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Is It Possible That Democracy Doesn't Work?
http://www.truthdig.com/eartotheground/item/is_it_possible_that_democracy_do
esnt_work_20161006/
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Posted on Oct 6, 2016
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Is it possible that democracy doesn't work? It's reasonable to ask the
question amid the xenophobia of Brexit, the Hungarian
referendum(http://www.express.co.uk/news/world/717619/EU-Hungary-migrant-all
ocation-referendum-Viktor-Orban-Brussels-refugees) , Donald Trump's
presidential campaign and the election of Philippine President Rodrigo
Duterte, who gleefully compares himself to Hitler.
"Most people possess almost no useful information about policies and their
implications, have little desire to improve their state of knowledge, and
have a deep aversion to political disagreement," writes George Monbiot
(https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/oct/04/democracy-people-powe
r-governments-policy) at The Guardian, reviewing the book "Democracy for
Realists." The book, published this year, was written by social-science
professors Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels.
"We base our political decisions on who we are rather than what we think. In
other words, we act politically-not as individual, rational beings but as
members of social groups, expressing a social identity. We seek out the
political parties that seem to correspond best to our culture, with little
regard to whether their policies support our interests. We remain loyal to
political parties long after they have ceased to serve us."
The obvious answer is better information and civic education. But this
doesn't work [.] Moderately informed Republicans were more inclined than
Republicans with the least information to believe that Bill Clinton oversaw
an increase in the budget deficit (it declined massively). Why? Because,
unlike the worst informed, they knew he was a Democrat. The tiny number of
people with a very high level of political information tend to use it not to
challenge their own opinions but to rationalise them. Political knowledge,
Achen and Bartels argue, "enhances bias".
Direct democracy-referendums and citizens' initiatives-seems to produce even
worse results. In the US initiatives are repeatedly used by
multimillion-dollar lobby groups to achieve results that state legislatures
won't grant them. They tend to replace taxes with user fees, stymie the
redistribution of wealth and degrade public services. Whether representative
or direct, democracy comes to be owned by the elites.
This is not to suggest that it has no virtues; just that those it does have
are not those we principally ascribe to it. It allows governments to be
changed without bloodshed, limits terms in office, and ensures that the
results of elections are widely accepted. Sometimes public attribution of
blame will coincide with reality, which is why you don't get famines in
democracies.
In these respects it beats dictatorship. But is this all it has to offer? A
weakness of Democracy for Realists is that most of its examples are drawn
from the US, and most of those are old. Had the authors examined popular
education groups in Latin America, participatory budgets in Brazil and New
York, the fragmentation of traditional parties in Europe and the movement
that culminated in Bernie Sanders' near miss, they might have discerned more
room for hope. This is not to suggest that the folk theory of democracy
comes close to reality anywhere, but that the situation is not as hopeless
as they propose.
Persistent, determined, well-organised groups can bring neglected issues to
the fore and change political outcomes. But in doing so they cannot rely on
what democracy ought to be. We must see it for what it is. And that means
understanding what we are.
-Posted by Alexander Reed Kelly(http://www.truthdig.com/alexander_kelly)
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