In internet discussions I have been involved in, people say a lot about democracy. Some think the democracy they think they are in is not working well. They seem to have few ideas about why, or how to fix it.
They will often talk of the need to ”get money out of politics” or the need to “elect better people”. Some believe that the internet has ruined public discussion. The ‘news media’ are failing, or people are not well enough educated.
Others are very definite that the political systems we have now are the best that can be because they are what is. I frequently run into the old Winston Churchill line, that democracy is the worst system except all those other ones tried from time to time. Old Winnie was a member of the British oligarchy, which had created the system he worked within, and so it worked fine for him.
There is another trope about democracy which I encounter less frequently, but which contains more truth. I am not sure who originated it. It is that the greatest threat to democracy is the idea that we already have one.
We do not live in a democracy. As the old democratic practitioners of ancient Athens would tell us, this system we have, of elections and parties and representatives, is meant to facilitate an oligarchic form of government. That is, one in which the factions of a privileged elite take turns at governing and at apportioning the wealth created by the whole population.
The participation of the working classes is limited to deciding which of these oligarchic factions they want to align with. Public discussion is kept structureless to facilitate the management of public perceptions by those with money to buy platforms and pay influencers. There is usually a lot of effort made to prevent ordinary people from gaining any experience at managing their own institutions, even at the most local level.
There are common features to those democracies which have been able to exist for some time in history. These include; choosing legislative bodies by sortition, meaning random selection of qualified people, to prevent partisan packing of such bodies. Also, delegated systems in which local assemblies appoint delegates to higher bodies, who then report back to receive further instructions.
If this is not enough, there are further aspects to a real democracy which will cause people with ‘liberal’ educations, brought up to think that ‘representative’ and ‘democracy’ are not oxymorons, to blow a mind fuse. In a real democracy there is no such thing as an elected official, there are no political parties, and there is no such thing as a free press or freedom of speech.
In a real democracy, public officials are appointed. In a technologically advanced democracy, they are appointed on the basis of advanced qualifications. They are appointed and removed, given areas of responsibility, directions, performance goals, and are monitored, by legislative bodies.
These legislative bodies are formed by sortition or delegation, or both. The bodies are structured to weed out interest agents, attention seekers, and ideological crusaders. Political parties are forbidden. Lobbying is forbidden; real democratic legislatures hear only delegates from other democratic bodies, or those experts which they have selected for consultation on specific topics.
There is no such thing as freedom of speech in a real democracy. Speech is privileged upon being qualified in the subject, speaking in good faith, speaking clearly and cogently, and speaking in an appropriate forum in an appropriate way. Debate is useless and no serious person is interested in listening to it.
It is an old saying that ‘freedom of the press’ is limited to those who own the press. That is, the medium of public discourse. Those who own the media control the public voice. That is, the power to decide what the truth is, and what is open to be discussed.
Whoever owns the public voice rules the society, is the hegemon. In an oligarchy, different oligarchic factions may control competing voices. This can lead to a complete breakdown of social cohesion, which is a problem of oligarchies; it is a big problem at present.
In a real democracy the public assemblies control the media and the public voice, and decide the truth for the whole society. The success of the democracy depends on the public having confidence in the assemblies. The public must also understand that there are no multiple realities or truths.
Generally, normal people do understand that. The idea that there are infinite realities which must all be debated comes from liberalism. It is a form of social control; only a privileged elite has time to debate endlessly.
A democracy which is not able to efficiently reach a consensus on the truth will break down. Ordinary people simply are not interested in endless debate and will not participate in a democratic process if their time and patience is abused. In a real democracy, there is little tolerance for these who want to keep rearguing things, who feel entitled to their own facts and own reality.
Thus in a real democracy, a successful one, there is an honest and efficient information service. This could be compared to a closed system or ecology. A democratic assembly needs correct information in order to make correct decisions.
It thus develops an information service which follows the usual cycle of knowledge formation in order to give the public body an accurate model of reality. That is, to distinguish facts, the relationships between facts, and the principles governing these relationships. True expertise in all topics is identified.
The results of this are made readily available to the general public. With a trustworthy source of truth in all subjects, disinformation campaigns are defeated and social cohesion is made possible. People no longer have myriad competing, manipulative, and mostly fictitious narratives blasted at them.
There is no need for hundreds of different media platforms. A democracy needs one integrated system of public information, run as a public utility. Anyone can contribute to it but they would have to pass through some system of editing, censoring, or peer review.
The usual types of noise makers will be screaming to the heavens about this. Totalitarianism is interfering with their ‘liberties’ or ‘freedom of speech’. These kinds of people will be gothically unhappy living in a real democracy but they will be a small minority.
So the old trope “democracy is the worst system except for all the others” comes from not knowing what an actual democracy is. There have been very few in history. It is debatable whether we have any in the real world, or merely a few partial democracies.
Democracies are a threat to “all these other forms” and are usually stamped out, from outside and from within. So we do not have much experience at running a democracy in a modern state. A real democracy in the present world would be an experiment.
It would be hard to get to a point of even being able to make the experiment. There would be so much against it. This gets us to another concept which is guaranteed to flip liberals, libertarians, and anarchists, and by the way pacifists, right over the moon.
In most circumstances there is no way to establish a democracy except by first establishing a dictatorship. This really should not be controversial to anyone knowledgeable about modern history. The limited democracies we have had were established mainly through armed revolutions.
Those which were not have almost always had to be subsequently defended by armed force. This usually meant having the ability to use force, but some of them have had to actually use force. Those unwilling to use force have been very shaky and tenuous.
We should not be overly concerned about the word ‘dictatorship’. Perhaps we need another word to indicate what is being discussed here. Dictatorship has become associated with tyranny and police states.
The origin of the term is in the six month emergency laws of the Roman Republic. They were invoked when regular government broke down, as often happened due to the ridiculous behaviour of oligarchic factions. They were often used to carry out reforms needed to restrain the abuses of these factions.
Western civilization’s original model of democracy, Ancient Athens, came about when Cleisthenes and friends took over. They broke the power of the hereditary clan chiefs by reorganizing the public into the Demes. They created the famous system of forming the ruling council through sortition.
The Florentine democracy came about when Duchess Matilda defeated the feudal lords, gave the cities autonomy, and refused to name a successor. When Florentine democracy finally collapsed from outside aggression and the internal disruption of the Medici, a famous political theorist proposed a solution for restoring it. Later political theorists have elaborated on this idea of the “Armed Prophet” as a means of establishing democracy.
The meme is “all the armed prophets have succeeded, the unarmed prophets have been destroyed.” It is true that those who set out to create reforms which benefit the population over a privileged elite, generally are destroyed unless they are able to defend themselves against the forces of the elite. In the present world, ‘oligarchy’ and ‘privileged elite’ usually means ‘Capitalist Class’.
The next trope to consider is the one which goes; “the history of the twentieth century has been the rise of capitalism, the rise of democracy to protect the public from capitalism, and the rise of propaganda to protect capitalism from democracy”. Propaganda or mass perception management has become the main weapon of capitalism to keep the population under control.
In western nations the populations have become so stupefied by mass perception control that a democracy would not be immediately possible. Even more than repressive police apparatuses, the “news” would have to abolished. We would likely have to educate an entire generation to be able to function as citizens of a real democracy.
While this is happening, all other aspects of capitalist hegemony would have to be dismantled and replaced by new institutions. Private banks and foundations would have to be replaced by systems of sovereign money and credit. All land and natural resources would have to be placed under public ownership.
Obviously, this will require a revolution and a transformative dictatorship. In the present time, such an initiative should not be seen as a particularly radical idea. The big issue is how it would be carried out.
Canadians generally have more trouble with this concept. Most countries have more experience with it. We will likely need a few examples in the rest of the world, of a democratic revolution and transforming dictatorship, before a movement for the same gets going domestically.
Such a revolution would be carried out by a powerful social movement, or through some external intervention or assistance. The latter option should not be viewed with disdain. It would likely lead to a less destructive and a more orderly transformation.
Most Marxist or anarchist theoreticians would be absolutely useless as a resource for this transformation. They would in fact probably be in the way. A real, democratic revolution would be led by people with good educations and real world experience as planners and administrators.
These leaders would have come around to the need for the removal of oligarchy and capitalism and establishment of a better way of running things, through their own logical analysis of contemporary problems. This transformation should be carried on with the least possible destruction and disruption of people’s lives.
However, nonviolence is a nonstarter. If democratic leaders are not able to forcefully defend themselves they are going to end up as unarmed prophets. It must be very clear that preserving the present system is not open to discussion.
This is what will be going on in the world for the next twenty or thirty years. There is a growing world wide consensus that oligarchic forms of government are not acceptable. Models of democratic government are beginning to be tested out.
It is interesting that Africa is in the forefront of this. In these nations, representative models of government are being seen for what they are; ways of optimizing an elite’s ability to engage in corruption and cronyism, and keeping the public in line through clientelism and patronage. They see these models as being forced on them.
Back here in quiet Canada, public awareness and discussion of these trends is very much behind the game. The sentinel part of the population here are just starting to recognize that their governments and economies are not working. What they are being told to believe does not make sense.
The key ideas for a post capitalist and democratic order are just starting to click into place. The great transformation is under way.
Yet it must be kept in mind that a real democracy will be an experiment. It may not be possible for a modern state to be run as an absolute democracy.
However, examples of city state democracies in the past, and local democracies in the present, show that when democracy has a chance to become established, it is a very powerful form of government. It produces very strong economies and societies. The experiment is worth doing.