Time to Stop Pretending -

Electoral Representation Never Is, Never Was and Never Will Be a Form of Democracy.

by Ivo Mosley.

We all know in our bones that it’s a bit of a joke to call our political system ‘democracy’ when our only democratic capability is to throw out one set of rogues and replace it with another (usually almost identical) one every five years. What’s not widely known is: it’s only recently that our system of electoral representation has been called ‘democracy’ at all. Up to a reasonably definable date - say 1800 - ‘democracy’ meant popular participation in government, just as juries are popular participation in the administration of justice. Electoral representation was understood to be an inherently elitist system, a variety of ‘oligarchy’, just as Aristotle classified it all those centuries ago.

To illustrate this, a mini-vignette. Again it is not widely-known, but the American founding fathers loathed democracy. John Adams wrote: ‘Democracy wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There was never a democracy that did not commit suicide.’ And Madison: ‘Democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths.’ Hamilton: ‘The ancient democracies, in which the people themselves deliberated, never possessed one feature of good government. Their very nature was tyranny.’ And Jefferson, whose personal inclination was towards popular rule, nevertheless rejected democracy: ‘A democracy is the only pure republic, but impracticable beyond the limits of a town.’

By democracy, all these writers meant the ancient system of popular participation in government. When these men devised the American system of electoral representation, they devised it as a specifically elitist system: the ‘people’ were supposed to elect their betters. Yet just a few years later, electoral representation was being sold back to the people as a variety of democracy. By the time Tocqueville wrote Democracy in America (in the 1850’s) it was commonly accepted that there were two types of democracy - modern ‘representational democracy’ and the ‘participatory democracy’ of the ancients. The idea that electoral representation was in direct opposition to democracy was lost.

Since Toqueville, only the most deeply sceptical of writers (Oakeshott, for instance) have referred to our system as anything other than a variety of democracy. But once we separate out ‘democracy’ and ‘electoral representation’ in our minds, we can see the development of the modern world in a whole new light. For a start, we can dispense with the despair that this world ‘is what people want’ and that therefore there is no way out. We can begin to understand our world as the interaction of peoples and elites, who themselves are always changing in ways influenced by electoral representation. True democracy, on the other hand, becomes something we might want to resort to in the future: a dim and distant possibility, perhaps even a way out of the mess our elites have led us into.

Before examining some aspects of this mess, let’s acknowledge some positive developments that have taken place in so-called ‘mature democracies’ - while accepting that this phrase is a misnomer for ‘countries that have been governed within systems of electoral representation for some time’. We can say that until recently they have been free of the kinds of arbitrary arrest, imprisonment and torture that plague dictatorships. We can say they are free of the genocidal acts that characterise young ‘democracies’ (such as the English in Ireland, the American against the Natives, the French in the Vendee, the Turks against the Armenians, the Germans against the Jews, the Hutu against the Tutsi, the Serbs against ethnic Albanians etc etc). We can say that, interlinked by co-ownership of financial assets, ‘mature democracies’ show more reluctance to go to war with each other. We can say that - for better or worse - censorship occurs not on moral grounds, only on commercial and political grounds. And we can say they are affluent.

To see how far our system of electoral representation is from being democratic, we can make a list of things that people certainly don’t want, but which the elite has imposed upon us anyway. My list would include: the Iraq war, the over-regulation of all aspects of life, the exploitation of poor countries by corporations, the destruction of native cultures (including our own) by state subsidy and dumbing-down, idiotic agricultural policies, the reduction of education to a series of training programmes with good-citizenship thrown in, divisive laws favouritising selective minorities, the commercialisation of childhood, the erosion of sources of authority outside government, the bureaucritization of the health service… how one could go on! It all adds up to the ever-expanding darkness we live in, a darkness that gives more power, jobs and money to government and their corporate accomplices - and less money and freedom to the rest of us. ‘One nation - united under CCTV’, as a London graffito puts it.

By understanding our system as an oligarchy, we can make sense of these and of even greater transformations which have been decided on by elites, far from any popular participation or approval. For instance, take a key period in the West after the end of the Second World War: Hitler was defeated, self-determination was restored to the states of Western Europe, America was established as the strongest power in the world. It was widely agreed (outside the communist world) that electoral representation was the sensible goal for political development everywhere. An argument thereupon raged among policy-makers in the US: should less powerful countries be allowed to determine their own destinies, find their own affluence, become prosperous trading partners and thereby increase the prosperity of all (à la Adam Smith); or should US foreign policy be directed towards destabilization, murder, and various types of manipulative coercion to satisfy the interests of US corporate, political and military elites?

Sadly, the latter course won out. Voters were never aware of the the argument, so to call this world-shaking development ‘democratic’ would be madness. Under cover of ‘democracy and freedom’, countries were encouraged either to succumb to right-wing dictatorships friendly to American interests, or to adopt the pseudo-democracy of electoral representation. Electoral representation opened the doors to big corporations: so in both cases, freedom lost out - either politically to the dictatorships; or morally and economically to the corporations. This transformation contributed over the decades to many of the troubles we are currently experiencing - for instance, to the murderousness of fundamentalist Islam. And who was the most outspoken opponent of this grotesque development? President Eisenhower, previously General Eisenhower, perhaps the last true American patriot, but powerless to arrest the scourge of the ‘military-industrial complex’ he warned so passionately against.

When we study electoral representation as an elitist system, we can begin to understand the continuity between our own globalising civilization and other great empires that took the name of the people in vain. Nazism and communism both relied on heavily propagandised illusions to gain and keep power - the Nazis on illusions of racial superiority; communism on the illusion that prosperity, equality and freedom would flourish in a system of totalitarian power. Our own system depends upon a number of illusions: for instance, that government can sort out our problems, and that constantly increasing material wealth brings happiness. But there is another illusion common to all three systems, and that is the belief that the system represents the will of the people.

This is why the simple truth - that electoral representation never is, never was and never will be a form of democracy - finds not even a nook or cranny to take root in: not in academia, not in the serious or popular presses, not in journals of international politics. In the case of academia, where the history of the democracy is familiar to many, this is a craven omission. J’accuse: this omission becomes a morally criminal one when our world is all but devoured by the jackals of government and corporate power.

When, on the odd occasion, the ‘democratic deficit’ of our representative system is discussed, it is usually asserted that participatory democracy is impossible in large modern communities. This is not so: someone with an appetite to find out could do worse than read Keith Sutherland’s book A People’s Parliament. Another frequent objection is that participatory democracy implies ignorant people pressing buttons on their TV’s saying yes to things like capital punishment. Not so: the Athenian process involved careful consideration by assemblies selected by lot, jury-style, for lengths of time that gave them experience and knowledge of process and issues. There is a deep antipathy towards popular participation among the elites - not surprising, for they have a lot to lose.

Granted that we live in an elitist society, it will be quite properly and correctly argued that all complex societies necessarily have elites. Even democratic Athens had its elites - though they were more vulnerable than our own, as the examples of Socrates and the practise of ostracism make manifest. But this misses the importance of acknowledging that electoral representation is a variety of oligarchy: it gives us a tool for understanding how our elites and peoples have both changed since the system was adopted.

Now that so many countries in the world have adopted electoral representation, we are in a postion to generalize about certain developments and tendencies which follow. With the arrival of universal franchise, old hereditary elites are pushed out, along with the traditional values and cultures they embody. Who fills the vacuum depends upon many factors: it may be tribal suprematists (as in Germany in the nineteen-thirties and in the Sudan today); it may be vendors of a commercialised culture and their political representatives; it may be an immediate take-over by corrupt sellers of the national assets (as in many ex-Communist countries); it may be that power is given to a messianic self-believer such as Tony Blair; sometimes it is even given to genuine legislators who want to change the world for the better. But whatever happens, the ancient culture is abandoned with all its accomodations to the difficulties of living well in this world; and some fantasy is offered to the people of how they will be happier as a result of granting power to a new elite.

This promise - that power will transform life for the better - is the illusion that transforms all societies under electoral representation: it is what draws people out to vote. It means that political power and control in everyday life grow exponentially. For every inch of power gained by the elite, an inch of freedom is lost to the people. The degradation of culture and education is a corollary to this process. Tyrannies - whether they operate in the name of the people or in the name of a dictator - like to impart to their subjects a sense of helplessness, and of a corresponding need for the state as a redeeming power. State-sponsored contemporary culture is always degrading; state-sponsored education veers always from truth towards propaganda.

In Britain, the elite - those who decide things - is a many-headed beast. The heads argue noisily among themselves, giving an impression that there is an ongoing discussion about the role of government in our lives. This masks a consistency in the advance of power. Take the divisions of ‘left’ and ‘right’: the left is generally in favour of more social control, the right is in favour of more corporate power. The reality in British politics has been that both these powers have advanced, breeding inertia and incapacity in the rest of us. And all the while, the sense that ‘this is what people want’ corrodes the will to resist. Left and right turn out to be the wings of a gigantic corporate vulture which absorbs 50% of our GDP for the privelege of ruining our lives.

It could be said that electoral representation is our most successful export. All around the globe, societies are reeling as they are hit by the realities of importing our way of life. Even if we ourselves cannot see the wood from the trees, it is to be hoped that someone somewhere can. Otherwise, we shall all be led like beasts to the slaughter to one or other of the great abysses the elites have prepared for us.