Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time. (Winston Churchill from a House of Commons speech on Nov. 11, 1947)
George Rebane
On its centenary we revisit the world shaking impact of WW1. The first of modern international wars did change the map of Europe and the Mideast. Empires – Austro-Hungarian, Russian, German, Ottoman – fell and new nation-states arose from their debris cast asunder. Countries’ borders were subsequently drawn upon the whims of powerful players who disregarded the details and longer term consequences of their dabbling with crayons on the maps spread before them. It was time for a new world order, and the details could be sorted out later.
The winner in the new world order was something known as democracy. No post-war nation-state would consider going forward without some celebrated expression of the kind of democracies that were introduced in America and France at the close of the 18th century. And therein lay the problem that haunts, nay, compels our energies to this day – unfortunately democracy comes in two distinct flavors that make all the difference in the world. In the sequel I quote philosopher and professor emeritus Claude Polin of the University Paris-Sorbonne who expands on the post-Enlightenment history of democracy in his ‘World War I and the Modern West’.
Fundamentally, democracy means that the people are sovereign. However, almost all who believe in democratic governance are ignorant of its two distinct meanings and blind to its two opposing and competing ways of organizing society – in short, there are two ways for individual citizens to achieve sovereignty. It is this distinction and the different regimes of public policy which then evolve that gives rise to the ideological polarity we enjoy or suffer from today, and that forms the basis for the debates in the media and in forums such as RR.
The first kind of democracy, in one form or another, is usually associated with the Right. This form allows the citizen’s sovereignty to be expressed in weakly bridled individual liberties, self-reliance, action as a free agent to bargain with others for his loss or gain, and in general fend for himself in a society of equally enabled and variously endowed fellow citizens. People such as these may call themselves “(classical) liberal, libertarian, hedonistic, mercantile, anarchistic, competitive, constitutional, or jungle-like, depending on the willingness of citizens to adopt common rules and sincerely follow them.” I would also add ‘conservetarian’ to those labels.
The United States was founded on this form of democracy as the foundation for its ‘Great Experiment’ to determine whether such sovereign individuals are able to govern themselves. As we have seen in changes wrought over the last century, the jury is still out on that question.
The second kind of democracy, again in one form or another, is associated with the Left. This “is the other half, which believes in a kind of democracy that is not generally understood as such, because the supreme law—written or unwritten—or the most hideous crime is to stand out from the lot or appear to fare better than others. Such were the egalitarian or totalitarian systems, as enacted in Revolutionary France in 1793, in Soviet Russia as of 1919, or again (horresco referens) in Nazi Germany after 1933—systems in which, whatever their differences, the leaders shared a common reference to the people as their power base. In other words, most people have not as yet realized there is another way of being a sovereign citizen: to make sure no one else is more sovereign than oneself.” (emphasis mine)
At this point we recall that this leftward terminus of democracy has been invariably attained by a leader cum dictator – ‘the man on the white horse’ – who ascended to power on the willingly bent backs of the democratic throngs. Lenin, Hitler, Mao, …, all were legitimized and gained their power from the people through a process “basically of a democratic nature.” And to bring in another connection, the fact that democracy has these two sides has given rise to the notion of the Great Divide that has become an oft discussed topic in these pages and elsewhere.
Polin correctly posits that it is this intrinsic nature of democracy in which “lay the seeds of the (democratic) nations’ degeneration”, and as each attempts to “balance unceasingly between two equally satisfactory and unsatisfactory choices; it is doomed to wage a constant war with itself.” In the larger view many of us, Polin included, fear that in this ongoing but little understood war the West will ultimately “surrender to invaders who have not fallen prey to the democratic delirium.”
I have previously explicated these arguments in the more nuanced discussion ‘Ideologies and Governance – a structured look’. Pulling these thoughts together with Polin’s dissertations on this most important of subjects makes clear the nature of the tipping point from which we may already have slid to the wrong side of democracy. Something to contemplate as we again celebrate America’s birthday on this Fourth of July 2014.
[Addendum] Man is genetically pre-disposed to be a social animal, it’s been in our double helix since before the genus Homo came to be. As we became more intelligent, we formed bigger and more complex societies that started with families and family groups, developed into larger tribes that then united under a chieftain who was anointed (sometimes self-anointed) king or monarch.
To that stage of social development we always had sovereignty focused narrowly in a single individual or a small council of elites that surrounded him. It was later that the notion of broadening sovereignty arose, first through what we today call the nobility, spreading then to men of means (land, property, commerce, …), and finally to anyone who could reliably fog a mirror. It was these latter day developments of widening sovereignty that were labeled ‘democracy’.
As I argued in ‘Ideologies and Governance – a structured look' (linked above), the ideological spectrum of organizing society can profitably be viewed along the dimension that is bookended by autocracy and anarchy. Anarchy is inherently an unstable social state since people will immediately begin organizing in groups in order to survive. And it quickly becomes apparent even to the most dim that bigger groups working within a supportive social contract can survive better, and even whump some lesser groups, take their stuff, and enslave them. This quickly brings us back on the road to civilization.
Autocracy, on the other hand, is an extremely stable form of organizing society and has demonstrated such mettle over the millennia. Autocrats (kings, presidents-for-life, chieftains, …) usually evolve into tyrants – ‘power corrupts, and absolute power …’ – who then replace each other through various forms of bloodletting, but the autocratic social form survives. This is the sense in which autocracy may be seen as a stable form of social organization.
Democracy is somewhere in the middle, and intrinsically unstable. In the system theoretic view such unstable systems can be stabilized only through the application of a robust control mechanism that constantly keeps nudging it back toward stability as it tends to drift off one way or another. The analogue of balancing a yardstick on one’s finger illustrates such an unstable system and the constant control required to keep the yardstick from falling over.
But as seen from the above development, democracy comes in two major flavors – one tending toward anarchy (the Right), and the other toward autocracy (the Left). These sides of democracy are not symmetrical with respect to the kind (intensity?) of governance or control required to maintain a given operating point or functioning organization. If we allow too much individual sovereignty (freedom, liberty, weaker social contract, too few regulations, …) then we drift toward a dog-eat-dog social order that tends to start correcting itself. However, the correction does not mean that it will recover some former salutary state; the correction may go directly to autocracy.
And, of course, if we start over-organizing ourselves in order to, say, enforce some arbitrary levels of equity or equality, then we are definitely on the way toward the stable attractant of autocracy. This tells us that more control or stronger/wiser government is required to keep us from sliding into tyranny. The problem is that no one has yet found a way to maintain society at such a sweet spot where we beneficially trade off equality against liberty through central planning. And this truth becomes more evident when we have attempted to centrally plan ever larger societies (e.g. nation-states) for the reasons expounded in these pages. In sum, we don’t know how large groupings of diverse peoples will react to any given dicta from central planners – today’s headlines should provide sufficient evidence of that. (In systems language, we don’t know the transfer function of such a large, complex, and dynamic system that reacts stochastically.)
It is in light of these factors that we should carefully husband the democracy that we have. And in a future post we will examine why democracy has not been a practical form of governance for everybody on the planet.
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