The Whole is Less than the Sum of the Parts

Today I came across this excellent commentary of the self-serving inconsistency in American attitudes toward contemporary democratic uprisings. This is well worth reading; it brought back to me the tension between democracy as an ideal, democracy as a political reality, democracy as an ideology, and democracy as a slogan.

As an ideal, democracy has a great appeal for those who lack other means of wielding power, which is most of us. Yet, the real reason why the ideal of democracy appeals to us, the masses, is not because it promises each of us power, but because it encapsulates the irreducible ideal of justice for all; indeed, my contention is that the true value of the ideal of democracy is not in the promise of power-sharing, but in the promise of justice, and that the ideal of justice is far more fundamental and essential ideal than that of democracy.

The problem with democracy as an ideal is precisely its broad scope. The idea that power can be exercised by the masses over the masses assumes either that the masses are a homogenous entity with homogenous interests, or that they we are all willing to compromise for the common good. In reality the people are neither one, nor the other (or we would know nothing but democracy) and that leads me to democracy as a political reality.

As a political reality, the democracy we know in contemporary western world is an illusion. It is an illusion because the power of the demos is severely limited. In the first instance, our power is limited to choosing the oligarchy that will exercise the real power (and often will do so with limited concern for the interests, not saying will, of the people). However, the illusory nature of democracy as a political reality goes deeper than that: the voice of the people is not the sole factor in determining who will make it into the power-wielding oligarchy.

This is nowhere more blatantly obvious than in the American presidential election, where the people’s choice is radically restricted by a financial pre-selection; anyone may run, but to be heard and seen requires loads of money — money becomes a mediator between the demos and the kratos. In principle this is not so far from the democratic reality of the now gone socialist regimes in Central Europe, where the people were given a choice of carefully pre-selected candidates; the technique is different and less blatant, but the net effect is similar: the power of the people is manipulated by those who have other, natural, means of power. If you accept what I said about the relationship between the ideal of democracy and the ideal of justice, the central issue in evaluating the political reality of democracy is how it relates to the core ideal of justice; some illusory democracies are better in this regard than others.

Democracy as an ideology is the elevation of the ideal of democracy (or, what is worse, often of a particular illusory realisation of that ideal) above other ideals, most importantly the fundamental ideal of justice. Those who worship at the altar of the ideology of democracy are unwilling to acknowledge (or perhaps unable to perceive) the tension between democracy as an ideal and as a political reality in any given time and space. Yet, the fact that there are not, and cannot be, any true democracies fundamentally undermines the credibility of democracy as an ideology; it makes democracy a political system among many, which is open to abuse no less than other, for example autocratic forms of social organisation (think about it; people do not rise against autocratic rulers because they are autocrats, but because often autocrats use their power in a way which deprives others of justice). The bottom line is that democracy as an ideal is not worth organising a revolution for, and those who start wars in the name of the ideal of democracy are either living in a self-delusion, or have other agendas.

And that brings me to democracy as a slogan: the use of the ideal of democracy to justify actions that otherwise might raise eyebrows. The sloganic use of the democratic ideal is characteristic of contemporary US and UK foreign policy. Yet the sloganic use only works if democracy is turned into ideology, for it requires the highest ideal of the ideology to justify violating other ideals. Without democracy as ideology the action that is to be justified is suddenly open to the scrutiny by the more fundamental ideal of justice. It is for this reason that the ideology of democracy, as all ideologies, is dangerous: for it obscures the more fundamental issues of human existence.

So the next time you come across the sloganic chanting of democracy, please ask yourself, what is it really about? It is not about democracy, it never is.

(P.S. It might well be that, as imperfect as the political reality of democracy is, it provides the best framework for our strive for justice. If you hear me saying ‘democracy is a bad thing’ you have not heard me at all.)