People have a skewed idea of what democracy is. They think it boils down to the ascendancy of the majority view, but that was never the plan. In ancient Greece not everyone had the vote.
The essence of parliamentary democracy is where we accept that we don't know how to run things ourselves / don't have time or resources to run things ourselves / can't be arsed to run things ourselves and therefore we employ professional politicians to do the job for us, on a fixed term contract to be renewed if they're doing well, paying them out of the public purse and firing them when they step out of line. Our job is to do the hiring and firing. Our job is not to do the thinking for them - why keep a dog and bark yourself?
I looked forward to Gordon Brown coming in. I thought he'd do the sensible thing - come in, sdtand for election, win hands down and thereby give himself 5 years to make all the difficult decisions, accept the howls of opposition at PMQ and reassure himself that he was doing the right thing, and that by the time he came up for reelection, his record would be his election campaign. Thank God! I thought. Here is a man who won't be America's poodle! Here is a man who is not telegenic, who will not be charismatic, who will be rubbish on TV and is practically incapable of cracking a smile. Because he is a serious man. He is an intelligent politician. He is an intelligent man. He is the kind of man who can do great things for this country. Unfortunately he is also a massive wimp. Because he didn't stand for electuionm when he should have done, because he was worried to an unseemly and indecorous degree. And he's not making the tough decisions because he knows they are unpopular.
He keeps telling me he's listening to me. I don't want you to listen to me. I want you to lead me. I want you to tell me how it should be done. I want you to be better equipped than I am to run the country because, to be frank, if you're counting on the numbnuts in this country to tell you what to do, we're all f***ed. And we might as well be anarchists. It'd be cheaper.
That's Plato up there, by the way. About as keen on democracy as I am. And he didn't have to contend with what passes for it now.
1 comment:
"The essence of parliamentary democracy is where we accept that we don't know how to run things ourselves / don't have time or resources to run things ourselves / can't be arsed to run things ourselves and therefore we employ professional politicians to do the job for us, on a fixed term contract to be renewed if they're doing well, paying them out of the public purse and firing them when they step out of line. Our job is to do the hiring and firing. Our job is not to do the thinking for them - why keep a dog and bark yourself?"
True, “our” (the general public/electorate) job is to do the “hiring and firing,” but there's more to our jobs than merely that. The reason that there's more--much more, and no less important than the hiring and firing part, which we can only do responsibly if we're paying attention properly in the first place, is not very complicated but _is_ very important. It’s that no relative "handful" of officials (a parliament, an executive, a judiciary, a national press) whether they be dozens, scores, or even a hundred or two or three hundred---of people, no matter how bright they are, can manage to substitute their brilliance for the plain general-interest point of view which the great mass of the public have just because they _are_ the great mass of the public. Their general common-sense won’t always be correct, wise or fair but it _will_ be all of those as often or _more often_ than the narrower points of view of those others, the public officials who are always in a position of being pressured to favour the powerful and organized of others---a tiny subset of the great general public---and whose interests run counter to the general public’s interests most of the time. That’s especially true of the sort of issues with which those in office deal: deciding who reaps benefits and who bears burdens in the settling of questions of public business. Left to themselves to decide things--- and, free of the curbing influence of a watchful general public, _any_ group of public officials, whatever their party or original intentions, will eventually fall under the sway of those other powerful organized interests’ efforts to influence them. Only the steady maintenance of reasonable limits can keep office holders from going astray. And only the general public can supply that sort of authority, that sort of independence from being overcome by interest group pressures and inducements to do what is inevitably the wrong thing from the view point of the greater public’s needs and interests.
Gordon Brown, far too much like the lamentable Tony Blair, is no exception to this. Whatever good intentions he may once have had, all those years of loyal service to Tony Blair’s political career did immense harm to Mr. Brown’s sense of judgement and his ability to do the right thing. In the end, he let himself become hardly more than a clone of Blair. No one should have expected of G. Brown after all that warping that he’d be in any condition to conduct himself or the government responsibly.
Plato, by the way, was anything _but_ a friend of democracy. I wasn’t sure how to read your “That's Plato up there, by the way. About as keen on democracy as I am. And he didn't have to contend with what passes for it now”---as meaning that, like Plato, you have no sympathy for democracy as a way of governance, or that you _are_ a believer in democracy and you see Plato as having been one, too. In any case, if you’re disgusted by what you’re seeing and living with from government over the terms of Blair, Brown and “New Labour”, please take heart: that isn’t “democracy” by any stretch of the idea. It’s a gross perversion of whatever deserves to be called democracy and, therefore, whatever faults democracy has (and it has them—though they’re no worse (and usually better) than the inherent faults of all other forms of government--- you can’t rightly blame what’s been happening on “democracy” since you don’t and haven’t been living in enough of one to hold it responsible. Plato makes very clear the sort of government he favours in his “Republic”. That system is called a dictatorship—one directed by, (what else?), a supposedly benevolent philosopher-king. Except there aren’t any of those, never have been and likely never will be.
Our responsibilities have to go beyond hiring & firing if you hope to avoid the harms of governments becoming infatuated with their own rule. Only the general public can exercise the necessary control to see that governments don’t fall in love with themselves and their narrower view of the world. Of course, when it comes to becoming corrupt, the journey for Blair was neither long nor difficult.
signed, "proximity1"
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