Democracy is supposed to give us all a fair crack at life.
Whether you’re an uneducated factory-worker on the verge of redundancy, or a Harvard-educated CEO with a love of restructuring and share buybacks, your voice should have an equal hearing.
Of course, it’s clear they don’t in practice. After all, there are many more factory workers than CEOs, and we need many more factory workers than CEOs. If the promise is that every voice will be heard equally, then no amount of money or alumni connections or previous-company-turn-around success should give a CEO the mandate to demand a factory be moved off-shore against the wishes of hundreds of precarious factory workers.
Only… chances are you’ve already spotted one flaw in that example. That doesn’t sound like a democracy, that sounds like a business!
But I wonder why we’re ok with that, but us occupants-of-the-free-world can still claim to have a real problem with any hint of authoritarianism from our (political) leaders?
Nearly every transaction we partake in during the course of the day is with a Centrally-Planned Authoritarian organisation: You don’t have a say about how much Amazon pays their staff, or which shipping company Costco use1, or who Visa offers credit cards to.
And, you’re going to say: “But, that’s different because, with them, we can ‘vote with our wallets’ and not buy!”
Only, is that true? Without strong, some might say “centrally-planned authoritarian”, regulation from a government, there’s actually no competition in the long term under capitalism. In the long-term, aggressive and unchecked companies will always expand and swallow their competition through any means necessary, until we have no ability to vote with our wallets left.
So, democracy inside our current economic system is really a fine balance, on a knife edge between authoritarian dictatorships (companies with owners and C-suites that direct them) who represent much of our economy but are highly incentivised to shrink any actual democratic power that might exist (using lobbying/propaganda/privatisation etc); and the unsullied will of the majority which is responsible for regulating out the worse dictatorial impulses.
I’m deliberately being a bit specious here purely because I want you to think about how we generally limit our thinking to how democracy is done, and therefore mull over how else we could desire it to work better.
The most basic premise of democracy is “the will of the people”. Although, that tends to imply “majority rule” because, in simple terms, ‘will’ is a weighted thing where the more you have of it, the more it gets its way.
But we’ve got enough objectively-bad examples from history to know that giving the majority unchecked power over a minority is not what most of us would want, and certainly is at odds with what most of us assume democracy sets out to achieve… So much so, we even have a bleak name for that kind of thing: Mob Rule.
In fact, the sort of difference and diversity that come from a strong minority voice are endemic in any society we built democracy to serve: We’ve all seen the grey dystopian movies, the interchangeable bureaucrats, the endless aisles of cloned sugary-breakfast-cereals. We understand that diversity is both the spice of life and, actually, an entirely natural state of being.
If we were all the same there’d be no point in democracy.
So, it stands to reason that any concentration of power; that is, any drift towards consistency—even when it is granted by a “democratic majority”—presents something of a threat to the principles that democracy should be designed to uphold.
This is the sort of challenge that won’t be solved in a Substack newsletter, but we can enjoy the spitballing process anyway.
For example, a while back I wrote about how one way we could access a relevant minority voice and improve our democratic engagement was by reducing the voting age to 12.
The thing is, when people propose ideas for democracy, it’s generally about getting better data into the system: How can we best know what each voter wants? We make it easier to vote, or more representative, we adjust electoral donation laws, and change how voting papers are designed.
What we generally don’t do (unless we’re fascists) is ask ourselves “What do we want the world to look like in 50 years’ time, and how do we ensure a shared vision guides us there?” Instead, we hobble from one election to the next, tweaking things in the moment, but mostly forgetting that democracy is a tool for the common good, not individual preference.
This is ridiculous of course. By the time we are considered “old enough” (if not mature enough) to vote, we each have enough ‘experience’ to know we can’t ‘do life’ alone; and we all have enough experience to understand those democratic goods delivered via diversity and difference are valuable. Yet voting for the prick who is promising you your own little piece of “tax cuts” or a “faster commute” is still par for the course in a world where you are led to believe democracy is a tool to get what you want.
But, that still only leaves us with either changing the way we collectively understand democracy; or changing the way a democracy operates. And, I guess, most philosophers and legislators over the centuries have realised that first option is a high bar to clear when you’re up against short human attention spans so, instead, most of the practice has been focused on how we can just ‘hack’ democracy into fairness.
I’m personally thinking about all this in the context of Aotearoa’s own 3-way coalition government discussions that, over a month after the election, are still very much a work-in-progress. Plenty of other people have already poured over the details, but it’s enough to simply note that, under the Mixed-Member Proportional (MMP) ‘hack’ we’ve used since 1996, it’s not been uncommon for a party representing under 10% of total votes to determine the formation of the entire government.
From a purely numerical perspective, you could question whether that is actually more representative of the “will of the people” than our (prior) First-Past-the-Post ‘hack’, where the party with simply the most votes wins.
However, I don’t want to get bogged down promoting the relative merits of either of these flawed systems. My personal sense is, if we’re going to use ‘hacks’, they should stop trying to focus on equity of input—that is, who votes, how, and how those votes translate into representation—and focus instead on what it might look like if democracy was really working. Specifically, the ideal democracy should—if not represent each informed individual’s explicit interests—at least offer a path to an equitable hearing and consideration of those informed interests.
And it should be clear, neither a 51% majority or a sub-10% interloper, at the end of a slogan-heavy election ‘campaign’, do that.
What it looks like is enormously difficult, and perhaps impossible, to visualise in practice of course. Practically, it might result in more regulation in some areas (perhaps to protect minority interests) and less in others. It’s also probable that almost all of the political ideologies, from “Neo-liberal Authoritarian Capitalism” to “Anarcho-Communism” likely touch on elements of it. But, equally, the one thing it couldn’t do is what all of those ideologies do: Impose a democratic presumption onto an entire population, via the presumption that there could exist a single ‘perfect’ command structure—an election, a single smart ruler, the neutrality of a ‘market’, or a shared ideology, as the framework for meeting the needs of a disparate group of people.
A little while back, William Callison and Quinn Slobodian wrote about one way you could think about a shared platform for very different voices and desires—diagonalism. They actually used it as a way to explain the apparent incoherence of ideals that brought together yoga instructors, internet grifters, self-employeed tradies, and Grassy Knoll conspiracists into the same Covid-related anti-government protests.
And, it’s fair to say, the angst in these protests is relevant to the sort of urgency we should have in our wonderings about whether we are currently living in an adequate ‘democracy’. After all, without the disciplined thinking needed to internalise what really caused this ‘odd’ bunch of people to come together, many lazily might conclude their shared ideology must be “all authority is bad”. And, without anyone putting forward a thoughtful alternative to the ‘democracy’ they’ve already turned away from, their conclusion could naturally be that even the aspirations of democracy are a lost cause.
Right now, these people might be described as being on the fringe, but remember:
Difference and diversity that come from a strong minority voice are endemic in any society we built democracy to serve.
These are people who looked at the structures their “democracy” built, and feel left behind or left out of them. But, throwing away democracy altogether is a tragic and dangerous state to find oneself in, because it leaves you with only “trust” or “war” in the way you interact with your fellow man. Indeed—while it doesn’t stop these ‘diagonalists’ from needing and desiring it—they surely must fundamentally conclude that even money clearly defers astonishing power to its possessor so, realistically, you can’t even trust in something as purportedly neutral as the free market.
These are immense ideas to lose faith in: Social inclusion, free markets, and a heard voice are building blocks for the relatively comfortable lives we live in. Should these continue to unravel, unpicked by democratic designs unable to deliver on their promise, we will lose much more than the culture skirmishes about transgender toilets and abortion rights.
Our framing of democracy has always, necessarily, excluded some people. But, in the past, you could (fairly, or not) say it was because some people “did not belong”. Democracy evolved in parallel with the bloated-anarchical communities we scattered across the surface of this planet and now call “countries”. Isolated by our technology and reach, we instead formed hundreds of independent nations and languages and value-sets, and only required our democracy to deliver justice, diversity, and inclusion within the safe confines of our own tribal borders.
But things have changed. Technology, debt, inequality, automation, immigration, climate change, refugees, disease, greed, and misinformation all now feed into all those little communities… And, unlike the “rowdy natives” or “insolent women” of the past, these new challenges to our democratic norms are not objects that can simply be “put in their place”, but spectres; impossible to define or control.
At one time, if you were from a different geographic place, or a ‘lesser’ [sic] gender or race, it was simple enough to protect or colonise a democracy against your ‘inferior’ values, using violence. But now, our status in an interconnected world entirely hinges on trying to decypher a planet’s worth of diverse values. We can no longer subdue these things with muskets or patriarchy or propaganda, or even Hollywood and aircraft carriers.
And that’s a bit unsettling.
The “End of History” notwithstanding, few serious thinkers really believed our democratic journey was ‘complete’—even before social media got us riled up about it. But, so long as we continued to live sheltered in our bunkers, with enforced majority (or violent) rule, there was, at least, a predictability to it. That predictability is hard to find anywhere now, with so many new spectral voices vying to partake of our democracy.
And, unaddressed, that unsettling alone is going to cause more and more and more people to detach from the optimism that democracy can ever deliver fairness and justice, and work for them. And, turn instead to misunderstandings of “Freedom” and “Autonomy” in their desire for relevance.
In tangible terms, this means Crazy can easily find an audience now. And the lack of serious attention to the fundamental aims of democracy—aims suppressed by the preference to maintain existing power structures—is delivering Crazy a growing stream of people primed to listen.
I want to be clear though, these people with their ears open to Crazy can’t just be dismissed as ‘stupid’. They are the people whose jobs the migrant-boom actually affects—drivers and factory workers—and people who the “Elites” and “Boomers” rent their overpriced houses to. These are the people who have never benefitted from cheap Uber rides, globalisation, miracle drugs, or house price inflation, and who find themselves less able to speak up about that unfairness with each passing year. All the anti-vax, anti-trans, deep-state bullshit is just static noise. The real cries are coming from a democracy that increasing numbers of people get no value from.
For my part, I worry that this makes our position on the knife edge, between conventional democracy ‘hacks’ and “Centrally-Planned Authoritarian” market-makers, precarious. I worry that, perhaps, this is not the best place to manage the challenges ahead.
We are rapidly closing in on a time when the value of money itself could be dismantled by some unloosed Artificial Intelligence—possibly entirely by accident; We are rapidly closing in on a time when a surge of climate refugees could numerically compete with entire resident populations; We are rapidly closing in on a time where proprietary technology could exponentially separate the haves and have-nots in health, intelligence and mobility, in ways that could essentially split humans into two different species.
We have already seen plenty of evidence that trust in governments, legal systems, and democratic institutions is not just waning, but being pro-actively acted against through movements that no longer require military uniforms, special salutes, or even the requisite shared history.
We either let that metastasize, knowing even our Patriot Missles and F35A Lightnings will pass right through these spectral enemies and our propaganda will only feed the conspiracy-energy that empowers them...
Or we think hard about how to build a world for 8 billion-odd minority voices.
No matter how objective I try to be, I still find it difficult to find fault in the aspirational core of democracy: Each little person on our galactic-terrarium having an informed say in their own mortal existence.
It’s tough to think of anything wrong with that.
Our technological progress has brought us to a point where we can spread the aspirations of true democracy, the mythology of our current neo-liberal democracy hacks, or the nihilism of a trustless world, with equal ease.
This is all to say, democracy is in a bit of a pickle. And the conventional hacks and fixes are no longer the solution. It seems to me that rebuilding democracy should be about first deciding what kind of humans we want to be, then working back from there.
We might even talk a bit about it here. Stay tuned.
-T
I'm concerned about drowning in a sea of plastic, and our water being poisoned and packs of wild feral dogs ripping us to shreds, and my grandchildren being homeless as the world gets harder not easier