Democracy
Democracy is concocted of belief and disbelief. The belief is natural: everyone deserves to participate in public affairs. The disbelief is also natural: everyone means everyone, people who hold contemptible notions such as racism or impractical ones such as Prohibition and would like to keep those notions entrenched or implement them. This tension demands a strong degree of trust in the value of democracy, although that value often exists in comparison with other, manifestly bleaker political realities such as totalitarianism, the rule of generals, or outright despotism. E.M. Forster’s “two cheers for democracy” seems the right number.
On its own, the value is hard to specify and gets entangled with notions of patriotism which can apply to any nation-state along with notions of freedom which can be defined in documents such as the United States Bill of Rights but are notoriously perilous: freedom is at the beck and call of the nation-state’s needs, as Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Delano Roosevelt and George W. Bush all demonstrated. The feeling persists that democracy is like tissue paper placed over many unwieldy predilections and manias such as greed, paranoia, hatred, and conniving ambition. It easily comes asunder or does little more than abet hypocrisy or is the habit of much greasy expediency or allows any demagogue to step forward and make his bullying way to the top or excuses its excesses on the grounds that it once had ideals. Two cheers may seem like two too many.
Over the course of my lifetime in the second half of the twentieth and beginning of the twenty-first century, I’ve come to feel that the main thread of democracy is disappointment. It looks good on paper, which again commends it, since many so-called governments have not bothered with paper—the ruler’s will is the law. The great stress that Protestant societies such as Great Britain and the United States have placed on the value of the Bible-reading individual created a genuine loam for democracy. People began to feel that they had an inherent value as human beings rather than the chattel that autocrats took for granted. It took centuries—a human lifetime is rarely the measure of true historical change, hence the lust for the speed of revolution—but the notion that each person’s political opinion was of value took hold.
Unfortunately, among the paradoxes that went along with this evolution was the awareness that such opinions have no value. They are opinions and may change tomorrow for no particular reason or may be held tenaciously for no particular reason. There is always that emotional sediment at the bottom of the glass. Reason does not have much to say to conceit and prejudice. The contempt that authoritarian societies have had for democracies stems from this waywardness and pliability. The king or tyrant or dictator or chairman or party leader tells it like it is. What “it is” may be, and often is, nothing more than a congeries of lies but that does not matter. Pandering to the voter is not an authoritarian problem. For a democracy, telling lies is more destructive in the sense that democracy posits individual responsibility as a core value. Lying is, among other things, irresponsible.
Like tops, democracies rooted in the Protestant values have wobbled but stayed upright. Since those values inform modern business practices—credit, after all, is a form of trust based on personal responsibility, however much corporations have diminished that sense—democracy increasingly has come to the fore in modern times. Many things undid the Soviet Union but one was the archaic approach to business. It became harder and harder to build a wall around money and the media that money travels along. Communism was built on ideology, a fantasy that could only go on for so long. In more recent modern times, Chinese authoritarianism has had to jettison much of its ideological component and rely on sheer power to keep itself entrenched. That course made sense but how long a government could be maintained that trammeled individual rights while stoking consumerism was uncertain.
Unraveling economics from democracy seems a labor of Hercules. At the outset of such a labor the bogey of capitalism would appear squarely in the way, menacing, powerful yet recondite. Where exactly does this entity reside? The stock exchange is full of people trading values. Is that it? The bank is full of money. So are miscellaneous funds. So are governments that print the money. And then there is the matter of impetus: is the profit motive the heart of capitalism? Is exchange value, as Marx thought? Is greed, amassing money for the sake of amassing money? And how does democracy fit with capitalism? Is it a cover, a fig leaf, a charade that masks the real workings in which a powerful few dictate the terms of life (“Better Dead than Red,” “Just Say No,” “Trickle Down”) to the harassed many? I can see Hercules shaking his head in puzzlement. A brawny guy, he wants something tangible to tangle with.
I’m inclined to agree with those who see democracy in the modern world as a concomitant of the unholy mingling of commerce and religion, the belief that making a buck and saving one’s soul are natural allies. Salvation is a form of soul accumulation, a certified sum in a higher bank. If that seems blasphemous then commerce in modern times is founded on blasphemy. As religion in modern times became less spiritual, and as fundamentalism grew as a protest against that anti-spiritualism, money-making became a quasi-religion, one that practiced divination—stock futures not entrails—and continually demanded testimonials about its efficacy. For many, modern times were about witnessing capitalism and the inventive, often unscrupulous captains of industry from Henry Ford to Steve Jobs.
Meanwhile, democratic governments sat in the backseat and looked out the window. Their leaders had armies at their disposal and immense power to conduct various social experiments but at their back, chivying them along, was one importunate bankroll or another, be it Big Oil or Military-Industrial Complex or World Bank or Multinational Corporations or Drug Cartels. Citizens threw up their hands in wearied contempt or invested much energy and money in changing one leader with another or chatted about politics as if it were a form of malleable weather but the economic engine kept churning. Now and then, democracies attempted reforms of excesses. That was all well and good, which, it would seem, is what can be said about democracy, the electoral whirligig of change, and the ethos of workable futility.