June 16, 2006
More Democracy! II Posted by John Steele Gordon at 02:45 PM EST Just a few comments, as I, too, have no interest in getting into a war of words here.
1) The generally accepted notion as to what constitutes a democracy has, of course, changed over the years. The Athenians, who coined the term, after all, regarded Athens as a democracy. Yet one third of the population were slaves without any rights whatever, and women had no vote (but, perhaps, much political influence: She Who Must Be Obeyed was named, not invented, by John Mortimer). Today a democracy must have a far wider franchise in order to fit the modern definition. Whether ex-felons should vote is a political decision. Those who favor it think it would result in more votes for their side; those who oppose it think so too. As for the age people must attain to vote, that, too, is a political decision. No one would argue that newborn babes or ten-year-olds should vote, because they cannot make up their own minds. That is why Scholastic magazine’s poll has such a fantastic record of accuracy. The kids reliably vote in the poll the way their parents will on election day. When I was growing up in New York State you had to be 18 to drink and 21 to vote. Now you have to be 21 to drink and 18 to vote. Both numbers are, obviously, arbitrary.
2) Mr. Zeitz writes that “social democracy” is a term that is well understood in much of the world. Fine. No argument. But it seems to me that “social democracies” are a subset of “democracies,” those that choose to socialize many parts of their economies. I would argue that the only “right” in a democracy is the right of all adults to vote—or at least all adults who have not forfeited their right by being convicted of a serious crime—and to have the results of their votes determine the composition and policies of the government. The “right” to health care that is paid for by the government may have much to do with whether the country is a social democracy but has nothing to do with whether it is a democracy.
3) Liberty and democracy are not the same thing, although, to be sure, they tend to be found in the same places. The people of British India had liberty—to be secure in their persons and homes, to speak freely, to live under the rule of law, etc. They did not have democracy.
4) Proportional Representation. I wrote that “I certainly don’t see how proportional representation is an attribute of democracy. It is, in my view, a terrible idea.” Mr. Zeitz responded, “And Good for Mr. Gordon. And too bad for a large swath of the democratic world.” Too bad indeed.
Then he wrote, “Yet whether PR works or not is utterly beside the point. PR rests on an understanding of democracy that sees the polity as a unitary entity.” Exactly. It sees the millions of people as mere units—political atoms as it were—not as individuals. Intellectuals have always found actual human beings annoyingly idiosyncratic and resistant to being plugged into their beautiful theories. That’s why their theories so seldom work in the real world.
And the people are only allowed to vote for a set of ideas, not for individuals. This has little to do with representing localities. There is no requirement that MP’s live in their constituency in Britain, and the vast majority don’t. Some hardly ever visit their constituencies except at election time. But they are still individuals. There was a case in the 1960s or ’70s (the Wilson government, if I remember correctly) in which a Labor government was elected, but one of the pooh-bahs of the party was defeated in his supposedly safe seat because he was personally very unpopular (I’m afraid I forget why). So the party booted a member out of an even safer seat so the pooh-bah could run there in a by-election. He lost again. He ran in a third seat and lost there. At that point Wilson said, in effect, “Sorry, but you can’t lose us our majority seat by seat” and he was out of the government. Now THAT’S democracy!
Mr. Zeitz wrote further that “this idea hearkens back to the republican political discourse of the eighteenth century, with its emphasis on organic community and disinterested government.” I hereby nominate “disinterested government” as the oxymoron of the week. Only in the cloud-cuckoolands of political theory are governments ever disinterested. Hamilton and Madison had no such illusions. Brilliant as they were, and deeply versed in political theory as they were, they wanted a government that would work in the real world, the world of real human beings, not so many tabula rasas to be written on by intellectuals. In that sense they were engineers, not intellectuals at all.
This world could use more political engineers and fewer political intellectuals. Much of the troubles of the twentieth century can be laid at the feet of the latter.
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