Democracy we Presume?

[Agrippa]

A very interesting article with many good points in my opinion.

Democracy we Presume?
Michael Walker asks himself what democracy really is in theory and in practice
Two fundamental questions belong to every consideration of
democracy: -do we have democracy and do we want it? In the course of
this essay, which is an attempt to help towards an understanding of
different approaches to the subject, the two questions should be
kept in mind. If we are unaware of them, discussion about democracy
and everything associated with it is likely to become a polemical
tool in a debate in which protagonists speak past one another,
because they are arguing on different premises.
In 1985 Alain de Benoist published a work entitled Democratie le
Probleme, (Le Labyrinth Paris). He starts by underscoring some facts
about the meaning of the word and the original form of democracy in
Greece. Democracy means the rule of the demos and demos notes de
Benoist, comes originally from the Dorian dialect of Ancient Greece
and meant a people or a commons, that is, a people on and belonging
to, a territory. Democracy for the Ancient Greeks was not linked to
the individual but to the polis, to the city state, a rule by
citizens. Slaves, he notes, were not included because they were, as
slaves, non-citizens, which meant not a part of the polis at all.
The citizen (polites) was entitled to participate in the affairs of
state, in contrast to the non-citizen (idiotes). The word freedom,
etymologically related to the word friend just as liberty is related
to liberi (Latin children) indicates not freedom from tyranny but a
state of belonging to the ethnos. Democracy is dependent, according
to de Benoist, on what Otto von Gierke called the Daseinseinheit
eines Volkes, the entity of a people. In other words, in its origins
democracy does not refer to individual sovereignty but to popular
sovereignty.

For Aristotle, democracy was one of the three principle forms of
government, the other two being aristocracy and tyranny, which we
can understand in modern terms as respectively: rule by a group
whose legtimacy is based on an accepted meretriciousness and rule by
individuals whose legitimacy is primarily founded on force. The
characteristic of democracy was and supposedly still is that by
means of the equality of citizens, all members of the community of
the polis participate in ruling the state. Because democracy, in
contrast to aristocracy or tyranny, implicates all citizens as
decision makers, the supreme source of authority under democracy is
the same law equally applied to all citizens. What is "right" is
decided by the law. Law has precedence over whim, will and custom.
The sovereignty which democracy grants to law (higher than custom or
the whim of individuals or the rights of groups) creates a moral
problem. If I think that a law is morally wrong, am I ethically
obliged to follow it? If I am a full bloodied democrat, then I am
morally so obliged, the law being the source of all legitimacy and
morality. This was why Socrates chose not to escape drinking
hemlock. "The law, right or wrong", says the democrat. Rousseau in
Le Contrat Social demands supreme respect for the law. People may
make bad laws, even cruel ones, but in a pure democracy all laws if
passed with due procedure, are legitimate. If the people is the
ultimate source of legitimacy, then we must logically accept a
decision of the people to make a law which approves abortion, or for
that matter, public torture. I am not consistent as a democrat, if I
appeal to a higher morality when civic duty bids me accept such
laws. Should I nevertheless rebel by appealing to what I claim is
a "higher authority", then I am opposing democracy in the name of
extra-democratic values, religious or ethical or of another
political order as the case may be. My ethical hierarchy is at that
moment ipso-facto, not democratic.
Although the people are seen as the ultimate source of legitimacy in
democracy and make the laws, they clearly cannot all foregather in
one place to propose legislation. A democracy in any complex society
necessitates a system of elective representation. The election of
representatives of the people is termed the "the democratic
process". This process is subject to so many divergent influences
and variegations and abuses that the possibility that a large
section of society may dispute the democratic credentials of their
society is ever present.
Democracy is popularly associated with the principle of majority
rule. While it is the case that democracy per definition is the
expression of the sovereign will of the people, there is nothing per
definition to say that the method by which that will is deemed to be
defined must consist of majority rule, or as some would dismissively
term it, "head counting". Numerical equality in the matter of
decision making, as has been many times pointed out, leads to a
levelling of standards to a mediocre level, the level fixed by the
average. The majority principle is however not a prerequisite of
democracy. The underlying principle of democratic procedure is not
that the majority votes on every decision but that the genuine
choice of rulers by the ruled is the basis of political legitimacy,
in other words, that those who rule either are the people or are
truly representative of the people. The key to the health of a
democracy lies not in this or that right but in the level of
participation of the people in the decisions which decide the course
of their own destiny. Majority rule is a means among possible
others, to arrive at an expression of what Rousseau called the
general will. For Rousseau the general will was the source of
legitimate democratic decisions, that is: not the sum of individual
wills, and not a dominating will or wills imposing itself but the
expression of the will of the people as a political body.
The drawbacks of majority rule, for example that it swamps quality
with quantity, are drawbacks which are often ascribed to democracy
as such. They constitute however the drawbacks of any system which
operates on the principle that the "majority knows best" and which
does not adequately educate its citizens or where (which amounts to
the same thing) it is not possible to educate the citizens.
Rule by a majority may easily constitute a tyranny of its own. If a
majority constitutes the exclusive source of political legitimacy,
then it can be legitimate and legal to expropriate or exterminate
minorities if the majority so wishes. If Tom Dick and Harry are a
democracy which has to decide how four eyes are distributed among
them, it is democratically fair in a system of absolute majority
rule, if Tom and Dick decide to have two eyes each and Harry go
blind. As modern democracies tend indeed in the direction of, at
least theoretically, claiming that majorities are the source of all
political legitimacy, they are compelled to insist on human rights
and civil liberties beyond or outside democratic power, in order to
protect minorities. In the example given of Tom, Dick and Harry,
there may be for example, an "inalienable right" to the power of
sight. Thus it is that liberalism is often identified with
democracy, not because liberalism and democracy are necessarily
linked, but because individual rights are needed to protect the
individual from a tyrannical sovereign "democratic" will of majority
rule.
Alain de Benoist writing on democracy draws a sharp distinction
between democracy and liberalism. He argues that they are not
complementary but fundamentally opposed to one another. In
Democratie le Problème, we read that while democracy is based on the
sovereignty of the people, liberalism is based on the sovereignty of
the individual. If the sovereignty of the individual arguably leads
to the destruction of the collective, then it follows that the
sovereignty of the individual brings with it the destruction of
true "republican" democracy (a democracy as Rousseau understood it,
one which seeks to maintain the health of the body of the citizens
defined as members of a given political organism).
Early theoreticians of individual rights were not concerned with
more than the security and prosperity of the individual. Since the
collapse of Marxist doctrine as a serious challenge, the idea that
democracy is an umbrella of enshrined human rights has become an
indispensable part of so-called "Western values". For early
theoreticians of the individual rights that the Western world now
takes for granted, such as John Locke, the individual precedes the
community; the state serves the individual. Democracy is interpreted
as the means of helping the individual and protecting his property
(ownership in liberal systems defines the man). In this perspective,
democracy is not established to serve a people because a people is
in any case a mere collection of individuals. Politics is then
little more than the art of settling their differences, reconciling
interests and mediating in disputes. For de Benoist, the sovereignty
of the individual necessitates the abdication of the rights of the
collective. The individual being the source of political
justification of any kind, the collective inevitably gives ground
until it is nothing more than an adjudicator in disputes between
individuals. On the other hand, and overlooked by de Benoist,
liberal rights emerge at least in part to protect the individual
against the absolutism of a fully democratic state laying claim to
the law as supreme authority.
Liberalism is associated with freedom and freedom is associated with
democracy, which are therefore linked in popular perceptions to the
extent that the two terms are presented as more or less
interchangeable and identical by Western
media: "freedomandemocracy", but freedom, as Schopenhauer pointed
out (Die Freiheit des Willens) is a negative concept (unlike
democracy, even if democracy has realised itself historically as a
negative phenomenon). Freedom is a negative concept because if we
define freedom, we find that we are defining the removal or the
absence of hindrances to action or thought.
Most people, including its passionate supporters, will agree that
democracy is not a system which should be applied in all
circumstances. As Plato's Socrates pointed out in The Republic, we
do not want the first choice of the people to be our doctor, we want
the best doctor to be our doctor. We should be unhappy if a plane in
which we were flying were piloted by the first choice of a group of
schoolgirls, or if our hospital surgeons were elected by the votes
of local rate payers. Why would we be uneasy? Because we might
reasonably doubt the qualification in both cases of the schoolgirls
or ratepayers to decide on the issue in question with adequate
knowledge and experience. Those who choose or vote must be qualified
to do so, they must be equipped with sufficient knowledge to make a
choice in awareness of what it is they are doing. In addition to
that, their motives should be disinterested: otherwise they will
vote out of self interest and not for the general good and their
chosen representatives will be no more than lucky individuals who
have reached positions of power and influence through the support of
their friends-they will not be humble representatives of any popular
will. Instead, they will be ciphers of a lobby.
It logically follows that the more general, the more national, the
more a matter of principle, the decision to be made, the stronger
the claim, in democratic terms, of the entire people to make their
voice heard directly. In democratic states today the reverse is the
case. Crucial decisions affecting the very survival of a race, a
nation, a people, or indeed a democratic system, are taken out of
the people's hands with the time-honoured anti-democratic argument,
that the issue is "too complex" for the man in the street to cast
his vote upon. It is a matter for "the experts"; "experts" are
commonly invoked in democracies. The people need "experts" to make
the "right decision" on their behalf. Experts replace the rulers of
non democracies in taking decisions on behalf of the people without
consulting the people. An example of such disingenuous argument was
the refusal by the Federal Government of Germany to allow the voters
to decide in a referendum whether to abandon the post-war Federal
constitution in the interests of European integration (Treaty of
Maastricht). The reason which politicians gave for their refusal was
that a referendum was contrary to the spirit of the very post-war
constitution whose fate was being decided!
Modern Western democracy, with its official acceptance of, but
growing hostility towards, the right to demonstrate, referenda,
grass roots activism and populism, increasingly discourages
participation or interest in the important decisions of state.
Furthermore, the machinations leading to the election of
representatives in modern representative democracy who are expected
to make such decisions "in the name of the people" works against
such civic virtue. Representative democracy favours instead
showmanship, eye-catching but superficial presentation and the "hard
sell". This is particularly the case to the extent that power is
weighed in favour of central party leadership against local party
organizations. In Britain the defeat of the far left's attempt to
control local party sections of the Labour Party, lead to a small
group of modernizers seizing power, whose aims include the stifling
of grass roots party democracy and the growth of a more
paternalistic style of government in which widespread political
activism is neither required nor expected from the population.
Greek democracy, which differed notably from Western democracy in
insisting on civic virtue and responsibility as the measure of
democratic health, and in which the citizens were expected above all
to decide on the crucial issues of state, consisted of four
principle elements: isonomy-equality before the law, isotimy-
equality of opportunity, isegory-freedom of expression and ekklesia-
the right of assembly.
In these constituent parts there is something of a syllogism, namely
to the extent that I believe that person x is my equal, I must, if
at least I wish to be fair, agree that x enjoys the same rights as I
before the law and so on. If I do not believe that x is equal to me,
then I do not believe that x should enjoy the same rights before the
law. Clearly, there have to be limits, based on intelligence and
knowledge, to the extent to which individuals are allowed to
participate in decision making. To take an extreme example, not the
most fervent and uncompromising democrat believes that non-human
animals should have the right to vote. In respect of the ability to
participate in decision making, everyone agrees that the mental
powers of a dog are considerably inferior to those of a human. There
is a point to consider here. Many people would nevertheless argue
that a dog should be granted certain rights-the right not be subject
to a gratuitous and prolonged taking of its life, for example. The
exclusion of dogs from the democratic decision making process of the
state does not exclude the possibility of permitting a dog such
rights, rights which might not be accorded to a lesser animal, such
as a flea.
The existence of rights is therefore not dependent upon membership
of a democracy. The granting or withholding of rights may apply to
human beings as well without those human beings necessarily enjoying
democratic rights. Democracies themselves acknowledge this insofar
as they do not to this day permit children, prisoners or lunatics to
vote. Only those have the right to participate in the decision
making process, who belong unequivocally and entirely, as members,
to the polis. The rights of the citizen and the rights of the human
being are not the same in a democracy. It is a tyranny which claims
that the individual and the citizen are the same. Democracy qua
democracy presupposes no right whatsoever, other than the right of a
citizen to be free and free from fear of doing the "wrong" thing, to
participate in the expression of the will of the community to which
he belongs to create or reject new laws, obligations and decisions.
All those who believe in fairness believe in democratic equality for
those who are equal.
But as Plato realised, equality provokes the crucial question: equal
in what? For a democracy, the answer is equal in the power to
actively participate in decisions. As members of the same polis or
res publica or for that matter, school, housing estate, association,
club or business, a wholly democratic constitution would demand that
all members would have an equal right to give their voice to the
general will in their expression of the direction and destiny of the
community to which they are bound.
Equality is certainly a vague term which always requires
specification. If participation in the decision making process of
the polis is the defining right of a democracy, political equality
in a democracy is the right of those and those alone who share an
equal ability to participate in the decision making process, to make
decisions. Given the strong tendency to for an elite to exclude
legitimate persons from decision making on grounds of incompetence,
it is in the interests of effective democracy to aim at a definition
of the polis and who shall be members of it and to educate and
improve those who already are, ensuring that nobody is unfairly
excluded. But modern democracies with increasing frequency are
weakening and blurring the definition of who is to be called a
member of the polis (everyone is my brother or sister now) while at
the same time depriving citizens of their right to make political
(as opposed to personal) choices.

http://thescorp.multics.org/24democracy.html

I add a link to a very good site which goes in a similar direction - but more in detail and on current issues:
http://www.alor.org/OnTargetBritain.htm

Excellent article, Agrippa. Makes a good food for thought and material for further discussion.