I have an idea

for reviving

democracy

R D Kernohan

I'd keep my doubts about democracy to myself if I hadn't heard so much about it recently. That has been on the strength of a couple of unfinished North African revolutions, the Libyan rising, and a wider range of Arab and Iranian discontents. For I incline to the Churchillian view, recorded two years after rejection by an ungrateful people, about it being the worst possible  form of government  except  the others that have been tried.
     Like E M Forster I raise two cheers for it. Like George Orwell I recognise different meanings the word has concealed and detect a lack of enthusiasm to reconcile them. I only disagree with Bernard Shaw's description of it as a 'political experiment' because he went on to call it 'the last refuge of cheap misgovernment'. But now almost everyone professes to belong to the democratic club, although a lot of members don't want too precise a rule-book.
     I don't think democracy has been so loosely described and eagerly invoked, even during the gloriously liberating revolutions of 1989-90 in central and eastern Europe, as it was when a minor tyrant fell in Tunis, Mubarak was forced out in Cairo, and much of Libya revolted against Gaddafi. That may have been because corrupt régimes in east central Europe had degraded the word by claiming to be 'people's democracies'. It may have been because the fall of the Berlin Wall and the restoration of a free Poland were so obviously triumphs of nationality as much as democracy. Or it may have reflected innate Western European scepticism (since shown to be well justified) about whether even post-Communist Russia can approximate to Western ideas of democracy.
     I'm surprised there hasn't been more scepticism, given the course of earlier popular movements in Egypt, and more evident anxiety over Saudi Arabia, so ill-prepared for reform, never mind revolution. There's not much encouragement from the West's blood-stained sponsorship of democratic forms in Irak and Afghanistan or even from the experience of Lebanon, the Arab country with a tradition of multi-party politics, or the recurring failures of democracy in Muslim Pakistan. And I hesitate to welcome the various groups who would like to change the government in Yemen (perhaps justifiably) as potential founding fathers of democracy in Arabia.
     To say that isn't to single out Arabs or Muslims for scepticism but to suggest that democracy ought to invite more scepticism everywhere than it usually gets. For in good politics, as in true religion, faith is only vindicated when scepticism is welcomed and overcome. That applies even in the Atlantic and West European countries that, having appropriated a Greek word much as Lord Elgin acquired the Marbles, rather arrogantly think of themselves as the homelands of democracy. It even applies in post-devolution Scotland, with its odd mixture of political apathy, fretfulness, and the curious conservatism which produced so strong a Labour showing at last year's general election.      The dullness of the preliminaries to this year's Holyrood elections suggests that the institutions created to address an alleged Scottish 'democratic deficit' have not greatly added to the sum of enthusiasm for politics or confidence in politicians.

We need constructive scepticism both about the general theory of democracy for far-away places and about its particular application nearer home. There would be fewer problems if we had the more limited goal of all governments 'deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed' rather than the rhetorical emphasis on government 'of the people, by the people, for the people'. Much as I dislike Jefferson and admire Lincoln, I prefer the words of the American Declaration of Independence to the phrase so often snatched from its context in the Gettysburg address.
     It has been too often and too easily distorted into government by the people who claim to know what is good for the people. That does not matter too much in countries where tenants of the White House or Downing Street retreat gracefully when the 'consent of the governed' is withdrawn or when free speech and media ensure that such consent has to be worked and argued for.  It matters when a Mugabe, perhaps a Castro or a Chavez, comes to power with popular endorsement but proves unscrupulous in keeping power.
     For one of the troubles with democracy is that is that it offers such scope to charlatans who can charm, bewitch, mislead, and control a people at the same time. We may think we can identify British prime ministers who managed this, however briefly, and wonder if even a first minister might have some talent for it. But the really worrying examples are elsewhere.
     Even Hitler reached the threshold of power through exploiting the forms of a democracy which he reviled. Thereafter he suppressed free elections – but he would certainly have won them until his war turned against Germany. Mussolini, before he thrust his country into Hitler's war, was probably more popular than any Italian leader before or since. Stalin, unlike Churchill, would not have lost a free election in 1945.
     These are the extreme examples, but warnings against the kind of celebration of popular will which has marked so much reporting of events in the Arab world. Part of the trouble is that 'people power', even the kind I so heartily welcomed 20 years ago in Prague or East Germany, is always more effective in breaking down than  building up. It also runs into problems in countries where ethnic or religious divisions, as in Bahrain now and Ireland for centuries, produce rival or restrictive cries of 'We are the people'.
     Even more important is the awkward fact that democracy, if we take it to mean individual freedoms, rights, and duties as well as free elections, involves more than 'the consent of the governed'. It should limit government to its 'just powers'; and it is that limitation, not just parliamentary or plebiscitary majorities which should guide executive action, European directives, and even Westminster or Holyrood legislation.
      We may argue whether powers are just when they debar some religious believers from being foster or adoptive parents, even when they seek to enforce a minimum price for beer. But there seems to be consensus on the need for limitation, fashionably expressed through declarations of human rights, written constitutions, and the case-law derived from them. These, however, are not the primary causes of the modest efficiency of democracy, as practised in Britain, the United States, Western Europe, and most of the Commonwealth.       Far more important are the presence, the diversity, and the mood of public opinion and the range of interests and activities outside government control – economic, social, religious, cultural, professional, and occupational. One might even put in a good word for something rather frowned on by much British opinion at the moment: the camaraderie of rival politicians. It is seen at its worst when they gang up to claim their expenses and puff up their allowances but in successful constitutional or parliamentary democracies it is usually a beneficial, stabilising, and moderating influence, both in ages of reform and of reaction.   
     
The trouble with a general theory of democracy is that it's far easier to draft a constitution and sign up to declarations of rights, often with mental and political reservations, than to create these favourable conditions. Where, as in South Africa, many of them existed under an ancien régime, even a revolution may take the path of evolution. But where they have never existed, as in Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia or large tracts of the Balkans, democracy will need a long time to take root, if it ever does.
     The USA failed to recognise that under the Clinton and Bush presidencies, though the trouble dates back at least to the time when Woodrow Wilson sought to 'make the world safe for democracy'. Obama seemed to be on the same track until the current Arab discontents put America's traditional ideological sympathies at odds with pragmatic diplomacy and its perceived strategic interests. It is still unclear whether this will lead to enlightened realism or total confusion in US foreign policy.    
     But there are also troubles with democracy in what we westerners regard as its homelands. Much of Greece seems constantly on strike against permitting the government it voted in to do what it had to do. Much of France thinks that human rights (the non-sexist update of the old revolutionary droits de l'homme) include premature pensions. The United States, despite the admirable working of its federal system and the courts' ability to make a written constitution flexible, is seriously handicapped by the enormous costs of political campaigning, especially those demanded even for successful primary elections.
     Compared to these friendly partners Britain does not do as badly as we may sometimes think. We haven't solved the English problem but we have for the time being workable forms of devolution for Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland. Our elections, sluggishly and approximately, respond to major changes of mood in the country. We have even got round, admittedly by a curious coalition route, to looking at our electoral system and a referendum on the alternative vote. It is a modest proposal but serious enough in content and unpredictable enough in consequences to keep me sitting on the fence. 
     It is not a proposal which has excited most British voters. That in itself isn't a bad thing, for what our politics need is not so much more excitement but more frankness and thoughtful participation: involvement, not obsession. But the mood of our politics is torpid and the language of political discussion, except for occasional hysteria and some academic remoteness, is stale and unprofitable – as the Scottish Review has argued in eloquent plain English.      We may even be entering a phase when the real opposition to the clearer and more coherent of the Cameron government's policies may come from the pressure groups – unions, teachers, doctors, charities, the social work industry, even occasionally churches – which are a vital part of democracy but ill-suited to involvement in its party politics and often blind to more general interests. The Labour opposition may ride high in the polls but it will be by drifting along with sectional discontents rather than steering a new course.
     
I have my own modest remedy for addressing some of these present discontents and distilling a stimulant for more active and thoughtful democracy. This would be to compile electoral registers by voluntary registration. The need to encourage 'opting in' to the electoral register would be an admirable way to revive many constituency associations of all parties which are either moribund or in the hands of small cliques. It would give them something worthwhile that they had to do between the routine of election campaigns and the savoury but occasional opportunities to select and reject candidates.
     It is a suggestion, which if made by anyone still in active politics would have the misfortune simultaneously to invoke denunciation as a Tory plot and probable excommunication by David Cameron's intolerantly liberal central office. But it would sting many indifferent or apathetic non-voters into a political act. It would also demand a little more effort and commitment than voting Labour (or, in much of England, Tory) as a matter of course or tribal solidarity. The incidental stimulation it might give to young, new, possibly freakish parties, and the risk that in Scotland it might temporarily favour the activists of the SNP, would be a price worth paying. It would rightly but not irrevocably disfranchise those who take no interest in politics. 'Use it or lose it' isn't an unfair formula in democracy.
     All government is a balancing act but effective democratic rule (of which reasoned opposition and honest lobbying are parts) is especially testing. Rulers can become remote and those they rule apathetic or fractious. I began with a familiar epigram about democracy from the great aristocratic democrat. But there is also an important truth in a little-known memo (one of thousands) with which Churchill bombarded ministers and officials. 'When one is in office one has no idea how damnable things can feel to the ordinary rank and file of the public.' The converse is also true: people indifferent to politics have no idea of the pressures and priorities of government. Democracy remains a better attempt to address that problem than the other means that have been tried. But democracy itself, which depends on stimulation and intermittent revival, needs to try harder.

R D Kernohan is a writer and broadcaster and a former editor of the Church of Scotland's magazine Life and Work