Can Our Democracy Survive?

And that the desires of the majority of the people are often for injustice and inhumanity against the minority, is demonstrated by every page of history.

-- John Adams:  On Government

But a man with a gun is told only that which people assume will not provoke him to pull the trigger.  Since all authority and government are based on force, the master class, with its burden of omniscience, faces the servile class, with its burden of nescience, precisely as a highwayman faces his victim. 

                                                -- Robert Shea & Robert Anton Wilson:  The Golden Apple

In politics, stupidity is not a handicap.

-- Napoleon Bonaparte

(Note that in this essay I use the word "democracy" as it is currently used in common parlance, basically to mean any system with free and fair elections of representatives. Technically, the U.S. is a republic, and no true democracies exist in the world today.)

There is no perfect political system, and democracy does have its flaws, some of which were well-understood by the U.S. founding fathers.  They tried to compensate for those flaws to the degree that they could.  (Note that I’m being lazy here - we really should try not to refer to “founding fathers” as a group, as the term is imprecise regarding whom it includes, and as the early leaders of this country were men of varying beliefs and opinions.)  Some of democracy’s weaknesses are becoming very evident in the world today:

• Pure democracy inevitably leads to “tyranny of the majority.”

• Short term leadership, while it avoids the corruption that can fester when terms in office are long, encourages short-term thinking and tactical, rather than strategic, planning.

• The qualities of a good leader and the qualities required to win a modern democratic election, even when the election is free and fair, are not the same.

• Those who are not allowed to vote, or whose candidates lose, may be unrepresented.

• Those who do not have time or a reasonable opportunity to vote may be unrepresented.

• Over time, any democratic system can be subverted and controlled by the monied class, effectively making it democratic in appearance only.

The concept of “tyranny of the majority” is simple but not always obvious.  The power of democracy is that it gives a proportionately more powerful voice to the majority of the voting public.  While this is an effective check against the power of government and guards us against tyranny by individuals, it does little to protect minorities, even if those minorities have the right to vote.  In a pure democracy, which does not exist today and never has (Athens probably came closest), we would simply vote on every action of government as the need arose.  But even in that hypothetical case, we would still need to worry about tyranny of the majority, especially if the majorities were clearly defined and organized into voting blocks.  Any sufficiently organized majority could vote to exploit, disenfranchise, and dehumanize any opposing minority on the pretext of a clearly recognizable difference, e.g., race, religion, color, age, gender, health, wealth, sexual orientation, political affiliation etc.  That is why, in a democratic country, well organized majorities can be very dangerous.

This is a much more significant issue today than it was when our country was born.  Tremendous advances in communication have made it far easier for majorities to organize, recruit, strategize, plan and draw on geographically disparate resources to pursue their objectives.  Fear is a common tool in building such majority organizations, as without fear there would be no motivation to work against the interests of any minority.  As I write this, America is struggling with a resurgence of openly expressed racism, sexism, Islamophobia and anti-LGBT sentiment as straight white males have realized that they could lose their privileged position in society unless they do something to hold everyone else down.  The biases that we’ve struggled with since our country’s inception still cause serious problems, and our failure to deal with them has kept us from addressing less obvious problems that will inevitably have to be dealt with down the road.

In fact, the largest and most disenfranchised minority today is not the one you might first think of.  Clearly discrimination of every type is still commonplace, but the largest minority today, and one whose prospects of equity are dim indeed, is the unintelligent.  Bias against those of lesser intelligence is seldom even noticed in our society.  If we hear a person comment on someone else’s misfortune by saying “it’s his fault for being black” or “it’s her fault for being gay,” we immediately think the speaker must be a bigot and would hopefully call them out for such awful behavior.  They have made a statement that certain people are inferior to the majority and so should be treated differently, and that’s clearly unfair since race and sexual preference are things that people are born with.  Those of us interested in equitable treatment of human beings reject such opinions.  If differences in people are genetic, and especially if they are as superficial as skin color, then they are not something we should be blaming anyone for, and our society has made a few commitments to being better than that.

Yet, if we hear someone say “it’s his fault for being stupid,” we are much more accepting of that point of view.  How many of us have said “don’t be stupid” to someone that made a mistake, or perhaps something more humorous like “there’s no cure for stupid?”  This is so ingrained that even the objects of such derision often just internalize the abuse.  They decide that yes, they must just be defective and inferior, and that is why they can’t do well in school, can’t find employment and frequently serve as the butt of jokes.  This kind of learned inferiority was a consequence of slavery as well.

The financial crisis of 2008 is a perfect example of the way this bias affects our society.  That crisis, to oversimplify just a bit, was brought about by a large number of home loans that were made to people who could not afford them, followed by bundling them into investment securities called “certified debt obligations.”  Those securities were then sold to entities other than the ones that initially set up the mortgage, frequently with very little information about the mortgages they contained.  CDOs were rated as safe by the world’s leading rating agencies and then insured against failure with something called “credit default swaps.” These new securities would pay off when CDOs failed.  Unfortunately, only a few very savvy people could see that mortgage-backed securities might start failing in considerable numbers.  When the interest rates on adjustable-rate mortgages started ratcheting up and home owners began defaulting en masse, the CDOs that were composed of those mortgages plummeted in value (becoming what we later referred to as “toxic assets”).  The insurance on them suddenly needed to be paid by the institutions that had sold credit default swaps, even though they had been purchased on the assumption that the CDOs they backed up were very safe investments.  Many of those large financial institutions just didn’t see the crash coming.  Then, as financial firms started dropping like flies, the stock market plummeted, huge numbers of jobs simply vanished, and we started looking for someone to blame.

Certainly, there were many good candidates for receiving that blame, including our lawmakers that allowed such poor loans to exist, be securitized and be sold with little or no regulation.  More good candidates were the mortgage companies that determined people to be “qualified” for loans that they clearly were not qualified for, the incompetent ratings agencies that failed to identify the risk, the financial institutions that made bad investments, financial leaders like Alan Greenspan that believed the big banks could be trusted to “self-regulate,” and the government as a whole for failing to protect the public welfare. To be sure, there were voices nominating each of these candidates for blame.

But there was also, and still is, a loud chorus of voices (undoubtedly to the delight of the real culprits) saying that the blame belonged to the “stupid” and “irresponsible” people that signed those home loans, thereby attempting to live beyond their means.  “It’s their fault for being stupid,” we heard as stories of financial ruin became common.  Even though the banks that made the loans had entire departments full of experts that determined if a loan was risky or not, the unsophisticated public was still blamed by many, even though we know that many ordinary folks are not equipped to understand complex financial securities or predict markets.  They see their neighbor doing something and figure that should be fine for them to do as well.  Of course, the accusers knew it was a useless point to make.  It may have served the purpose of the financial industry and conservative politicians by diverting attention from their own roles, but it resulted in virtually no corrective action.  You cannot legislate against naiveté or even flat-out stupidity.  Even a Nazi-style “final solution” against the unintelligent, one that no one’s conscience would accept, would result only in a change to the members of the group called “stupid,” since “stupid” is a relative term.  If your intelligence is the lowest in the room, then you’re the stupid one, regardless of how smart you really are.  One lesson in this is that if the health of our financial institutions is going to depend on general consumers not behaving stupidly, then our economic future is dim indeed.  No, there will always be people that are relatively smart and relatively dumb, and the way we run our society must take that into account to avoid another crisis like what happened in 2008.

We are always going to have people living with us that cannot understand a mortgage contract and certainly some that cannot decide if they should sign it or not.  Average IQ is around 100, but there are plenty of people that are 85 or less and plenty that are 120 or more.  The gap in capability between an IQ of 120 and one of 85 is enormous.  It is genetic, and those that are at the lower end of the scale are disadvantaged from birth.  They have much poorer prospects for having a wealthy or even a comfortable lifestyle than their more gifted fellows.  That is not their fault.  There is less that they can do, and in a functional capitalist society, less economic value is usually placed on those that can do less.  But that does not mean that they should receive less respect or fewer rights simply due to the accident of their birth.  These are uncomfortable thoughts, but if humankind is to continue to find its way forward democratically then we must think them.

And it gets worse.  There is one more group with an even smaller voice in the decisions that are shaping their lives today.  These are, of course, our future generations.  If you do not yet exist or have been alive for fewer than 18 years, you have zero representation in our government and no vote whatsoever.  That is why we keep spending your money and depleting the resources of the world that you will one day have to live in.  It is certainly the reason that climate change, though a clear an imminent threat, receives little real attention, and what little attention it does receive comes mainly from the young.  The flaw of short-term thinking is in play here as well.  If the country’s leadership is only in power for a short time, they tend to be held accountable, if they are accountable at all, only for the short-term effects of their decision making.  Thus, they are motivated to seek solutions that deliver quick results even if they know those results will be temporary or will have negative consequences in the long-term.  Any long-term effects will be credited to or blamed on some future leader.  This is like the person that knows he will die in a year and so goes out and charges his credit cards to the maximum, knowing full well that he will never have to pay the bill.  Even if the earth is going to burn, most of us won’t be around to see it.

Recent U.S. presidents have realized that running up the country’s debt, even in peace time, is a recipe for a successful presidency, as long as the consequences can be put off until someone else is president (though the clear practice of building peace-time deficits began with Ronald Reagan, it is not at all clear that it was his intentional strategy to do so, as it surely must have been for his successors).  Similarly, leading the country into war makes reelection more likely due to the fear that war generates within the electorate.  This is true even though war is clearly one of the world’s great evils, as we discussed in TWTR.  Pollution, climate change, depletion of our forests, oceans, aquifers and more will continue unabated as long as there is no unavoidable public emergency that politicians must deal with.  Our governments are blatantly irresponsible all the time, and we let it pass with barely a complaint.  We even cheer them on if they are on the political team we have chosen.  Democracy, when combined with modern marketing techniques for public manipulation, ensures this.

When we think about foreign policy, on which the U.S. constitution has very little to say, we find yet another group excluded by our democratic system.  Foreigners do not get a vote, and without guidelines in the constitution, we are free to make the most self-serving decisions, driven by fear, that do not benefit the world outside our borders or even humanity as a whole.  This flaw leads to wars and exploitation of other cultures.  Of course, pinning this all on democracy is somewhat unfair – all of the world’s governments have this flaw.  This is an outgrowth of our reluctance to unify our world as a single, peaceful nation.  As long as fear is what drives us, our borders will remain, and this problem will continue to propagate misery across our planet.

The third flaw in democracy from our list above is arguably the most serious of them all because it is the most formidable barrier to changing the political system.  The two sets of qualities in the table below are not mutually exclusive, but it is extremely unlikely that a single person will have many that aren’t from the same column. 

To Govern Well	To Win Elections
Honesty Integrity Judgment Intelligence (high) Knowledge Ability to see the big picture Openness Long-term thinking Empathy Love Governance over popularity Charisma	Speaking/acting ability Marketing skills Attractive appearance Intelligence (average+) Offensive to few in the majority Connections Flexible values Short-term thinking Wealth Appeal to the wealthy Popularity over governance Charisma

The dramatic improvements in communication over the last few centuries have made the disparities between good leaders and successful campaigners ever wider.  U.S. citizens had to pick up a newspaper and read about Thomas Jefferson when deciding whether to vote for him or not.  He had to be an intelligent and eloquent writer, and he had to inspire his constituents without assistance from teleprompters and satellite feeds.  If his teeth were not quite straight, that would hardly be a handicap.  Today is quite different, and superficial qualities like appearance can win or lose elections.

As communication technology improves, successful politicians will increasingly display more qualities from the right side of the table and fewer of the qualities from the left side.  Given a choice between selecting, say, a random university professor to be President of the United States and a random actor, most people would surely choose the professor.  Examining the table above, however, leads us to predict that few of our best thinkers will ever be elected to major positions in the government, while a profession like acting is perfect preparation for public office.  And if we look at who is being elected, we do in fact see more entertainers finding success in politics every day.  As elections become bigger and bigger media events, we will tend to elect leaders that are less and less well prepared to govern.  That is an obvious problem.

Another problem didn’t become clear to me until I spent a few months working for the U.S. Census in 2020.  One day I knocked on a door at a large apartment complex.  After some time, it was answered by a middle-aged man.  When he saw me, he gave me a look that asked “what now?”  I insisted that my questions would only take a few minutes, and that got him to talk to me.  Turned out he had two jobs, his wife also worked and they were just barely able to put food on the table for the whole family.  I had managed to catch him in one of the rare moments when he was at home with his family.  After he gave me the information I needed, I suddenly realized “there’s no way that guy is going to vote.”  Why?  Because he just didn’t have the time.  This country has a growing population of working poor that only have time to eat, sleep and work, and sometimes not even enough for those.  How can we shame them for not voting?  This is clearly no accident.  Corporations have discovered that they can make their labor cheaper by going to part-time work, thus avoiding the obligation to provide benefits like health insurance and pensions.  Just replace each full-time worker with two part-time workers and your cost for each hour of work drops dramatically.  Not only can you eliminate benefits, you can pay them less per hour, and that’s why people need so many jobs nowadays.  As we demand more from our workers, they will be increasingly disenfranchised, thus eliminating the possibility that they will receive equal representation with wealthier classes that have time to go to the polls.  Those that wish to undermine democracy are quite satisfied with this state of affairs.

Even if we ignore these problems with democracy, the last item on our bullet list of flaws can cause the very concept of democracy to become irrelevant.  Democracy is not truly democracy if:

• The names on the ballots are controlled by a privileged few.

• Citizens do not have enough complete or accurate information to make an informed choice when they vote.

• Money spent on advertising is significantly different from one campaign to the next.

• Uneducated or uninformed voters are not capable of understanding the information that they do have, or even of recognizing when they need to see more to make an informed decision.

• People think their votes won’t count.

• People are afraid of voting, either because they will be in some kind of danger at the polls or because they fear retribution.

• People are too busy just surviving to go vote.

So, is the United States a democracy?  It certainly wasn’t during slavery.  It’s somewhat better now, but each of the problems listed above still exist in varying degrees. We have become a two-party system that only pretends to be democratic, something of a “pseudo-democracy” if I can invent a term.  The Democratic and Republican parties have, by virtue of their past successes, managed to convince the public that no candidate other than a Democrat or Republican can be elected president.  This has allowed them to wrest control of the presidential debates away from the League of Women Voters, something that happened many years ago with very little notice.  Now those debates have shrunk down to just two candidates, and independents are usually excluded.  It is very unlikely that any 3^rd party candidate could win without access to presidential debates, and that is as designed.  Those invested in and benefiting from the status quo would love to keep it that way.

I remember asking a friend of mine who they were going to vote for in a presidential election.  They stated that the best candidate was one of the independents, but they were voting for the Democrat because the independent had no chance, and they didn’t want to “waste” their vote.  Clearly, if we have reached the point where voters do not feel they can vote for the person they truly want to win, then our electoral system is badly broken, and democracy itself is being subverted.  We could implement ranked-choice voting with “instant runoffs,” which would solve this problem by ensuring that no vote is ever wasted (i.e., if your candidate finishes last and no one has fifty percent of the vote, then your vote is recounted for your second choice), but the parties in power have no reason to support such an idea.  Their greatest fear is losing the power that they have, and so they are constrained by the inertia of the status quo, and they are not the only ones.

In a country where people have the right to free speech, those who seek power will not hesitate to lie unless there is a political price to pay.  Only a strong, free media can exact such a price.  This is why freedom of the press is guaranteed in the first amendment – it is essential for true democracy.  But if the fourth estate is “free,” they are just as free to pursue lies as they are to pursue the truth.  So, the important question becomes, “what motivates the media?”  In a capitalist system where the media consists of private, profit-driven corporations, money motivates the media.  Democracy is safe only as long as truth sells, but the truth has no marketing department and no champion that benefits from the truth winning out.  Today, the public has come to value truth less than sensationalism, less than controversy and less than well-packaged lies that go unchallenged.  Each lie has been created and popularized by someone invested in it, someone who benefits from its acceptance.  The truth rarely has such supporters.  Sure, some of us defend it out of pure idealism, but we aren’t invested, and that’s a big difference.  That means that democracy is effectively subverted.

If each “news” outlet were rated by an impartial observer, one with no profit motive (someone like the Consumers Union, for example), say on a scale from 1 to 10, and if each one were required to prominently display that rating so that anyone receiving information from them would see it, the news we consume would be very different.  Such a rating would reflect both accuracy and completeness.  Getting the story out first would have no impact on the number.  Giving time to false, crackpot ideas that stir controversy would reduce the number.  Failing to report important stories would reduce the number. Only truth would matter.  Then at least the public would have some indication of the quality of their news, and they could pursue the highest quality sources while abandoning the lowest quality ones, if they so choose.  With our present system, most people do not even know how to begin making that choice, which means that the information they are provided by the media, upon which their decision-making must be based, has more deception built into it every day.  Lies sell better than the truth, because lies can be crafted for the purpose of selling.  The truth cannot be crafted at all, and if the truth is inconvenient, then consuming it becomes a choice like eating your least favorite vegetable when ice cream is an available alternative.

So, what do we do about these flaws that exist in all modern democracies?  If fear remains a significant force in the life of the average person (for without fear the need for much governance simply evaporates), there is only one thing we can do. That is to place better safeguards into our constitution.  Minorities are not effectively protected unless it is in the constitution.  Leaders will continue to be limited to short-term thinking unless the constitution requires them to do otherwise.  Money will have an outsized influence on our votes.  Elections and voting will result in skewed representation unless the constitution requires something better.  Democracies will move towards plutocracy unless the constitution provides safeguards against it.  The framers put some safeguards into the US Constitution, but they could not hope to foresee all the changes that would make democracy’s flaws more dangerous as time went on.  New amendments are required.  The challenge, of course, is to rally the political will to institute them.  The existing establishment at the time of this writing will certainly not be the ones to do it.  No, if anyone is going to save democracy, then the movement must come from the people, and it will need to be led by the young.  The threat of authoritarianism is strong and getting stronger.  We may have one more chance to institute a viable democracy, but the window of opportunity for that is already closing.