Disagreement

WHY DEMOCRACY? TWELVE ADVANTAGES IN SUMMARY

~ steinringen ~ Leave a comment

In twelve recent posts, I have listed the Twelve Advantages of Democracy. Those advantages, taken together, are my answer to the Why Democracy? question. They are powerful advantages, the reasons people take to the streets and risk their lives for the blessing of living under democratic order, as currently in Iran.

There is a divide between regimes that are (more or less) democratic and those that are (more or less) autocratic. The difference is not in perfection or beauty. Democracy is often messy and always unfinished. Autocratic regimes can be impressive in strength and performance. But there is a difference for the people who live under the respective regimes.

If your country is democratic, you are

  • less at risk of tyranny
  • more likely to possess rights
  • more likely to enjoy autonomy
  • more likely to be protected by rule of law
  • more likely to experience political equality
  • more likely to handle citizenship duties
  • more likely to benefit from effective governance
  • more likely to live in an environment of prosperity
  • less at risk of suffering poverty
  • more likely to live in peace
  • more likely to experience managed disagreement
  • more likely to enjoy a culture of tolerance.

These are real, practical and tangible advantages of real democracy as we know it. There is nothing abstract or theoretical about it; this is the way things play out for real men, women, children and families in today’s world. If you live under an autocratic regime, the risks and likelihoods all fall differently. You are then more at risk of tyranny, and so on. If you have a choice, your best bet by far is democracy.

Still, the advantages are only probabilities, not certainties. Democracy does not guarantee any of it. The theoretician Alexis de Tocqueville, for example, observing American democracy in the 1830s, warned of possible “soft despotism,” a kind of tyranny under a surface of democratic forms. The Greek philosopher Aristotle warned, as have many others, of the danger of mob rule. In his city of Athens, the world’s first democracy only lasted about two hundred years.

Today’s democracies are not always impressive. In Britain, the home of the Westminster Model, rather than effective governance we are in a long run of misrule. In the United States, the home of the American Constitution, the ability to managed disagreement and tolerance is going lost.

None of that negates the advantages of democracy. It only suggests that we are not alert enough to what democracy does for us to stand guard over the democracies we have. If we allow them to wither, as in Athens, we will soon enough know what we have lost.

For more detailed analysis, see How Democracies Live.

WHY DEMOCRACY? ELEVENTH ADVANTAGE

~ steinringen ~ Leave a comment

The eleventh advantage of democracy: management of disagreement. Democracy is, among other things, a way of living with disagreement without repression and of forging cooperation out of conflict.

In autocratic systems, the social good is defined from above and a duty of obedience is imposed downwards. Autocratic governance depends on a pretence of agreement and therefore the repression of disagreement.

Democratic governance is grounded in an acceptance of disagreement and an ideal of cooperation without repression. To get on in society, we need agreed upon (more or less) goals and procedures on many matters, some of which are controversial. There is no such thing as a public policy that is the preferred policy of everyone, and there is no such thing as a public policy that does not come with costs to someone. In a democracy, ideally, everyone is entitled to state their views and fight for their interests. At some point, however, a shared position needs to be found somewhere in the landscape of disagreement. That can be done democratically, for example by voting in a national assembly, or in a general election or a referendum. Some citizens will unavoidably be disappointed in what becomes the shared position, since it will not be their preferred position. The ingenuity of democracy is that since everyone has had a say in the process leading up to joint decisions, or the opportunity thereto, there is a good chance that everyone should be able to, even if grudgingly, accept the outcome, even when it is not their preferred outcome.

Some thinkers have taken the impossibility of agreement to be an argument against democracy – how can public policies reflect the will of citizens if citizens cannot agree? But that is logic turned upside down. It is because of the impossibility of agreement that we need democratic ways to find acceptable policies. If we could just add what each of us prefer into a single best choice, we could leave public policy to computer programmers. But, as the political theorist Albert Weale has shown, there is no such thing as “the will of the people.” We will different things and the quest for the true will is futile. The political tug-of-war is not to find out what the people want, but to find a reasonable balance of opinion in the many things people want. In democracies we do not agree, we muddle through with the help of acceptable compromises.

For more detailed analysis, see How Democracies Live.

On democracy and obedience, see Nation of Devils.