
“vote” is practically and pragmatically driven toward competence, stability and
honesty in government (or so goes the theory.)
If you have essentially little or nothing to lose (in a material sense) your
vote reflects those things that hard-pressed/hopeless people of all ages have
tended to gravitate toward: religious fervour or opportunistic corruption (or,
many times, both in the same package.)
Israel is the only country in the middle east with a prominent middle
class; it is also the only one with a functional democracy (you might argue it
is a potentially DANGEROUS democracy, but it is a functional one for better or
for worse.)
But the US is nothing if not middle class,
isn’t it? I mean, even people making
over 200,000 dollars insist earnestly (and perhaps accurately) that they are
the epitome of middle class values. So
why is our democracy in such a seemingly sick phase (let’s hope it’s a phase
and not a terminal illness!)
The problem is that we have forgotten
something very important: America was
indeed founded as a democracy, but it was founded very deliberately as a
REPRESENTATIVE democracy and not a DIRECT democracy. The fact that most of us have forgotten this
is made manifestly clear every four years when the “wacky” or “inexplicable”
nature of the Electoral College is discussed.
There is nothing mysterious, strange or outmoded about the Electoral
College; it only seems that way to those who have forgotten our roots as a
representative democracy (which means: most of us.)
The idea embodied by the Electoral College
is that we elect individuals whose judgement we trust to then take action on
behalf of our nation in a manner in which they consider most positive. They represent our general interests, but—at least
initially—had no obligation to reflect our specific desires or directives. Technically, we still vote for electors, who
in turn vote for a president and vice-president, although a rigid custom has
evolved in which electors declare their presidential allegiances ahead of time
and invariably cast their votes for that candidate regardless of the
circumstances. The idea of
representative democracy is not trivial or insignificant, for America—at its
founding and now—is comprised of large numbers of sincere, hardworking individuals,
many of whom are too busy or otherwise not inclined to inform themselves
regarding the complexities of running
the most powerful nation on earth. As
long as they/we acknowledge this and focus on electing intelligent people of
excellent character to REPRESENT us, this works out fine. But when we start to think that watching
sensationalized and heavily edited cable television qualifies us to understand
the intricacies (and appropriate costs) of government, and we expect our
elected representatives to DIRECTLY reflect our specific, individual and semi-informed
perspectives, we get into hot water.
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| If we all have to vote on every issue, is there any time left to drink fine Scotch? |
If you look at all of our fifty states, and
determine which of them is least functional, California would probably be near
the top of most lists. And it’s no
coincidence that California was the first state to overtly apply direct
democracy through its ballot initiative process. Perhaps one of the most famous of these ballot
initiative was “proposition 13” proposed by one Harold Jarvis, which set a
permanent, constitutionally mandated limit on property taxes. This fashion of ad-hoc direct democracy seems
fine for a while (especially when opening your revised tax bill) but there is
no way that such initiatives can respond to changing circumstances (just one
example: the Americans with Disabilities Act imposed huge mandated spending on
states) or fluctuating economic circumstances.
Ross Perot, when a candidate for president, was quite fond of declaring
things to be “just that simple,” which sounded fine—except that it wasn’t and
isn’t usually true.
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| This is how you must spend your free time if you don't let representative leaders do their jobs |
California is a mess, and the entire US is
following close behind. Wisconsin
recently conducted a shrill and wasteful “recall” election of their governor—justified
on the basis of being “responsive” to the people. Our electronically connected world has given
all of us a megaphone; we use it, and we expect our representatives to hear
us. Fine so far. But when our “representatives” start to
engage in silly stunts like website “voting” on specific bills, recall
elections to even political scores and simplistic one-issue “pledges” cooked up
by Grover Norquist, we are in trouble.
Our Representatives in congress (if they still deserve that description)
increasingly behave as if we were founded as a direct democracy, voting in
whichever fashion they perceive the “American Public” to think. The health of the nation is an afterthought;
the health of their political careers is the forethought.
But we can’t blame them, really. The unfortunate fact is that party activists
are increasingly strident and ideological in their impulses, and increasingly
selective about the information upon which they determine their positions. And they vote accordingly in party primaries,
expecting their representatives to directly reflect their ideological stance at
all times. The only way to hinder the
harmful effects of these zealots, in a democracy, is to outnumber them. We simply must find a way to broaden our
major parties’ active base in such a way that a more moderate and informed
perspective prevails; a perspective that acknowledges that in a representative
democracy, we must look for candidates of broad and flexible mind, capable of
representing out general interests through rapidly changing circumstances.
Right now, playing to the zealots who
dominate nominating primaries, candidates demonstrate just the opposite traits
to those needed my representative democracy: they issue very specific solutions
(that will never happen), make very specific promises, and sign ridiculous and
rigid “pledges.” They essentially take any discretionary authority away from
themselves before they get elected. They
seem either ignorant of how representative democracy works, or too afraid to
argue for the prerogatives necessary to be a true representative.
What would democracy look like if we
reawakened the representative roots of our democracy, if we found a way to
overtly empower our elected representatives to exercise discretion and
judgement in their voting, whether in Congress or in things like the Electoral
College? I have a theory: an electoral
college composed of generally respected, broadly informed citizens elected on
the basis of their broad judgement by their individual states may never have
elected George W. Bush. And who knows,
maybe they would have elected John McCain president knowing that his chief
disqualification (the presence of Sarah Palin on the ticket) could have been
easily avoided by an electoral college willing to ignore modern protocol, and split the ticket to elect
Joe Biden vice-president. (Maybe we could have had George H.W. Bush and Lloyd
Bensten?) It’s called exercising
informed discretion….couldn’t we use a bit more of that in our government?
Let’s bring back representative
democracy…democracy seems to be in need of it.
