Below are some thoughts on democracy by Paul Treanor that may be worth keeping in mind as we contemplate eletoral politics.
Joe W. ____________________
http://web.inter.nl.net/users/Paul.Treanor/democracy.html
Testable propositions... The idea of increasing political conformity and uniformity is difficult to operationalise, but these propositions could be investigated...
in democracies, the range of political ideas (in the manifestos of parties elected to parliament) shrinks. in democracies, the difference in stated aims between major parties (those with more than 5% of the vote) also shrinks democracy inhibits the formation of major new political parties (fusions of existing parties excepted): the chance that, in any 10-year period, a completely new party will gain more than 5% of the vote, is small. democracy inhibits the formation of major new political-ideological groups of parties (comparable to the green parties in western Europe, the only such example in the last generation)
Democracy has brought societies which are monotonous and uniform, at least to some of the people who live in them. But not only that. Democracy has failed to bring utopia. That is, it has failed to bring into existence any proposed ideal society, or any other proposal of a 'utopian' type. Democracy itself can be labelled a 'utopia', and the present liberal-democratic societies are historically unique - nothing like them existed before the 19th century. So, in that sense, democracy has brought at least a new democratic society, which is itself an ideal society for some people. But nothing else. No dramatically new type of society has emerged among the democracies, differing from the standard model of these societies. And most liberal-democrats would in fact be hostile to the label 'utopia' being applied to these liberal-democratic societies.
The liberal tradition is resolutely hostile to utopias: anti-utopianism seems a defining characteristic of liberal ideology. That hostility has shaped the present liberal-democratic societies. Liberal anti-utopianism and democratic anti-totalitarianism are in practice the same thing. Some liberals explicitly equate the two, and see totalitarianism as the result of utopian ideals. They believe that the 20th-century totalitarian regimes derive from the European utopian tradition. The early-modern ideal city, the ideal city-states of the type described in Thomas More's original book 'Utopia", were for them the source of all later evil. (Many postmodernists share this distaste for utopia, and the belief that there is a direct line from Thomas More to Auschwitz). In other words, there are liberal-democrats who believe that the political system should be so structured, as to save society from utopian experiments. To them, democracy is (at least partly) a mechanism to prevent utopia. I think they are right about the nature of democracy: but it is democracy, not utopia, which must disappear.
....historical inevitability dictated the triumph of individual human rights that was inherent in the political transformation that mankind was experiencing, particularly in the phenomenon of mass political awakening with which we wanted to identify the forces of democracy and freedom. This was our response to the challenge posed by the notion that so dominated our century: that a coercive utopia derived from dogmatic hubris, that a perfect society, a form of heaven on earth, could be constructed by political compulsion. Zbigniew Brzezinski, Morgenthau Memorial Lecture 1995.
The resistance of democracy to innovation, is clearly related to the reluctance to accept any criticism of it. Although pro-democratic theorists often say they are not claiming democracy is perfect, in practice it does have a semi-sacred status. So in democratic societies, criticism of democracy, even without questioning its fundamental principles, is regarded with suspicion and hostility. Especially, democrats are reluctant to accept that a democratic system can be corrupted. They may try to associate this criticism with fascism: corruption and 'decadence' were indeed major themes of anti-democratic propaganda in the 1930's. Logically, that implies that there is an underlying belief that democracy is in some way 'pure' or 'perfect'. In turn this creates a tendency to social self-worship, at its most extreme in the United States. Widespread belief that the existing society is perfect or quasi-sacred, creates a climate for complacency and social conformity, not for innovation. Sacralisation is, by definition, a contra-innovative social phenomenon: the sacred is preserved, to abolish it is sacrilege.
A conservative and anti-utopian bias has specific effects inside a nation state. No existing democracy began in an ethical and cultural vacuum of the kind used in social-contract theories. Their values are the pre-existing values of the constituent demos (nation). The 'democratic values' in a democratic nation-state are the values of the dominant ethno-cultural group, which first constituted that nation-state. Danish democratic values are Danish values, Norwegian democratic values are Norwegian values. Rejection of these values would require an individual moral choice, and the truly democratic citizen does not exercise individual moral judgment, but blindly accepts election results. That mentality is unlikely to produce innovation in the core values: most will be transmitted unchanged from one generation to the next. Paradoxically, the source of values in a democracy is often not the voters, but the voters' ancestors.
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