How’s that for an inflammatory title?
Now that the people who ony read the title and not the article have left to write me caustic mail, let’s talk about the rhetoric surrounding democracy vs. other forms of government, particularly socialism.
Because lots of the opinions I see expressed about both are literally non-opinions; they contain exactly zero information about democracy or socialism, despite seeming to be so pointedly about them.
One example is the statement that “democracy is the best form of government because it acknowledges that humans are fallible.” Another is that famous quote, often misattributed to Churchill, that “democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others.” These statements are meaningless because they miss, at heart, what the core of democracy actually is.
At heart, democracy is a system of group decision making where everyone who is a member of the group has a say in what decisions are made by and for the group.1
Much of the rhetoric and debate around governments today is wrong or useless because it co-opts the terminology of democracy, while actually talking about completely incidental aspects.2
This goes into a deeper misunderstanding about the words we use. Let’s take some shots at “socialism” next, because just like “democracy,” it’s often used as a non-word; in many ways it’s even worse than “democracy,” because it can mean anything from a governmental system to an economical system to an epistemology!
Socialism is often used, in varying contexts, to mean the following things:
This misuse of language is pervasive, and it leads to situations where people are completely talking past each other; if you rally in support of “socialism” because you believe that we aren’t doing enough to help the poor and needy, and you start arguing with someone who thinks you’re in support of highly centralised governments, the ensuing debacle will do nothing but incite vitriol — you’re literally speaking different languages, with entirely different meanings for words.
Which gives us enough rhetorical clarity to explain why democracy is wrong.
(You thought that title was a bait and switch? Guess again!)
Picture in your mind, if you will, a group of you and two or three friends in the same room. How difficult would it be to get everyone to agree on a place for dinner? Now run the same exercise again, but with a group of 10 friends. How difficult was it this time? Let’s scale up some more, assuming that we can get everyone in the same place to discuss. What about your entire neighborhood? What about an entire city?
You probably noticed that the larger the group, the less and less likely it seemed that a consensus could be reached. Which leads to the fundamental issue that people miss when arguing about whether democracy is “good” or “bad”:
Democracy doesn’t scale.
Remember that democracy was invented in a quaint little town in Greece with less than half a million in population. Then remember that only non-slave adult males were able to vote, and you get a voting population literally the size of a rural town in the middle of nowhere today. Using the success of democracy in Athens to argue that “democratic values” should be applied to entire countries today is like arguing that jumping off a 3-story building once is the same as falling 3 feet ten times. Scale matters.
Democracy (in the sense outlined above) is, fundamentally, a centralised decision-making process; everyone involved must come together, at the same time, to hash things out. There is no room for separate units of the whole to work independently, or for smaller pockets to make local decisions that make sense for their specific situation. Somehow, people understand the principle that large groups suck at making collective decisions, yet forget about this when it comes to government.
For instance, this is why democracy should not be used for deciding national fiscal policy, or effecting social change.4
Democracy is a an excellent idea that has been applied in situations where it’s stretched beyond its limits. Use it on the small scale, not the large.
↥1 Voting is only an incidental aspect of democracy; consider a small community making decisions through a communal gathering and discussion at the town hall. They might make decisions without the need for an explicit vote or referendum. But would we consider that to not be democracy? As another example, families can be run in a democratic way, with regular time set aside for discussion with everyone in the family to decide, for instance, how to allocate the month’s budget. (I would argue that these are the best run families).
↥2 Such as checks and balances.
↥3 If you squint, it’s basically just totalitarianism, dressed up in flowery language. How this cognitive dissonance is not more widely recognised (dictators bad! socialist dictators… good?), I don’t understand myself. I guess people really are fooled by makeup on pigs.
↥4 Since a lot of this is easily construed as being specifically targeted at the U.S. governmental system, I should say that yes, I am counting the U.S. as a democracy here, and to hell with the pedants who delight in emasculating valid discourse with the meaningless phrase “but it’s a republic.” The same principles apply: much of the decision-making now happens in a centralised, holistic manner through Congress, with individual states and counties have much less individual autonomy with the continuing rise of the Federal Reserve in setting national fiscal policy.
Intentionally Irrational