Democracy

Democracy

Elections are big business in the US and Canada. We have just completed another nationwide election in Canada to retrun a minority conservative government. Beside election rhetoric there are are meaningful discussions about the process of government and the value of elections as we now know them. I am rewriting a description of democracy in my book, Surviving Human Nature, and wanted to share this overview:

From Surving Human Nature by Stephen Gislason

Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys. P. J. O'Rourke

Athens, Greece is often given credit for inventing democracy. But in Athens only one in 10 residents could vote. Women could not participate and slaves had no rights. Those who did vote were often tempted to vote in favor of war. Athens flourished for a few years but the Greek empire and democracy was over within 150 years. While the Greek legacy was carried on by the Romans and spread through Europe, the real story of ancient Greece is tragic, not heroic.

In the US, George Bush and Dick Cheney made a mockery of democracy. They acted like despotic monarchs and approached other countries with a belligerent swagger. President Bush became one of the most hated of men in many countries. Of course, Bush only acted as a nominal leader, a front man for a small group of men led by vice president Cheney and his advisors.

According to Posner, in the US, the founding fathers did not want to set up a democracy but a mixed government. The presidency is the monarchical element, the Senate and Supreme Court are aristocratic elements and only the democratic element is the House of Representatives. This design has worked more or less to balance competing interests, but Bush and Cheney demonstrated that the design had become obsolete. Posner stated: "The Constitution of the United States of America is the supreme law of the United States. The United States Constitution was adopted on September 17, 1787, by the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and later ratified by conventions in each U.S. state in the name of The People; it has since been amended twenty-seven times, the first ten amendments being known as the Bill of Rights. None of the amendments change the infrastucture of governance."

The US is a totally different country in the 21st century. Corporations that do not evolve with changing circumstances tend to fail. So do countries with antiquated constitutions. The question for deep thinkers is – can the organization of democratic government evolve to improve their performance and assure human rights or are humans doomed to one form or tyranny or another? One solution in the US is to close the white house and develop a better method of selecting qaulified people to administer the country.

In most countries, government is a circus of competing interests, displaying their wares in a variety of venues. The real process of government is an endless series of negotiations. Negotiated deals tend to benefit the more aggressive, influential and wealthy participants. Government as a circus is arguably better than government as a monarch’s court, but it is not ideal and may not be sustainable. All governments are inefficient and are prone to corruption.

Canada operates with a parliamentary government copied from the British Parliament. An elected body meets to discuss government performance and to pass legislation. An appointed Senate has mostly ceremonial roles, a House of Lords. You could argue that the Canadian parliament puts democratic processes on display and requires that the Prime Minster and his cabinet meet with other elected representatives on a regular basis. In 1791, Canada was a British colony. The English parliament decided on the Constitutional Act of 1791 which established the infrastructure of government. The British North America Act of 1867 established the Dominion of Canada. True Canadian autonomy was not achieved until Prime Minister Trudeau persuaded the Canadian provinces and the British parliament to pass the Canada Act in 1982 giving all constitutional and legislative authority to Canada.

The Canada Act included a Charter of Rights. Canadian constitutional principles are federalism, democracy, the rule of law, judicial independence and respect for minorities. Canada, like other countries, also has an ethos, common law and other less obvious sources of rules of conduct, social norms and expectations. Within government there are traditions that are persuasive, but not legally enforceable.

In every institution, there is a tendency to fascism, the dictatorial rule of an elite group who believe only they know what is right and true. A fascist displays innate tendencies, unmodified by learning, reasoning and devoid of compassion. The fascist promotes arguments and dissention, developing the idea that only some citizens have rights and privileges and others become outsiders who must be constrained, imprisoned, deported or eliminated.

The Bush-Cheney group in the US borrowed credibility from the elite members of the Republican party, but it became obvious that they were aspiring fascists, acting in the best tradition of aristocratic dictators. They had been elected by conservatives and right wing Christian fundamentalists who believed that their vested interests would be advanced. They were wrong. True conservatives want small government, balanced budgets and faithful application of the country’s policies and ideals. In the US, the declaration of independence and the constitution declare ideals that the Bush Cheney group ignored.

Cohen summarized the US predicament: “The nation is heading toward a constitutional showdown over the Iraq war. Congress is moving closer to passing a bill to limit or end the war, but President Bush insists Congress doesn’t have the power to do it. The war is hardly the only area where the Bush administration is trying to expand its powers beyond all legal justification. But the danger of an imperial presidency is particularly great when a president takes the nation to war, something the founders understood well. Given how intent the president is on expanding his authority, it is startling to recall how the Constitution’s framers viewed presidential power. They were revolutionaries who detested kings, and their great concern when they established the United States was that they not accidentally create a kingdom. To guard against it, they sharply limited presidential authority. The founders were particularly wary of giving the president power over war. They were haunted by Europe’s history of conflicts started by self-aggrandizing kings. John Jay, the first chief justice of the United States, stated: “absolute monarchs will often make war when their nations are to get nothing by it, but for the purposes and objects merely personal.” The Constitution does make the president “commander in chief,” a title President Bush often invokes. But it does not have the sweeping meaning he suggests. The founders would have been astonished by President Bush’s assertion that Congress should simply write him blank checks for war. As opinion turns more decisively against the war, the administration is becoming ever more dismissive of Congress’s role. If the founders were looking on now, it is... George W. Bush who would seem less like a president than a king.”

Elections are often thought to be the essence of democracy, but as human groups grow larger and social organization more complex, elections become media events that preclude the ideal of citizen involvement in government. In a simple analysis, increasing size and complexity of government makes ideal democracy impossible. Eventually, democratic rights might be restored by internet technologies that permit citizens to discuss and vote directly on policy issues and legislation.

The value of elections is not so much the selection of the right people to run governments since this result is seldom achieved, but the opportunity to disrupt political oligarchies in the early stages of their development. You could argue that candidate selection for elections is so inappropriate to the task facing the elected politicians that an election lottery choosing from thoughtfully selected, highly qualified citizens would do a better job of forming governments.

An alert, well-informed citizenry and a politically independent judiciary are essential to the preservation of personal freedoms. A civil society develops multiple overlapping levels of dispute resolution with the right to appeal bad decisions that are common and inevitable when local tribunals and courts decide who is privileged and who is not.

In a civil society there must be a wealth re-distribution plan so that money and power is not concentrated in a small elite class but, at the same time, does not discourage or penalize smart people who make the extra effort to innovate and contribute to the general good.

Affluent populations need to protect themselves from attacks that originate from inside and outside the group. The need for protection appears to be persistent and relentless with no prospect in the future of any reprieve. Fascist groups within elected governments, however, typically abuse the need for national security to consolidate their power, to threaten political opposition and to suspend democratic rights and freedoms, replacing external threats with internal repression.

Humans are obligatory social animals with the delusion of independence. We know that a small number of humans will be alpha animals and lead a much larger number of humans who are followers and will not have the inclination nor the ability to "think for themselves."

We know that the audience, the "public", is made up of different groups with vested interests that conflict. We know that everyone makes up stories that support their own point of view. Everyone deceives others and there is no absolute truth. We know that some humans are bad and will harm others as a matter of course; their behavior will not be altered by rational argument or laws and must be constrained by force. Some of these bad people arrive in positions of authority and power. Some bad people are elected, even to the highest positions in government where they can do much harm without insight or remorse.

We know that the voting public contains individuals with different mental abilities and that most humans have distinct limitations on what they can and will understand.
We know that the root human struggle between self-interest and the interest of groups is ubiquitous, pervasive and is not going away. An axiom for the 21st century must be that charismatic leaders who sway large audiences with anger, demands for revenge, and blame directed specific groups are dangerous. Politicians of all persuasions want and need the ability to persuade and control large numbers of people, so that governments run by elected politicians often involve demagogues who are willing to override or suspend individual rights. This is one of the weaknesses of democracies.

A human tendency is to treat a few other humans well, members of your immediate select group, and to be suspicious of and hostile towards everyone else. Humans can learn to override this tendency and succeed to varying degrees at opening their minds to all sentient beings but this is a difficult task and only a few humans actually achieve an "open mind".

Consider some of the basic truths of language, story telling and consensus:

We value consensus-achieving activities and try to achieve some stability by using slogans and standard stories to unite the local group.

Reality configurations can be described as cultures, local, ephemeral consensus systems, encoded in language, symbols, law, art and rituals.

Cultures are perpetuated by teaching children to formulate experience in the local configuration and by renewing culture patterning through schools, churches, news, events, media and artistic representation of the local version of the really real.

A convinced member of a culture will have difficulty seeing outside his or her own culture and will treat outsiders as aliens. Aliens are treated with suspicion, fear and hostility.

The quickest way to unite a group is to declare war on aliens. After is war is declared, all citizens must comply with military values and commands. They must cease to criticize politicians and military leaders. They cannot protest without risking punishment. In effect, a government who declares war becomes a dictatorship.

Noam Chomsky, linguist, social philosopher and activist is one of the smart and nice citizens of the world who has been willing to sacrifice his personal comfort and venture forth consistently over many years to confront contentious issues with reasonable, well-informed arguments, an unshakable faith in individual freedom and a belief in the perfectibility of humans. He displays some of the best features of a sentient being fighting oppression with reason.

Commercial interests merge with political agendas to control the public mind: Chomsky would say, for example: “One factor is the power of business propaganda in the U.S. This is the country where the public relations industry was developed, where it was most sophisticated. It’s the home of the international entertainment industry, which is mainly propaganda. Huge funds are put into controlling the "public mind," …this is toward the capitalist end … there’s a huge expenditure on marketing, which is a form of manipulation and deceit... something like one-sixth of the gross domestic product goes to marketing. A large part of that is advertising. Advertising is tax-deductible, so you pay for the privilege of being manipulated and controlled."