1. The Building Blocks of Democracy
1.1. A Central Power: Violence, Authority and Oppression
"Political Ideologies"
Andrew Heywood (2003)1
Much of the apparatus of democracy is designed to protect the people from whoever wields the greatest physical power. The government alone is given the authority to decree the use of violence: Citizens cannot imprison people, wage wars, confiscate property, but the state can. Or it can empower others to do it in its name. This monopolizing of power into a single body has led to massive stability across the world: Where a strong central power is in control, petty feuding, tribal wars and local militias all have to either conform to the new legal proclamations, or they will face physical consequences. But, this centralisation opens up a de-stabilizing weakness: totalitarianism all-too-frequently turns into oppression. For this reason, constitutions and legal frameworks restrict what governments can do.
1.2. Voting and the Free Press
"The Commercialist Mass Media: The Bane of Human Cultural Evolution" by Vexen Crabtree (2009)
One major restraint of the power of government is the fact that power is held within the democratic framework, by a particular party, and parties can be voted out of power. So, if a government infringes too much on the people's civility, it will lose power. This makes parties naturally avoid outright oppression. Part of this process necessitates the existence of a free press; i.e., news services and broadcasters that are free to criticize the government, draw attention to its misdemeanours and therefore keep the populace informed enough to be able to choose when to change their votes to other parties. But this, again, leads to a weakness: The people may be confused or miseducated by the free press. And if people vote on short-sighted issues, the governments may be forced to act in a short-sighted way, and reduce the quality of life and stability of the country.
“The mass media that pervades the UK and other countries is holding back human cultural evolution. Most news is unchecked, and most of it derives from commercial public-relations departments, even in quality newspapers. Entire social panics and worries have been founded on nothing more than newspaper exaggeration. Politics and democracy itself is endangered by the mass delusion fostered by some papers, as politicians are pressurized into taking measures that don't make sense, because the populace has been misled by popular tabloids.”"The Commercialist Mass Media: The Bane of Human Cultural Evolution" by Vexen Crabtree (2009)
Solutions to these problems are not easy to find and they remain hot topics, along with voter apathy, the modern trend that many people don't bother to vote and know little about politics, partially due to its lack of reporting by the popular press.
1.3. The Division of Powers
The philosopher Machiavelli wrote on democracy, and in his book "The Discourses" "the doctrine of checks and balances is set forth explicitly."2. This means that the processes of government are divided; the legislative body writes the laws but has no physical power (so it cannot become totalitarian), whilst the police enforce the rules but do not write them. Parliament cannot pass laws that the police won't enforce, and the police cannot enforce illegal laws.
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- This ancient doctrine, which can be traced back to Aristotle, was perhaps most thoroughly explained by the French jurist, Montesquieu, who based his analysis on the British constitution of the early 18th century.
- The doctrine is based on the notion that there are there distinct functions of government - the legislative, executive and judicial functions. According to the doctrine in its basic form, these three functions should be vested in distinct bodies so that excessive power is not concentrated in the hands of one body.”
"Constitutional and Administrative Law (Key Facts)" by Coles & Reynolds (2003)3
2. Its Challenges
2.1. Special Interest Groups, Ethnic and Single Issue Parties
One risk to democracy comes from small but activist groups called special interest groups. They do serve an important role in democracy (consciousness raising, free speech, freedom to lobby, etc), but they are also potentially subversive.
“Single issue parties are a risk to the stability of our (or any) country. Most of them lack any sound economic knowledge or realistic theories on the demographics of the UK. Special interest groups are a benefit to democracy as long as they don't actually have any power. It is better to convince mainstream parties to take up green issues than it is to vote for (green) single issue parties. Parties that merely represent a single idea, a specific religion or a specific ethnic group are all undemocratic in nature. They are short-sighted and appeal only to the most basic instincts of their supporters. Educated and sensible people should vote for parties by judging the range of their economic and political policies, not by a single issue such as their ethnicity. Single issue parties are too narrow and too specific to be able to cope with governance at large, and are frequently intolerant towards those who don't subscribe to their particular ideology.”"Single Issue Parties are Dangerous:Against BNP, Green parties and Ethnic Parties" by Vexen Crabtree (2006)
On the page this is quoted from I discuss special interest groups, ethnic parties, religious parties and single-issue parties in more depth.
2.2. Multinationals Versus Nation-States
Apart from the risk from small elitist groups as discussed above, another risk comes from the opposite side of the spectrum: Massive multinationals.
“Globalisation has led to the emergence of commercial companies that have transcended nationality. From an economic point of view "the essence of globalization is the construction of a global capitalist economy, which is geared to the interests of transnational corporations and substantially reduces the power of the state, particularly its ability to transform the social structure".
When a government restricts or regulates an industry - for example by banning factories from dumping poisonous metallic waste into rivers and harming vast portions of the natural world, those companies responsible can choose to obey the law by taking responsibility for their side-products. They can do this by cleaning up the waste or by upgrading or changing their procedures. Both of those cost companies. In the modern global world, many multinationals choose to move production abroad rather than comply. Production is normally moved to developing countries that want the revenue and taxes and are not particularly interested in the high-tech legislations against environmental damage. Often, new companies receive tax breaks for moving into countries; all this conspires against the government in question that wanted to protect the environment. In effect, the benefits of globalisation to the company (that it can move production abroad with ease) is a disadvantage to well-meaning governments. Multinational corporations therefore outmanoeuvre local governments. [...]
Massive corporations can outmanoeuvre governments and therefore evade the law. Multinationals organisations like the UN and EU can fight back. The heads of large companies have massive power over staff, employment, industry, national economies, the environment and yet are not elected nor publicly accountable for their actions. Supra-national organisations, staffed by those on the pay roll of elected governments, empowers democracy with renewed control. National democratic consolidation of power is required in order to reign in multinational corporations that are presently beyond the law because they can avoid the laws of any one particular government.”
2.3. Mass Stupidity Versus Democracy
Both issues so far - special interest groups and multinationals - have been due to the concerted actions of intelligent, active individuals. In these cases, political action, unions and reason can restore the balance between enterprise and democracy. But this next issue is the most important, difficult and serious problem that democracy faces. It is not, inherently, a political problem but a social one. Mass stupidity undermines democracy. Professor of Law M. Loughlin points out that the founders of modern political theory believed that deliberation (which requires intelligence and knowledge) is a key aspect of democracy:
See Jon Elster (ed.), Deliberative Democracy“The common theme in the thinking of Aristotle, Fortescue and Machiavelli is that, notwithstanding the vast differences in the societies about which they are writing, politics remains intimately connected to dispute, debate and some notion of self-government, and this tradition is maintained today in a revival of the idea that deliberation, rather than simply voting, provides the key aspect of democratic decision-making.”
Cambridge University Press, 1998."Sword and Scales" by Martin Loughlin (2000)5
I debate this point energetically in my page on elitism vs. stupidity in public democracy:
“If the masses are stupid, democracy doesn't work. The government has to rule by stealth, tricking the people through things that merely sound good but in intelligent society promoting and doing things that are good, or democracy shoots itself in its foot and causes the downfall of the nation into an anarchic mess. Shallow policies do not make for good government, but, most stupid people vote on shallow issues. The solution is to trick the stupid people into voting for you or to educate them. A good-intentioned deception is nearly always much easier and will never be dispensed with, the only alternative is to restrict voting for uneducated people. This is the dilemma of modern Western democracy!
[...] The social analyst Frank Furedi bemoans this in his book "Where Have All the Intellectuals Gone?" (2004) stating that a stupid public are "only affected by sound-bites and short-term ideas", and that the decline of intelligence and the rise of vote apathy, all since the 1960s, undermines the authority of democratic government. [...]
It means that in order for the populace to understand something, it has to be dumbed down to the point that it's meaningless. So politicians come to rely on appearances, slogans and image rather than substance and content. This is because the masses do not have the ability to understand the content, statistics, the sociology of required changes: they only understand the surface patterns, the veneer. You end up with people being concerned with outrage and shock more than issues. Naom Chomsky is an intelligent critic of the way modern democracy works. This employing of "dumbed down" politics, which is really nothing more than a soap opera and just as shallow, is summarized by Chomsky into what was known as the "Mohawk Valley Formula" [Chomsky 1991]: The use of hollow slogans and shallow campaigns for the stupid masses. Because while parties still explore issues and produce in-depth papers and analysis, it's only the intelligent minority that understand them. As a result of stupidity and trash culture, democracy is threatened because the masses votes are not hinged on pertinent factors but on frivolous ones. Chomsky talks of the situation in USA politics, but the affect is the same as in the UK: Trash Culture in the UK is the same as the religious, mass stupidity and commercialist factors that undermine American social voting:”
"Dictatorships, Democracy and Satanic Mistrust of Human Nature" by Vexen Crabtree (2001)
The above quote is from my text on Satanic Government. Satanism is an elitist religion, believing in 'better' people, and as such my page recommends that forms of stratification may overcome this weakness: By giving intelligent people more votes, you reduce the significance of the problem of apathy and education. You might even stimulate more people to get an education. But the search for a valid method of deciding who has 2 votes is a problematic one, and I discuss it a little more in the text I quoted from above, "Dictatorships, Democracy and Satanic Mistrust of Human Nature".
2.4. Voter Apathy and Indifference
Most developed, Western countries have seen a continual decline in the numbers of people who vote in elections and referendums. This worries politicians, as 'democracy' requires the input of the masses in choosing the parties that are to be in power. But that is not the only issue that comes with voter apathy. To be disinterested is also, naturally, to know less about politics. The 19th century political theorist Tocqueville followed the 18th century Montesquieu in predicting that as liberty and economic freedom become entrenched, people would become energized in the private sphere and no longer participate in public affairs6. Since Frank Furedi commented below on dire voter turnouts in the UK, some of the numbers have increased, but, it worries political theorists that the direct-vote mandate has been undermined by disinterest. The decline since the 1960s in all European countries has followed the USA's lead, although recent elections have been much more energetic there.
“The low turnout of voters affects the authority of governments who are keenly sensitive to the erosion of their legitimacy. [...] In 1997, New Labour was backed by only 31 per cent of those qualified to vote, voter turnout at this election was the lowest since 1945. [...] The 1999 UK elections to the European Parliament brought a turnout of 23 per cent - and in one Sunderland polling station, only 15 people turned up out of the 1000 entitled to vote. In the 2001 General Election, apathy emerged as the dominant issues under debate - and the turnout was an all-time low of 59 per cent.”"Where Have All the Intellectuals Gone?" by Frank Furedi (2004)7
It is no surprise when Prof. Furedi goes on to note that more people vote to choose who the remaining cast of Big Brother, than who vote to elect our leaders for the next three years.
3. Conclusions
Democracy, the control of the direction of government and the granting of its authority by the people, needs to be actively watched and defended. Special interest groups and single-issue lobbies (as well as parties) can, through their hearty activism, undermine democracy by giving certain an out-of-proportion focus at the expense of general good governance. Large multinational companies are able to outmanouvre and ignore local governments, which sometimes places them above-the-law. Mass stupidity and voter apathy means that the people normally vote (if they vote at all) on short-sighted, shallow and unimportant issues, which reduces the ability of government to make required sacrifices to overcome long-term problems. If the people vote on good-sounding but shallow policies, only good-sounding but shallow (short-term) parties will be elected. This is potentially disastrous and represents the biggest threat to democracy.
Solution to these threats include increased inter-governmental agreements on Law and Order, Trade and Industry Regulations (such as occurs within the EEC, etc), and multi-government agencies such as the UN and EU bring international commerce back within the reach of authority. To overcome the problems of mass stupidity and ignorance, meritocratic systems should be tested and implemented in addition to tried-and-tested methods of political revitalisation and public education.
Despite weaknesses, the strengths of democracy make it the sole superior method of governance and it has shown itself in history to be most capable of allowing human development (technological and moral), granting human rights and protecting the rights of citizens against corporations and government abuse. To this end, it is the duty of developed, stable democratic countries (such as the USA, Europe, India, Japan, etc) to help governments who rule countries with little stability. where history, strife and conflict divide the people, and for international institutions to declare and defend clear universal Human Rights.
