By Aamir Zeb
What started as an experiment in Athens over two thousand years ago eventually pervaded every continent and every land. Democracy, Democracy, Democracy is the repeated call that bellows from the four corners of the globe. It is the established order in a chaotic and unstable world, where every critic of democracy is viewed with heretical suspicion. For every political problem, we are told, lies a democratic solution. For every civilization, for every country for every tribe, for every time - goes the mantra - democracy is the claimed answer to all our ills. A remark by John Adams, the second President of the United States. “Remember democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide.” Adams’ remarks were true then and are fast becoming true now, especially in the Western world, the heart of the democracy’s home turf.Corruption, incompetence, growing debt and a feeling that politics just doesn’t work for the ordinary man is now prevalent in most if not all major democratic countries.
Yet before we get into a detailed discussion around the merits and demerits of democracy, it is important to define precisely what we mean by the word democracy – for it means many things to many people.Some use the term in a linguistic sense: to characterise consultative behaviour. A company boss is considered democratic if he or she consults their team on a regular basis, in contrast to those who are considered dictators when they bark orders and expect to be followed. Others refer to any type of election - from the school council to high political office – as democratic. Also, liberal secular societies do not have a monopoly on claiming democracy as their own. Many communist countries during the Cold War era described themselves as democratic republics; and even Saddam Hussein’s Iraq had Presidential elections. But those for whom free and fair elections are the key characteristic of a democracy would not give democratic legitimacy to those held in communist states or in dictatorships, where only one party exists.
Others view democracy as more than just elections - that democracies should be characterised by other values and institutions. That alongside regular elections there must be liberal values, a functioning legislative chamber, a vibrant opposition, a free media, civil society and an independent judiciary. For some, especially from the libertarian viewpoint, democracy should not be equated with liberalism; the latter considered to be the end goal, whilst the former needing to be limited in order to avoid a nation becoming illiberal through the passing of authoritarian legislation. That is why many would describe the United States as a republic rather than a democracy. For the purpose of this Article democracy can be defined as “the political system that institutionalises legislative sovereignty - in either the people directly - or in their elected representatives”.
Most politicians in democracies claim the ‘change’ mantle, very little ever does really change. Moreover, political scandals are far from being isolated events or aberrations in secular democratic systems. Expenses fraud, ex-Ministers being “cabs for hire”, cash for influencing legislation and loans for peerages are all examples in the UK alone. The alleged attempted sale of a Senate seat in Illinois and a congressman with thousands of dollars in his fridge in the USA were similar shocking episodes. It could be argued that in America the political class sold out some time ago to special interest groups - so much so that Washington DC has become a byword for organised and institutionalised corruption. India, considered by many to be the largest secular democracy, is also considered to be the most corrupt. Politicians at both federal and state level have been milking the country dry since partition in 1947. Israel is touted as the only democracy in the Middle East. Yet what does it say about its government when a former President is being tried for rape and an ex-Prime Minister investigated for corruption? The developing democracies don’t fare better. Elections in Kenya, Afghanistan and Pakistan have all yielded a corrupt elite, and Russia’s conversion to democracy has produced an oligarchy more interested in making money than serving the public. In essence democracies in country after country favour the elite while continuing the propaganda that everyone has the same power within a democracy. However the supporters of secular democracy do not accept this premise. In their world-view democracy is not a perfect system but, to paraphrase Churchill, it is better than everything else. For them democracy is infinitely superior to its rivals, and the demise of medieval monarchs, Soviet Russia, Nazi Germany and dictators around the globe only validates their opinion. For them democracy works because it is, in Abraham Lincoln’s words. “a government of the people by the people and for the people.” In addition they cite the growing number of countries worldwide that are embracing secular democracy.
Some argue that the problems that have arisen are due to bad implementation and a political class that has lost its bearings. Yet the problem of secular democracies originates not from bad implementation but shaky theoretical foundations. The view that laws become superior to other laws based on the number of people voting for them is as absurd as it is dangerous. We certainly don’t decide scientific progress based on the number of people who support a position, if we did then Galileo, Copernicus and the hundreds of scientists who spoke truth to power and who struggled against public opinion must have been wrong. We decide trials based on the quality of evidence not on the numerical superiority of witnesses on any particular side. If people, as they did in the 1930’s, vote for a populist leader who would later kill millions of Jews and start a world war, does this validate their choice just because they constituted a majority at a point in time. No it doesn’t.
The very word “democracy” (people power) rooted in Greek was the real give away. This is why throughout the ages from Socrates to Jefferson, from Plato to John Stuart Mill the concept of mob rule and the tyranny of the majority was the fear. This phrase “tyranny of the majority” was originally quoted in Alexis de Tocqueville in his book ‘Democracy in America’ and was then picked up by Mill in his work ‘On Liberty’. The concern was that laws would not be decided on the basis of societal benefit by the majority but would instead be rooted in self interest, emotional passions and parochialism, an attempt to usurp the rights of the minority. As Thomas Jefferson stated “A democracy is nothing more than mob rule, where fifty-one percent of the people may take away the rights of the other forty-nine”. Plato and Aristotle were especially hostile to the tenets of democracy. Through their influential works, after the rediscovery of classics during renaissance, Sparta's political stability was praised while the Periclean democracy was described as a system of rule, where the less well born, the mob (as a collective tyrant) or the poorer classes, were holding power. Mill's solutions had an even more radical suggestion to majority tyranny and that was to have proportional representation with extra votes for the rich and the well educated to balance out the votes of the less educated majority. Winston Churchill also joked that the main argument against democracy was a ten-minute conversation with the average voter.
The reality is democracy never existed in reality as it is not the representation of majority but minority because the votes gets divided among several candidates.It is actually giving the power of legislation to an elite class to make laws and decide right and wrong from limited human wisdom. History’s only democracy was instituted at Athens in 508 BC by Cleisthenes but any citizen below eighteen years of age was not allowed to express his views . Only citizen citizen over eighteen years of age was a citizen, able to gather with his fellows on a hillside, where, after listening to various demagogues, he could vote with the other citizens on matters of war and peace and everything else that happened to be introduced that day. In 322 BC Alexandra of Macedon conquered Athens and eliminated their democracy, which was never again to be tried by a proper state.
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