Reconceiving Democracy
While I've promised myself that I wouldn't make my posts this year simply a lit review of my reading list, I did want to point out an interesting book that I read last week (it's been out for a couple of years, so some people will have run across it already). Kevin O'Leary's Saving Democracy: A Plan for Real Representation in America makes some interesting points and proposes some interesting ideas. For anyone interested in rethinking the way modern democracy might work, I'd very much recommend picking it up.
O'Leary's focus is on the United States, but the themes he explores have considerable international relevance. He notes that during the years of the Cold War, America's (and the West's more broadly) standing as the champion of democracy worldwide (however much the principles of democracy might have deviated from actual Cold War policy at times), had the effect of freezing serious public debate about the ways in which democracy could be improved. Obviously, this is only a partial truth. Among Western democracies, the twentieth century as a whole saw significant democratic advances in the area of inclusion. Women and minorities were ensured the right to vote, and were integrated, if somewhat imperfectly, into the practice of citizenship as currently imagined. Procedurally, though, our idea of democracy has generally fallen along pretty standard lines. Elections should be free and fair, adult suffrage should be universal, there should be an independent judiciary, mechanisms to protect individual and (perhaps) group rights from the vagaries of the electoral process, there should be a free press, and in the social realm, a robust civil society. Obviously that's a simplified list, but it maps pretty well with how most people think of "democracy."
The intellectual impetus behind most modern democracies, though, remains in the nineteenth century. Modern democratic governments have inherited institutions that, for all their power in aligning the interests of the state with those of the people, are fundamentally aristocratic. In almost any society, the cohort of people who consistently win elections comes from its elite elements. Money, education, and elite social connections make it immensely easier to campaign for public office, and while good campaign finance laws can blunt this effect, they will never eliminate it. Combined with problems of scale (O'Leary points out that, originally, members of the House of Representatives had roughly 30,000 people in their districts - current districts are larger by many orders of magnitude), this has the effect of distancing the people from their government, allowing them to offer broad consent or rejection, but making the idea of "rule by the people" a bit of a misnomer.
O'Leary suggests creating citizens assemblies, selected by lot, with the power to veto legislation. I won't go into the specifics of his proposals, as they get a bit too much into the weeds of American political life, but the basic idea of giving people a chance to meaningfully participate in the creation of legislation, of actually authoring policy without having to make a more permanent move into professional politics, merits real consideration. So do other more radical reforms like (in the case of the U.S.) eliminating the Senate, an institution which has not aged well. O'Leary only scratches the tip of the iceberg of such ideas, and I think modern democracies are overly squeamish about experimenting with new ways of marrying their participatory ideals with procedural reality. Don't get me wrong, stability is important. One of the key merits of democracy is that political actors don't expect the rules of the game to change every time they lose an election. Still, we should not become so enamored with the status quo that we forget the compromised circumstances under which it was born. If the West is going to hold itself up to the world as an example of the transformative power of democracy, remembering the "transform" part might not be amiss.
