Is Democracy Anything Special, Really?
This question has been simmering away in my mind almost as long as I’ve been familiar with the concept of government. When I found out that Socrates, one of the most revered thinkers in the Western world, was openly critical of democracy — a position that eventually got him executed by his democratic government — I began to wonder more urgently. I had been taught that democracy — and in particular, the United States’ democracy built on a philosophy of fundamental human liberty — was the best way to run a government that truly reflects the interests of the people. I was taught that democracy, like science, is self-correcting: if it’s not effectively protecting the people, the people will effect changes until it does. I was taught, if you don’t like what the government is doing, there are several ways to change it yourself; therefore, people kind of have to like it, because if they didn’t like it, they’d change it, and then there wouldn’t be any problems.
I have a real problem with circular reasoning like that. It’s too close to the paternalistic “because I said so, that’s why” that gets pulled out whenever an authority’s legitimacy is questioned. If democracy really is so self-correcting, isn’t it possible that it could correct itself all the way to a new form of government? And if so, does defining “a good government” as “a democratic government” now ring somewhat disingenuous? And if it’s possible for a democracy to be transformed by its own processes, how can we blindly trust that all new forms it might birth are improvements?
If we trust the history written by the Romans, Rome was a republic until a few ambitious, powerful men leveraged their influence to turn it into a dictatorship, back when centralized authoritarian rule was perceived more the as rule than the exception. By modern standards, even before that seizure of power, Rome was by no means democratic; participation in government was limited to a tiny fraction of the people who lived under that government’s rule, and those citizens got their status from their birth. The Athenian government that American middle-schoolers are taught to revere as the original “democracy” was just as authoritarian as any monarchy; they just defined their royalty more broadly.
By its own standards, the US is not democratic. All citizens supposedly have equal protection under the law and equal right to participate in government. Yet only those who inherited their citizenship — an aristocratic class defined by birth — can hold the highest office. What’s more, US citizens in Puerto Rico have no voting representation in federal government. How likely is it that Puerto Rico’s continued neglect at the hands of its own country is in part due to this lack of representation?
The US claims that equal rights and liberties for all are promised by the Constitution, and that’s why the Constitution is to be upheld as the absolute arbiter of political good. Yet if you analyze the Constitution, you will find it riddled with inequalities, spelled out as plainly as if they were self-evident truth. And because it’s in the Constitution, the US deems it right. And because it’s deemed right, it’s carried out as law. And of course the Constitution enforces inequality; it was written by elites who carved the definitions of “citizen” so that it included only people like them, and then righteously proclaimed all citizens equal. No system claiming to be equal has ever been created with the equal consent of all involved parties. How, then, could they ever be equal?
We hold slavery as one of those moral absolutes. I was taught in my grade-school history that the Civil War was an end to that evil, and to thank Lincoln, and the good ol’ American Way, for saving the world yet again. But the US never abolished slavery. It partially outlawed slavery, while providing a loophole to allow certain entities to continue practicing it. The thing about an absolute is it has no exceptions; the government that created the thirteenth amendment saw fit to write in an exception to the ban on slavery. And thus Americans believe that there is no slavery, therefore prisons aren’t plantations, and therefore the penal system is not racist, because we abolished slavery — except that we didn’t.
Not everything that claims to be free and equal is free or equal. Democracy repeatedly, consistently fails by its own standards of success. Those who wish to change the system, it’s wise not to count on the system’s cooperation. If you trust democracy because you love equality and liberty, think again.
