Reflections on Democracy as a Form of Government and the American Political System

 Plato identified the weakness of democracy. Political action requires either competence or virtue: competence, for example, when making security or economic policy; virtue when allowing policy to be infused with justice and the common good. The basis for democracy – literally “rule by the people” – is that sovereignty lies not in a monarch, not in an elite, but in the people. The people govern themselves in the sense that they are not governed by a king whose subjects they are or the traditional authority of an elite.

   The sovereign, more precisely, are the citizens. In Athens, the cradle of democracy, citizenship was restricted to Athenian men of a certain age. Women were not thought competent and in any case, had another role to play in the city-state. Foreigners were not citizens – their loyalty could not be counted on for one thing. And of course, slaves had no rights at all. Since the Enlightenment, women have had citizenship, implying they are competent, rational beings. That is the key point: rationality, competence, virtue. To govern well – to be able to make competent and just policy – requires a certain kind of education and certain natural abilities. It is one craft among others.

     Regimes – I mean by that term nothing more than the form of government or state – based on monarchy or oligarchy justify themselves by denying the competence of the common people (competence = reasoning powers and capacity for virtue), either by nature or because their role as laborers or craftsmen absorbs their energies, whereby a political class – mostly the richest – has the leisure and the sole purpose to govern. So if democracy is not denied because the nature of the common people is not up to the task of self-government, its denial is justified by the distribution of roles in society. Each person, to be good at their job, must devote their lives to it. Governing requires the development of reason and virtue, and that takes all one’s energy; education must be tailored to the development of reason and virtue. Craftsmen also need education but of a different kind. To be a good craftsman also requires all of one’s energies, thus leaving no time for political education and the duties of citizenship.

   The people, therefore, either by nature or occupation or both, are not capable of governing themselves. A particular man may be a good carpenter, but that doesn’t mean he can pilot a ship or knows what needs to be done in terms of foreign policy. To give the carpenter a voice in the conduct of foreign policy is analogous to giving a ship’s mechanic a voice in navigating the ship. The mechanic couldn’t even intelligently participate in a conversation about navigation choices – the same with foreign policy, for example. They lack the background knowledge and experience. The pilot or foreign minister doesn’t understand much about the ship’s engines either. People need to restrict their judgments to areas they know about. And of course, more natural gifts of intelligence and character are required for some occupations: a theoretical physicist or a stateman requires gifts that are more rare than those of a carpenter or a mechanic.

   So if the people have an equal voice in governing, how will they be able to judge sound from unsound, serious from unserious rhetoric? A mechanic could tell me any bullshit, and I would not be able to judge it as bullshit since I don’t know much about engines. The problem of a democratic people falling to propaganda was perhaps the worst feature of democracy for Plato. Competent pianists can disagree about how to perform a certain fugue of Bach; my opinion would be irrelevant to such a disagreement; indeed, I am not entitled to an opinion due to my ignorance. With today’s technology and a whole science industry behind it, propaganda is so powerful that it constructs reality itself, makes truth irrelevant. That was Plato’s definition of Sophism: language becomes an instrument not to reveal reality but to mask it for power. Language (including visual images) is one tool among others to get power. The only purpose is to create the desired effect, to make people think and feel like you, the power-seeker, need or want them to think and feel to serve your interests. Proof for Plato that the people cannot and should not govern themselves.

    Of course, the situation is far worse for us than it was for the Athenian democracy Plato criticized. To be a craftsman is to have mastered a discipline, which means that knowledge and virtue had to be acquired. And craftsmen, free men, had a kind of honor in most societies. Good government was obligated to do them justice. They were part of the community and their interests mattered. These interests, at least, they presumably were competent to speak about. But capitalist work has largely deskilled production. I suppose the mass of Trump supporters – not all – are unskilled and poorly educated, having never had to master a discipline because the economy does not need too many such qualified people. Factories make tables today, not skilled carpenters. And the quality of education possible for large masses of people is so poor that few understand even the most basic features of government or history. But the most ignorant QAnon nut’s vote counts the same as the government professor’s. The minds of most citizens – the Trump people are only the most extreme example – never come into contact with reality. Fantasies are constructed, and based on these fantasies they exercise their voice.

    Moreover, there is a world between most people and the financial elites in this country. And the purpose of politics, to the extent that it has any substance, is for the financial elites to keep and grow their wealth, and for the working masses to keep and grow their modest wealth by defending what they have again imagined enemies – poor immigrants mostly, and other non-white groups that are worse off than they are. This narrative is entirely the product of the financial elites and swallowed hook, line, and sinker by the masses of Trump supporters. When politics is reduced to a war of all against all, mediated by fantasy, to determine who gets what and how, the door is opened to what Tocqueville called the tyranny of the majority. Only with our constitution – topic for another day – the tyranny can also be of a minority.

    To sum up Plato’s critique, a quote from Winston Churchill: “The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.”

     The presupposition of democracy, the anthropology behind it, was the belief that the average voter is competent, rational, virtuous. Thus the average voter can, it is assumed, judge authentic arguments from propaganda, as Jefferson wrote:

If there be any among us who would wish to dissolve this Union or to change its republican form let them stand undisturbed as monuments of the safety with which error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it.

 

No experiment can be more interesting than that we are now trying, & which we trust will end in establishing the fact that man may be governed by reason and truth. Our first object should therefore be to leave open to him all the avenues to truth. The most effectual hitherto found is the freedom of the press. it is therefore the first shut up by those who fear the investigation of their actions.

 How melancholy to read these words after the experience of the 20^th century and the age of Trump. If anything has been proven by the history of the last 100 years it is this: people, especially people on the lower end of society but not only, are manipulable. They can be made to dance on the strings – nay, they often want to dance on the strings of a Hitler, Trump, or whoever. If any fact seems to make nonsense of the fundamental premise of democracy – that the common person is competent – it is this history and indeed present in the US.

    Jefferson was well aware that there is a sociological component to competence. He feared urban masses: “When we get piled upon one another in large cities, as in Europe, we shall become as corrupt as Europe.” Since America was so big, he assumed (rightly) that there was enough land and wealth to go around, so that the democracy would be based on a large property-owning class and a fairly equal distribution of wealth. (The natives would either have to get “civilized” or face their ruin.) He thought a good public educational system and a free press would ensure the enlightenment of the sovereign. The contrast with modern America couldn’t be more stark, as this graph shows:

  

   The level of education corresponds to this, and even the best education for the elites is not the kind of education needed to produce wise and virtuous citizens devoted to the common good. Trump has supporters in every class, though their motives differ. This is just my feeling, but the best metaphor to picture the relation of the top to the rest is that of predator and prey, only the predator manages the prey to keep them docile and ignorant. Again, this makes nonsense of the idea of democracy.

. . .

   The problem is that it is almost utopian to imagine a selfless, devoted, virtuous class of servants who manage the ship of state in the best interests of all. The tendency of any such elite is to develop their own class interests and pursue them at the expense of the common good. As Churchill said,

Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.…

I feel the same way. Even among modern liberal democracies, American democracy ranks near the bottom, but it is much preferable to an autocrat like Erdogan, Orban, or Putin, or an autocratic party like the Law and Order Party in Poland (even if that party represents the majority) controlling economic life and monopolizing the public realm (controlling nearly all communication). Why is a malfunctioning democracy preferable to what I would call pop-fascism? Here my short answer:

• I don’t want to have to watch what I say – for example, as a university instructor. Putting people in prison for their thoughts, words actions – insofar as these respect human dignity – is horrible.
• I – like Jefferson – think that freedom of the mind is one of the most important goods, and it can only be protected in some form of open society.
• A political life that does not center around open public debate but passive TV viewers consuming propaganda also demeans the human being.
• An autocrat and his oligarchs are like parasites, sucking the blood out of working people. (Thus many big capitalists will throw their support behind Trump, as German capitalists did behind Hitler, rather than face a democratically elected government that will challenge their privileges.)
• Education – especially the university – cannot be free when its prime function is to produce conformity to the regime.
• It belongs to human dignity to be free, and that at a minimum means giving one’s consent to being governed and respecting the rights of those who disagree (again, within the limits of respecting human dignity).

• I was born and raised in a society that was at least in theory devoted to the principle that all people are created equal. That is not as good as Germany's 'the dignity of man is inviolable' but it is pretty good. I can't change my loyalties at 64. People have sacrificed their lives for this principle.

Given that I feel compelled to support democratic government, how do I conceive it? The people are the sovereign – like a monarch, a collective monarch, a schizophrenic monarch who has different personalities, different conceptions of his interests. As the King had a cabinet of wise men to advise and conduct the day-to-day business of government (the King can’t be an expert at everything), so the democratic sovereign has a government to advise it on policy, to force it if need be to face the requirements of reality and justice. The job of the government is to enlighten the sovereign. It does this by means of reasonable dialog and criticism, always oriented to truth and justice. This should ideally be done by representatives in a legislature – like Parliament or the Bundestag. A free and above all responsible press should be limited to reporting and giving commentary in the form of rational debate between authorities representing different positions. The media must be public to do this task, and should be strictly supervised not for content so much as for respecting the ethic of truthful, rational speech. [Corporate media is the death of democracy; the only thing worse is the state control of media as in Russia, Turkey, Hungary, or China.]

    I think – I learned of this argument from my friend, Dr. Georg Bluhm, and I have never been able to refute it myself and know of no other refutation – the separation of powers system in my country makes this function of government difficult. The problem is that Congress has the power to reject any executive policy – e.g. in the Cold War, undermining Détente, as they did with the Jackson Amendment (many examples I could give) – without the responsibility of putting an alternative policy in its place. A debating club without responsibility lacks the discipline that only reality provides, for it is reality that policies must deal with. Thus debates in Congress tend to degenerate to Sophistry (with noble exceptions). In Parliament, it the government’s policy is not supported, the Parliament must replace the government with a new one that will put into place the alternative, which has been vigorously debated. The fact that any policies debated in Parliament might have to be enacted and that the government that enacts them will be judged by voters provides some measure of discipline to the rhetoric.

   The education of the citizens is obviously critical as well. Classes not only in government and history – classes that feature a clash of interpretations – should be combined with classes in so-called “critical thinking” (formal and informal logic, the art of making good arguments). The quality must be high in all classes of society. Don’t ask me how we get there.

   And the socio-economic status of the citizens must be addressed. You can’t only have a very sick democracy in a country with classes as far apart as in America, with so few at the top and so many at the bottom. Wealth and opportunity – a matter of justice in any case – must become more evenly distributed if a country is to have a meaningful democracy.

   I don’t know how to reconcile capitalism in its current form with democracy. To me, that has been the fundamental problem of American democracy, in addition to the consequences of racial hatred. (They are connected.) Capitalism dumbs the citizens down in drastic ways: through mindless work, through mindless consumerism, through the structure of media. This is too complex to discuss here, but Marx was right about one thing: the economic and class structure of society conditions the consciousness of the people in it; and some economic and class structures are compatible with democracy – and some are not. In America we have a Lockean liberal (nothing to do with the current meaning of ‘liberal’) ideology that has no roots in social-economic structure. Indeed, a pop-fascist regime is the "superstructure" that probably most reflects the economic-social "base" at the current time. That is a deep and probably intractable problem.