[lbo-talk] 'Democrazy'

[Joseph Wanzala]

Democracy: 'crazy-demo', 'demostration of craze', 'crazy demonstration' - 
Fela Anikulapo Kuti.

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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