Democracy is not what it's cracked up to be

Writer Barry Lopez asserts that what we refer to as “democracy” has not served us very well (https://thesunmagazine.org/issues/528/the-world-we-still-have). A heretical statement perhaps. And yet, arguably, the world’s actually existing “democracies” are currently presiding over – and are mostly the architects of – the worst disasters in human history: the climate crisis (much spoken about recently), the nuclear crisis (less spoken about), and wider ecological crises, not to mention the economic crises of extreme inequality and poverty the world over.

How did this happen? And why do we persist in regarding the construct “democracy” with such rose-colored lenses?

As always, a historical understanding is required. Contrary to the mythologies we are taught in school, as handed down from the lofty language of “founding fathers” (“to secure rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed”), these stories have little to do with the matter.

Essentially all modern nation states, and especially those we refer to as “democracies”, are inheritors of the mantles of large kingdoms and empires. The democracies which succeeded these despotic regimes did not generally aspire to dismantle whole-cloth the armies, the concentrated wealth, and the power of the states they inherited. Instead these nation states have usually tried to keep all the existing and familiar institutions and social relationships mostly intact, by cobbling together more or less effective coalitions to form at least a voting plurality, if not an outright majority, with which to win elections and retain power.

Barry Lopez contrasts our concept of democracy, according to which we believe we have arrived at a great mechanism for attaining “the consent of the governed”, with the many much smaller scale, traditional indigenous forms of governance, which typically rely heavily on “elders”, the oldest and most respected members of the community. In these cultures, elders, too, generally can rely only on the voluntary agreement of the other members of the community for their power. But the distinguishing characteristic of their “rule”, he says, is that elders will only agree with community decisions that benefit everyone. If even a few people are expected to be left out and suffer, and even if the rest of the community anticipates great benefits, elders will nix such decisions. The elders are not supposed to be thinking about feathering their own nests, and the respect they receive derives from their ability to see and devote their thinking to the greater good of the whole, along with all its parts. But it has nothing to do with building up loose “governing coalitions” of the kind that characterize democracies. Naturally, this can only work on a small scale, where close relationships of trust can be built. But our current structures look nothing like these.

Not so long ago, people in many places, especially Europe and Asia, swore fealty to feudal lords, even if they had to surrender a lot of their autonomy and even pay substantial tribute to their new rulers. At first, they mostly did so only out of fear of attack (either by those lords themselves, or by warlike neighboring clans). Maybe it was not that great, but it must have seemed better than the alternative!

Later, as these lords accumulated wealth and power, and conquered other such despots, or forced them to bow to them, kingdoms and empires formed. In so doing, they promulgated various mythologies about themselves, from which came fairy tales like the “divine rights of kings.” But at some point, enough people figured out that these despots did not really receive their powers from the Gods afterall, and that it could in fact be taken away or redistributed in a new fashion. And that they could invent new mythologies to explain this redistribution, just as the monarchs had. Whence “democracy”.

The trouble, though, is that a great deal of force and coercion remains necessary for the continued functioning of these democracies. Again, since they can only survive through large and unwieldy coalitions, they usually have to maintain intact most of the inherited institutions of the despotic regimes they replaced. And there is no guarantee – or even any particularly good reason for confidence – that they will protect the rights of minorities, look out for the interests of the historically marginalized or oppressed, and so on. All the democracies we can name also therefore generally have to maintain large internal security forces, to repress riots and other disturbances. That’s a pretty sure sign that they function nothing like traditional cultures, and are probably incapable of “looking out for everybody” in the kind of selfless way that traditional elders are expected to do.

As a child in the 1970s, I vividly remember a very respectable adult gringo citizen of our United States explaining to me, a few years after Pinochet’s bloody coup d’état, how it was necessary, because Chile had brought disgrace upon itself as a country by “voting for communism”, and how it was supposedly “the only place it had ever happened!”

It was only much later I learned a little bit more about what this thing called “communism” was supposed to stand for. It was all very complicated and difficult, with a whole lot of tricky karma involved, I learned. But curiously, it had at its core a line of thinking a lot like those elders Barry Lopez talks about: leave no one out. So given all that, even if the gringo adult who warned me about Chile was wrong that “nobody ever voted for communism!” (except there), it now makes some sense to me, and in a certain fashion, I think he may have been right.

The odds of people in large, modern nation states reliably voting (or politicians assembling effective governing coalitions) in favor of the kinds of arrangements that traditional elders anywhere would approve of are slim indeed. And now, given the ecological crisis, “leave no one out” has to include the four-leggeds, the six-leggeds, the eight-leggeds, and so on.

It’s a bleak prognosis, but it seems to me to be pretty explanatory of our current predicament.

We cannot, however, merely turn back the clock all of a sudden. We are already embedded in such vast and unwieldy structures, and heavily reliant on them. Nobody knows any easy answers or ways out.

Fortunately, there are still a few elders around. One whom we lost recently was a woman named Marta Harnecker. She was a sociologist from Chile (that same country my own gringo elder warned me about!), and she spent decades after that infamous coup, traveling around the world, and learning about how people in other countries were attempting to build more inclusive and participatory democracies. She wrote many books and made documentaries about what she learned.

Her last book before she died came out just last year. It is called Planning from Below: A Decentralized, Participatory Planning Proposal. It is dense, chock full of practical considerations and recommendations about the nuts and bolts of exactly how to go about it. It is free of dogma. I think it is the kind of work we all need to be doing.

Fortunately, many people are starting to awaken to the gravity of our predicament. Groups like Extinction Rebellion, notably, are calling for immediate and drastic changes to how we organize ourselves. Extinction Rebellion has four demands:

1. Tell the truth: we are in an existential crisis
2. We must make an immediate transition, to avert far worse catastrophes
3. We must not trust corporations and politicians to make all the decisions about how to do this (afterall, the latter are mostly responsible for creating the same crises in the first place), therefore, we call for the convocation of citizen’s assemblies to make proposals
4. We must make a just transition, especially one that does not sacrifice the lives and interests of the most vulnerable communities, who have usually benefited the least from the activities that have provoked the crisis itself.

The third and fourth demands get to the heart of the problem of democracy, the one to which Marta Harnecker dedicated her life to understanding.

We have other examples to draw upon, too. In Sri Lanka, a social movement called “Sarvodaya Shramadana”and founded by a former schoolteacher, has brought millions of people together for experiments in village building and peace making, inspired by both the teachings of Mahatma Gandhi and the wisdom traditions of their own (majority Buddhist) country. Quincy Saul calls it one of the best models in our times for practical, hands-on “ecosocialism” on the scale of a whole country (https://www.counterpunch.org/2015/04/10/on-climate-satyagraha/).

And there are many other places (India, Cuba, etc) where people are trying something new, as Marta Harnecker describes in her book.

One thing’s for sure: what we are doing now is not working out. And it’s a safe bet that the problem is not a matter of making a few superficial changes in “best practices”. The crises have been a long time coming, and we have had plenty of warning about all of them. If we haven’t responded more effectively up to this point, then something is very fundamentally wrong with the existing structures and institutions to which we have so far been so unreflectively loyal.