DEMOCRACY

"Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what they are going to have for lunch" - Benjamin Franklin 

Nowadays, the concept of a democratic society is elevated to the highest form of government known to man as it presumes to portray the freest kind of society. In a democracy, there is a veneration for: free speech; diversity of opinions; debates are encouraged; a balance between conservative and progressive ideologies… to the point that the idea of democracy becomes compromised without those. It is counterposed to monarchy and totalitarianism which are more restrictive in nature and hamper progress and peaceful and stable societies. But is that really the case in our modern western societies? Are our societies the epitome of democratic (and thus progressive, peaceful and stable) ruling?

The word democracy comes from the union of the Greek terms ‘demos’ which means ‘the people’ or ‘district’ and ‘kratia’ which is ‘rule’ or ‘strength’; meaning altogether ‘ruled by the people’.  As Ken D’Oudney states:

“Through its etymology, history and signification, the word democracy designates the constitutional justice system. […] The word the Hellenes gave to describe the state of society in which the citizens have control through the Trial by Jury to judge, make and enforce the laws and overrule the government, the wealthy and powerful, the aristocrats and all the people who sought to rule them, was demokratia, which translates into English as Democracy” (2016:1)

The idea was that the power was vested on ordinary citizens to judge, decide, enforce and ultimately make the law, which was effectively the people’s power to rule. Therefore, the origin of what democracy entailed was very distinct than the ones we see today. It meant creating the law, which could perhaps be understood as a type of direct democracy through referenda but that in reality it was a type of Common Law system in which the community itself decided in terms of law and morality. So, if this is where the idea of democracy comes from but not what we have today in our modern democracies, what is it that we have today? Is the power today really held by the ‘common’ people?

The means by which democracy is executed nowadays are suffrage and people’s trust. Without the ritualistic voting taking place, governments would not have people’s trust and without the later, the former which we now consider to be fundamental to democracy would not happen. In a theoretical manner, people’s trust on their representatives and the act of voting are what sustains the idea that we live in democracies but as D’Oudney explains: “suffrage does not define democracy nor does it produce democracy, for electoral voting takes place in anti-democratic states too.” (2016:1)

What we have today are indirect democracies in which the people select representatives to whom they delegate the power of decision over law and thus over morality too. There are major problems with this type of democracy; the first and more relevant one that I want to point out is about the “contradiction-in-terms”. D’Oudney proposes that “misconstrued notions [of democracy] (such as “direct” or “representative”) confound, undermine and pervert the real meaning of democracy because they incorrectly allude to statute law derived from government-by-majorities, including referenda and voting in assemblies.” (2016:18) That’s one of the main reasons why democracy these days is not people’s power but power over the people as it has become “electoral voting -majority ruled and media-driven consensus politics”.

And those, again, neither create nor define democracy, perverting like that what we mean by our current idea of democracy. So, we seem to live in permanent cognitive dissonance. We talk as if we live in democratic societies but what we really mean by it is that somebody else has the power to de facto rule over us.

First, the concept that the ‘creation-fiction’ called government can have rights that men and women do not possess like the right to rule someone else is logically wrong as if men and women haven’t got that right, they cannot delegate it to any government. No one can delegate a right he does not possess. Moreover, there is no creation that can be authority of its creator, it is certainly strange to affirm that the author of something is under his creation’s authority. Notwithstanding, this strange formulation is justified by the ‘consent of the governed’ idea. The author and authority of governments (the people) give away such authority to the representatives of the state in order for the people individually to be accepted as part of ‘society’.

Larken Rose writes that democracy “is nothing more than majority-approved immoral violence, and so cannot possibly fix society or be a tool for freedom or justice” (Rose, 2012:31) Furthermore, that “all belief in “government” requires the absurd, cult-like belief that, by way of pseudo-religious political documents and rituals (constitutions, elections, appointments, legislation, and so on) a bunch of mere mortals can conjure into existence an entity that possesses superhuman rights – rights not possessed by any of the people who created it” (Rose, 2012:111). If I do not have the right to tell my neighbour how he should behave and live his life; why would I have the right to elect someone to do exactly that? At the point in which only a few decide then by definition, the rule or power does no longer reside on ‘the people’.

Elected politicians seem to be under no moral nor legal obligation to keep the promises they made to their voters once they are in office. Politicians are there for personal gain, and even if they were in politics to actually help people live better lives, could they do it? Nowadays, it is pretty clear that politicians obey the mandates that come from international organisations, as those are clearly the ones dictating policy. Moreover, political actors are there to “sell” these policies to the people through propagandistic means. "Propaganda", wrote Noam Chomsky “is to a democracy what the bludgeon is to a totalitarian state.” And if all this is the current state of affairs with our political system, the question is begged: is this democracy desirable?

In his book 'From Aristocracy to Monarchy to Democracy' Hans-Hermann Hoppe puts forward an interesting argument. He states that, contrary to what we might think, out of these three froms of government, democracy is the least desirable. I will look at some of the flaws that Hoppe brings up in the book that will give us a glimpse of why he might think that. 

The first flaw is that the illusion of "we are all government" weakens public resistance against government power and intrusion:

"Under democracy the distinction between the rulers and the ruled becomes blurred. The illusion even arises that the distiction no longer exists: that with the democratic government no one is rules by anyone, but everyone instead rules himself. Accordingly, public resistance against government power is systematically weakened." 

This blurring between the political class and the people has as a consequence that:

"the plutocrats are able to act in a largely unrestrained manner because the masses are deluded into believing that their vote is ultimately what determines the course of events. The ability to vote pacifies the masses and prevents them from directing their anger at the real wielders of power, i,e., the plutocrats."

Not only that but, because there is "free entry" into the political system:

"the selection of state rulers by means of popular elections makes it essentially impossible for harmless or decent persons to ever rise to the top. Presidents and prime ministers come into their position not owing to their status as natural aristocrats, as feudal kings once did... but as a result of their capacity as morally uninhibited demagogues. Hence, democracy virtually assures that only dangerous men will rise to the top of state government."

And here we can perfectly see what is happening nowadays, where the dictates come from the Davos Economic Forum; the World Bank; the International Monetary Fund; etc.

"the true power elite, which determines and controls who will make it as president, prime minister, party leader, etc. are the plutocrats. The plutocrats are not simply the super-rich -the big bankers and the captains of big business and industry. Rather, the plutocrats are only a subclass of the superrich. They are those superrich big bankers and businessmen, who have realised the enormous potential of the State as an institution that can tax and legislate for their own even greater future enrishment and who, based on this insight, have decided to throw themselves into politics. They realise that the State can make you far richer than you already are: whether subsidising you, in awarding you with state contracts, or in passing laws that protect you from unwelcome competition, and they decide to use their riches to capture the State and use politics as a meand to the end of their own further enrichment."

"Two choices in modern democracies reveal themselves. There is the art of the demagogue, and there is the art of what may be called... the demaslave. The demagogue is one who preaches doctrines he know to be untrue to men he knows to be idiots. The demaslave is one who listens to what these idiots have to say and then pretends that he believes it himself. Every man who seeks elective office under democracy has to be either the one thing or the other, and most men have to be both. No educated man, stating plainly the elementary notions that every educated man holds about the matters that principally concern government, could be elected to office in a democratic state, save parhaps by a miracle." (H.L. Mencken, Notes on Democracy).