

Is democracy overrated? - akandiah
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-23607302

======
thingification
From the comments I see here so far, I don't see evidence that people have
read the article (which is a transcript of part one of a radio talk that just
went out over the air on the UK's Radio 4). It seems people are responding to
the title.

Here are some quotes:

The totalitarian system, I learned, endures not simply by getting rid of
democratic elections and imposing a one-party state. It endures by abolishing
the distinction between civil society and the state, and by allowing nothing
significant to occur which is not controlled by the Party.

...

In the underground universities of communist Europe, my friends and colleagues
studied those things, and prepared themselves for the hoped-for day when the
Communist Party, having starved itself of every rational input, would finally
give up the ghost. And the lessons that they learned need to be learned again
today, as our politicians lead us forth under the banner of democracy, without
pausing to examine what democracy actually requires.

~~~
mattsouth
Perhaps it is a dry article, but I heard it on the radio this morning and
really appreciated it
([http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b037vb15](http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b037vb15)
\- may be blocked outside uk). I was grateful to see the text version. Summary
is that Roger Scruton believes that democracy needs an independent judiciary,
property rights and the right to free speech and opinion in order to succeed.

------
netcan
" _Western nations have acted upon the assumption that democracy is the
solution to political conflict and that the ultimate goal of foreign policy
must be to encourage the emergence of democracy.._

 _.. three ideas - democracy, freedom and human rights - are spoken of in one
breath_ "

Ironically, thing that current liberal-democratic ideologies should have
inherited from Marxism is the emphasis on influencing the people. Democrats of
the last few decades give the general public's attitude and political culture
a ridiculously strong presumption of innocence. The problems in autocratic
countries are assumed to be institutional: bad systems, bad leaders. The
People want peace, freedom and human rights. I think that's why human rights
are expected to follow democratic elections.

In the middle east right now we have seen this fail in a similar way in
several places. Democratic elections bringing to power strongly non
"democratic" candidates. Confessionalists, nationalists & theocrats.

A more Marxist-like approach would worry more about spreading the ideology
among the general public. In Eastern Europe (especially East Germany) "like
Western Europe" was enough. In the middle east " _lets be more western_ " is
not going to work. We're understandably hesitant to start pushing a "little
book of ideology" into the hands of 16 year olds around the world given our
20th century experience with such books. I don't know what the answer is to
that. What I am pretty certain about is that if you want to see "democracy" in
Syria or Egypt, you have more than just an institutional problem to fix.

------
binderbizingdos
All systems put _their_ form of rule on a pedestal worshiping it, saying:
"there is none like it".

It will fall apart as all the other systems have and be considered "silly
compared to our knew awesome form of rule"

~~~
ahomescu1
Except democracy has been around for at least 2500 years, and we still have
it. It seems that all those other "awesome forms" fail and revert to the
natural, default state of countries: democracy.

Which brings me to my second point: democracy seems to me like the natural
order of a large group of people. It's natural for people to compete to
achieve their goals, and democracy seems to be the only system that spreads
success around.

~~~
jeremyswank
monarchy, autocracy, and tyranny have been around a lot longer than 2500
years. don't we still have those, too?

~~~
ahomescu1
We still have monarchies, but many of them are also democratic (hereditary
monarch plus elected prime minister and legislature). I agree we still have
tyrannies too, because I think there's a cycle between them and democracies.
Democracy weakens, a tyrant takes power, this lasts for a while before
collapsing, then his competitors take power themselves (in some cases,
democratically).

------
osmsiberiano
I'm glad to see this comment from a Brit, because it's exactly what I was
telling to the Western friends for some time: formal procedures do not make
democracy. (I think Iraq and Afganistan are clear examples.) It's a whole
culture of participation of citizens and accountability from those who take
the power, and those cultures are mutually dependent.

We had all formal procedures in USSR & Russia in 1988-1991, but the citizens
did not know what to do with them, and then they were gradually taken away.
Democracy is a grassroots phoenomenon, it grows ground-up.

------
mbrock
From Wikipedia:

" _Democracy [...] encompasses social, economic and cultural conditions that
enable the free and equal practice of political self-determination._ "

This article is not alone in having a very narrow and technical conception of
democracy as solely a method of election and legislation. That this in itself
is not sufficient for a flourishing and liberated society seems obvious.

The real issue seems to be how to encourage actual, real, functioning
democracy, instead of installing a thin veneer of technical democracy on top
of a society whose deeper currents are undemocratic.

For some reason I'm thinking about the story of how the Velvet Revolution in
Czechoslovakia has historical roots in the Communist suppression of Zappa-
influenced psychedelic rock band The Plastic People of the Universe. Maybe the
world just needs more psychedelic rock.

~~~
thingification
"This article is not alone in having a very narrow and technical conception of
democracy as solely a method of election and legislation."

That is an argument about words and not ideas. The article says that voting is
not enough, and so do you.

"That this in itself is not sufficient for a flourishing and liberated society
seems obvious."

Some things bear repeating.

------
thirsteh
"Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others." —
Winston Churchill

------
smky80
No system of government really works that well because most people "defect" in
the sense of the prisoners dilemma. So instead of working for the public good,
the government ultimately becomes a means of exploiting the public good for
powerful individuals' advantage.

Pretty much everyone government ultimately devolves into a form of "mafia" \--
a relatively tight network of powerful individuals united by some fairly
strong bond such as familial/ethnic ties. This network can count on each other
to "cooperate" and not "defect", while the public/masses just can't coordinate
and cooperate enough to oppose them.

~~~
asgard1024
Every society is subject to the problem you are talking about. That's why
humans actually evolved to go at lengths to punish anybody who does defect.
Without this sense (for fairness), no society could function. And as you
correctly point out, mafia is the subject of the same rule. (That's why you
usually get either a rigid hierarchical system or democracy, not so much a
system where a large portion of population democratically controls the rest -
that's unstable.)

The key in democracy is exactly what it says on the tin - one person one vote.
This is much more stable to this devolution, because other people in society
can observe when this rule is broken by anybody and take action. Thanks to
this, much less energy is required for infighting, and people can be happier.

~~~
smky80
> humans actually evolved to go at lengths to punish anybody who does defect

They might have initially, but I'll make the argument that probably since the
dawn of agriculture, and the generation of large societal surpluses, evolution
has been pushing humanity towards defection.

I think recent experience in the US shows quite clearly that votes don't
really matter, only money does. Moreover votes can be manufactured through the
media (money).

------
pjgomez
I think the real problem is we don't really have democracy: once every four
years we are allowed to pick between Coke or Pepsi and then we hand over all
our power to a bunch of people until the next election.

------
asgard1024
Is he talking about democracy as an ideal or democracy as commonly
implemented? These are two very different things..

The ideal is to give everyone the same say in what laws should govern the
society. In my view, that ideal isn't overrated. It's just basic fairness.

If you have two kids, that argue for a toy, what do you do? You force them
each to have it for half a time, fairly.

The societies that evolved the ability to implement such fairness spend less
resources warring about who should get how much power (arguing about the toy),
and so spend more resources on productive activities (playing with the toy).

~~~
dirtyaura
If you - and apparently many others in this thread - actually read the
article, you would know that he is not talking about ideal vs commonly
implemented democracy at all. He is talking about other institutions of free
society that are in his view as important as democracy, but are usually lumped
together with democracy in political speeches of the leaders of the West.

These other institutions that can exists with or without democracy are
judicial independence, property rights, freedom of speech and opinion and,
finally, legitimate opposition. In his view, all these can exist
independently, and often existed before democracy in Western European
countries.

~~~
asgard1024
I read his article, but I didn't get his point, and you're basically
explaining the reason why.

He is not correct in lumping all those together in his analysis. Maybe he
could say "Western democracy".

I agree that these institutions existed before democracy. But you would also
be hard-pressed to find democracy without them, but it's not because democracy
would require these institutions to exist.

I can perfectly imagine a democracy in Islamic society with Sharia law, that
doesn't have those institutions. As long as everybody can secretly vote, with
equal vote, they know what they vote about, and it's impossible to restrict
voting of other people by voting, it's democracy in my books. However, I don't
think it would last too long. The other innovations are probably so useful for
majority of people that they would very quickly (and democratically) agree on
implementing them. That's why we never see anything like this in the real
world (in the real world probably both things co-evolve).

In other words, I see democracy vastly more important than those institutions,
because implementing democracy itself will probably lead to implementing these
institutions, while the opposite is not true.

------
saljam
Not quite what the article was talking about, but what worries me about modern
democracies is where the responsibility of government decisions lies. In
theory the voters should bear it, since they chose the government. But in
practice they just shrug "rotten politicians" and move on with their lives as
their country wages war on millions of innocents. The politicians themselves
rarely get their comeuppance, because hey, the people chose them!

Democracy only works with a politically active population. And frankly, most
people don't give a shit.

~~~
rdc12
IMHO its worse then that, the system (The political parties, the media,
electoral systems etc) has moved in such a way to make people not give a shit.

------
ekm2
This reminds me of Pope John Paul II's reply when asked why the church was not
more democratic:

 _The church is not a democracy and truth is not established by a show of
hands_

~~~
jongraehl
It's _more_ plausible, not less, that divine inspiration is reflected in the
vote of a group than in a single man's decision. Like a multiple sensor array,
the noise in a single instrument (and the risk of its corruption) can't cause
the whole to fail to detect the signal.

------
Afforess
I would say, yes. Theoretically, an all-knowing Philosopher King would be the
best form of government. In reality, that's extremely hard to achieve. Modern
day democracies, like in the US, are intentionally designed to move slowly, so
that no single person or group of people can radically change how it affects
it's citizens. That also means it is slow to reform.

~~~
asgard1024
No, it would not. The all-knowing philosopher (AKA enlightened dictator) would
basically amount to democracy.

Let's say this philosopher wants to do something which is undeniably correct,
but majority of people still disagrees with it, and they are willing to
protest and risk lives. Then what is he going to do?

Is he going to kill those protesting? Or beat them up? Then I would submit he
is not enlightened in any way.

Or is he going to back down with his proposal? Then here you have it. He
basically let the people decide.

He also may have a third option, deceive the majority of the population. I
would not consider that enlightened either. It's a slippery slope - he has to
know what is good for you before _you_ know it, if that's possible at all.

I also don't think democracies are _designed_ to move slowly. In fact, the
more direct democracy, the more slowly it moves - common people are much more
conservative than people who want power. You can actually observe that
empirically, and it is arguably a weakness of democracy.

~~~
jiggy2011
Or he could just allow them to protest peacefully but implement his plan
anyway.

A truly wise and benevolent leader (if such a thing were possible) would also
be skilled at assessing public mood around a proposal and would weigh that
into his plan.

Of course the difficulty is in knowing what constitutes a "good" policy. Is it
something that makes the majority of people happier right now? Is it something
that rewards desired behaviour? What about weighing long term factors against
short term? For example if we can increase greatly quality of life right now
at the cost of massive environmental destruction that won't be felt for
several generations.

~~~
asgard1024
So what if they wouldn't stop protesting? What does it mean, allow to protest
peacefully? Like a free speech zone?

But isn't this "weighing" you talk about just a form of voting? If he caves in
based on public opinion, then he is being effectively democratic.

That's the problem. The concept of "benevolent dictator" is just oxymoronic. I
would be glad if people stop using it as an argument, because it's just so
contradictory.

~~~
jiggy2011
Isn't this roughly how it works now? You implement legal rules for when and
how protests can occur and allow people to protest within those rules but a
protest is no guarantee of policy change.

I guess a truly benevolent dictator would have some objective principles to
decide the best course of action and use those. What those principles would
look like, I have no idea.

~~~
asgard1024
If we really lived in democracy, it wouldn't have to be that way. We would
just accept defeat if majority would disagree. That's what people in
Switzerland do.

You just hid the contradiction of "benevolent dictator" into "objective
principles I have no idea about". That's the reason why you have no idea -
such principles don't exist independently of subjective values of each person!

~~~
jiggy2011
I think that the closest you could get would be to define some formula for
quality of life or happiness, possibly based on neuroscience and predictive
modelling that is far more advanced than we have now and govern based on that
perhaps based on median happiness or some such.

Of course you will still get people under such a system who would be worse off
than they would under others. You also have questions about whether you let
some people be happier than others if their actions are likely to cause the
average level of happiness to increase. Similar to the conversations we have
about wealth now.

However I don't think the choice would be between implementing majority rule
on every micro decision and tyranny.

Perhaps it makes sense to think of such a system as a representative democracy
where every election is won by the same candidate because they are so vastly
superior to the others.

~~~
asgard1024
But there is also an issue of freedom and trust. Sure, you could provide
"endless happiness" by making everyone stoned, but what freedom that is?

The point isn't to implement majority rule on every micro decision; people are
often generous enough not to be control freaks. But again - when they are not,
then it probably isn't just a "micro" decision.

Your last sentence was exactly my point. If such a dictator is going to win
every election, why he needs to be a dictator? Why we can't just have those
elections? By this, you also gain trust.

I love Linus Torvalds quote: "People can trust me [about kernel development],
because they don't have to trust me." I think it's true everywhere - trust is
only gained if you have choice not to trust.

------
duncan_bayne
It's worth remembering that there are ways of achieving democracy that don't
involve voting. For example, creating a Government from a randomly-selected
group of citizens every few years.

In my opinion that's a vastly superior approach to having everyone vote for
one a bunch of - for the most part - crooks, thieves and liars.

------
D9u
Disambiguation is called for in respect to what _democracy_ actually is...

[http://www.diffen.com/difference/Democracy_vs_Republic](http://www.diffen.com/difference/Democracy_vs_Republic)

Black's Law Dictionary says that the difference between a democracy and a
republic is that sovereignty is retained by the individual within a republic.
(USA is a Constitutional Republic)

The article fails to note that democracy does not preclude communism, and the
DPRK ([http://www.korea-dpr.com/](http://www.korea-dpr.com/)) is a classic
democratic communist nation in which the people have no individual sovereignty
in lieu of that sovereignty being relegated to the collective in the name of
the greater good _for the nation._

~~~
mtgx
Aren't all existing democracies republics?

Personally I think the pendulum needs to swing a lot more in favor of true
democracy, and accountability of those "few" representatives in power. Because
it doesn't look like the current system, where the pendulum swings a lot more
in favor of the representatives, has been working very well.

We need more direct democracy, more referendums, more citizen law-making,
where the representatives are only a _relative_ "check" on that citizen power
(to prevent _extreme_ abuses of "mob rule").

~~~
D9u
Isn't "true democracy" a form of civilized mob rule?

Why should individual sovereignty be forfeit in favor of the group sovereignty
that is democracy?

East Germany was another "Democratic Republic," which didn't turn out so well.

Is the fault with "democracy," or the "republic?" (these terms have little
relevance to America's present political parties) Or is it some other aspect.

In my estimation, if a nation's citizens have no individual sovereignty, that
nation cannot be properly referred to as a _republic,_ yet such nations do fit
the definition of "democracy" by virtue of the sovereignty enjoyed by the
collective majority.

~~~
asgard1024
East Germany was only called "democratic republic", in reality it was neither.
The fault isn't within those terms; the fault was that calling it that way was
simply a lie.

You also ask: "Why should individual sovereignty be forfeit in favor of the
group sovereignty that is democracy?"

Because we want to agree on certain things. Human societies have evolutionary
advantage over independent sets of humans.

------
albertoX
Real democracy doesn't exists in any country. Except from e-democracy
experiments like in Rio Grande do Sul(Brasil). Instead we are in a tight
controlled Particracy.

Thanks to internet we are getting closer to a new Era where citizens will have
direct control on the governments. This is yet to be achieved but there are
already thousands of people working silently on this.

We will have the first real democracy in Europe at the end of 2015 and it will
spread quickly.

We are citizens, we are real democracy.

~~~
johnchristopher
> We will have the first real democracy in Europe at the end of 2015 and it
> will spread quickly.

What are you referring to ?

~~~
phaemon
Well, they wouldn't be working very silently if he just went and _told_ you,
now would they? ;)

~~~
johnchristopher
Ah, well. I just noticed it was a one-post account.

I was asking myself what could be going on regarding EU laws or constitution
or sthg in 2015.

------
InclinedPlane
Yes! (But also no)

The problem is that in the "western world" there are complex systems designed
to preserve both widespread individual liberty as well as consensual
governance (for convenience I'll call these "free systems"). However, we tend
to merely label these systems as "democracy" even though many other systems
that have popular voting can exist which do not offer the same protections of
liberty and consensual governance. This terminology and modeling problem makes
it more difficult to spread the aforementioned "free systems" of government
because it's very much more difficult to elucidate all of the factors behind
such systems, some of which are socio-cultural and economic.

One common pattern in "unfree" countries that have experienced bouts of
democracy is for there to be a popular vote that brings in a government that
then ends all of the democratic institutions. This has happened routinely for
well over a century. Another problem is that you have a corrupt group in power
with few checks on their authority and they simply rig every election in one
way or another.

I think it's mistaken to believe that it takes generations for a country to be
ready for freedom and effective democracy merely because naive attempts to set
up democracies can easily fail. I think it's also a mistake to assume that
countries with long histories of democratic institutions and liberty are
comparatively immune to collapses of those institutions.

Much like the situation with economics we tend to live within political
systems which rest on foundations that are not widely well understood, if at
all, and rarely even discussed in depth at an abstract foundational level.

It's no wonder it's so difficult for countries to try to bootstrap their way
to democracy and it's a bit of a shock that our own systems of government in
the "free" world work as well as they do.

------
northwest
> Is democracy overrated?

No.

It's just that we haven't gotten through to eliminating the corrupting
elements and anchoring this legally, yet.

Why? Because corruption (= ultimately money) protects itself.

~~~
anonyfox
Even worse, in Germany the election turnout is less than 50% on average,
getting even worse every year.

Most people are literally not interested in everything around them and get mad
when you start talking about politics. With people like this, democracies will
fail. A living democracy needs involved and civilized people.

~~~
mtrimpe
That's also a massive opportunity though, since whomever could capture the
attention of that 50% and get them to vote could become the biggest party
overnight.

To me that just sounds like an underserved market waiting to be addressed.

~~~
pampa
Yep. Just like in 1933

------
tomp
No.

