Portrait of a New Governance


  Our Democracy really is a remarkable system, if you think about it, for it performs the oddest and most powerful of alchemies. It takes a promise, that it alone gives us freedom, and our heart’s desire, and by the magic of voting, this desire is somehow converted into support for this or that government, with this or that set of new regulations. What we elect is then a dream, a hope, (a vision thing); what we get is a set of technical reforms designed to mirror, from afar, that dream or have something (but not too much) of it. This alchemy is clearly based upon the double-think of whom one votes for. On the one hand one knows one ought to vote on the basis of policy. And yet the policies one is given to choose from are rather uninspiring ones, (and often rather similar); and yet at the same time one is told that this is the system that best satisfies human freedom (and might even be the end of history itself). One is inspired to dream of freedom, and yet the satisfaction of the dream is disallowed. The result is then that one makes a different judgement, one not based upon policy so much as trust. A trust that is then expressed in either a vote for the party which one trusts (and always has done, as often as not) or for an individual representative. One cannot then vote directly for the dreams which one wants, only for individuals who thereby set themselves up as the focus of the dream.

  The result is that we live in a system that can claim for individuals, and parties and so government something very big; for they come to express the collective will of the people. What exactly this will is, is of course rather undefined, beyond the fact that it is a convenient bit of eighteenth century mysticism. It might then mean many things: It might be the genuinely collective consciousness of a folk; or else the name for the pooling of hopes and dreams of a population, or a practical set of policies or merely a sorority style approval rating. In a sense it is necessarily all of these things, and yet none of them, for it is a force that essentially does not exist save through this appeal to it. That is, it exists not really as a force in its own right, so much as in the claim which democracy has for legitimacy, the claim to somehow represent us all, and to express ‘something’ (call it Will) that we all share. It exists then in the big claim that we are free (and near-ish the end of history) made by the system once every five years or so. 

  As part of this claim we are reminded that the vote cost much blood, and was struggled for across all of history itself. And this claim is a little tenuous, for most of the struggles associated with the vote were, at the time, about something quite different. The English, American, French and Russian revolutions, were not primarily about expanding suffrage. Likewise the extension of suffrage was less an object of immediate agitation and more a panacea from the later part of the nineteenth century, where British governments offered the vote and expanding the rights of individuals to vote, as the cure all for social dislocation. The vote was not what people struggled for, it was merely what they got.  This is of course not to say that there were not pure suffrage movements – what else were the suffragettes, and chartists? But their argument was that the vote, if it did convey any real power, then ought to be extended to women and the poor as well. That is, the argument here is essentially a negative one. It is not that voting is thought to be any great shakes in itself, but rather that if one is excluded from it, then one does not have even the small hope which it promises.  More than that, one loses the right and status of being one of those who are asked to identify with the general will. So that while this identification itself might be empty, the very fact that one was asked was enough (and is enough) to convey status or perhaps just to feel that one matters (a bit).

  This second element of General Will, as status giver is then rather problematic in societies with universal suffrage, for if we all vote then it loses its distinction. And yet this is clearly not the case in the constant appeals which the democratic system makes to other’s systems. For democracy is of course a missionary system, and claims to those who do not have it, that this ability to be a part of ‘something’ big is both real and important. Disenfranchised individuals, deprived of all hope, then aspire to become democracies (or at least that is our theory). More than that they are encouraged to dream that being a part of this general will, ought to be enough to get that will heard somewhere in government. They project onto the general will, the dream that it somehow makes them matter, makes them important. A move that then allows democracies to spread. It becomes then a condition which the West set for aid, a condition in modernity we require others to pay to modernize at all: or at least we in the West dream that it is - other folk merely aspire to the lifestyle….

  Here the sceptic will detect two additional forces at play. Firstly on the government level real political change in the hotspots of the world is of course very difficult to achieve. Problems of endemic poverty in a world of plenty are clearly very troubling and surely put into question the entire political system the West has fo(i)stered for world. A thought that is profoundly unsettling (in the West). It is then rather convenient to pretend firstly that the problem could get better through (somehow) the extension of democracy. Secondly, that once one has extended this system, with its insistence that it somehow represents the people, we can then very legitimately claim (well at least in our own eyes) that their own problems are their own fault now, and so feel less guilty. A move which then has the extra advantages that it will allow us to judge the fate of the nations by the quality of the democracies that they manage to maintain. Those countries that buckle and break under the democratic yoke, we feel are somehow immature and problematic such as Iraq or Sudan (which is ironic given that they are two of the oldest nations on earth). While those countries that take our model and turn it into a platform for demagogues who really do seem to want to help the poor are somehow suspect (Colombia). Democracy then allows us not only to impose a cheap, and somewhat virtual, solution for the world’s problems, it also allows us then to make judgements about disparate individuals, and sort through the ones we like and the ones we do not. The rule of course being that those who in spite of their problems remain looking to the West for their model (and so are firmly caught up in that Western dream of the General Will that behaves itself) we like, and those who do something different, earn our ire and distrust.

  But at the same time the sceptic will notice (as Marx did) that democracy is terribly useful for modern capitalism (in the same way that feudal kingdoms suited our old empires). For democracy effectively breaks down a state into bite-sized and rather bribe-able pieces. One can the bribe individuals or parties (where they are called political donations of course) in a way that one might have more trouble with in a state. More than that it allows this bribery to be massively localized. That is, if one is bribing a person or a party or perhaps a region, one is not then having to do anything really massive. The result then of these bribes is that a country modernizes and yet poverty remains the norm for all but the elite. They get rich on our bribery (one way or other), while we get the resources and the poor get some local aid and much good advice. This move then has the additional advantage for us in the West, with our tender liberal consciences, that it then becomes these elite’s problem how to deal with their poor and not ours. More than that, the West aims to impose a certain set of solutions on ‘Third World’ countries, i.e., only those solutions that do not inconvenience our ‘interests’ in the country (and our right to take their resources according to the rules of free trade). Or to put it another way, we have not only made other folk responsible for their own mess, but also we have ruled out any solution that actually disadvantages Western interests. A neat trick if you can do it, and a bitterly resented one too – a resentment that lies at the heart of land reform in Africa as a whole and Zimbabwe in particular.

  Our belief in the power of voting is a powerful drug therefore. A drug that blinds both ourselves to our own relative powerlessness within a system, but also to the effect which we have upon the rest of the world. As long as we vote, as long as we are a believer, then we have a faith that somehow we are near the end of history, and so somehow or other everything will be OK; that everybody will muddle through to the Western (or American) dream - a dream of freedom and wealth. Therefore our continued belief in our vote, actually matters for the status quo. For if that belief were questioned, then almost everything about our society would come into profound question. A fact that makes such questioning highly problematic. Those who reject the current political system do not have the stomach for thinking through the entire basis of government, more than that, they know (from historical precedents) both the difficulty, and frequent brutality of changing an entire system; coupled with the fact (and our systems makes us all very aware of this fact) of the lack of guarantee that the result would be any better than the current system. This lack of stomach then leads to that wide spread belief in the Churchillian sentiment that democracy, for all its faults, is the best of possible systems (in a fallen world). A sentiment that is quite possibly true, but certainly unverifiable and untestable (for how is one judging this?), and anyway begs the question whether all democracies are equal in their being the ‘worst save for all the others’.

  Democracies hold over us all as their whip hand the fact that one cannot simply change them without much risk (and bloodshed). There is of course an irony here. If Democracy really was what it claimed to be - the expression of something asking ‘What is the General Will?’ then change ought to be possible. What democracies are then saying here is that this Will, the will that is the source of legitimacy for a government, is actually rather dangerous, and can only be trusted within the confines which democracy has built for it. It cannot be conjured safely directly (or in any other manner). The result is then that all major political change becomes problematic and apathy the only (totally idiotic) method of resistance.

  However to keep up the pretence that is it somehow good, democracies need to claim that something positive is actually happening when governments have fallen. That is they need something big enough to make the claim ‘the people have spoken’ feel awesome and matter. These forces have been in evidence within Britain recently. Most critical amongst them is the fact that the individuals suddenly change but titles do not: one still talks then of governments or prime ministers, and all the trappings of power. These trappings, these names, feel sacrosanct and absolute. A fact that is then drawn into sharper relief by the fact that there are new occupants in these roles, a fact that everyone has to then get used to. In this ‘getting used to the new lot’, democracy pitches its power. This is what you can do, it tells its people, this is your power. That is, the power to choose who sits in their great (and enduring) positions within the state. Our surprise becomes then a refraction of our supposed democratic power. Or at least it allows the claim to be made that it does.

  Secondly and just as importantly the first two tasks of the new government are always to dish the dirt on the old government and then define its own position in relation to all the other non-governmental powers of the land. The first then involves completing the purge which the people have begun. They have to be taught how really bad (when you see the figures) the last lot were, and how wise we the voters were then (by implication) in getting rid of them. Old governments are always then bloodied out of power. In the second ritual, differing organizations will greet in differing manners, the new government, and make their pitch in an expression of good (and general) will. They will then hope that the new government does this or that or the other, and so define how they (the organizations) will relate to them (the govt.) and the criteria which the organizations will therefore judge the government by. The effect of this move is of course to make us all aware of the power of this new lot to govern, and the implications for us all of the fact that they are in power. A move that is then hooked onto the fact that these organizations are doing what everyone does in the face of a new government; that is they are projecting upon it various of their own hopes, dreams and fears. They are then making the new government part of the fabric of all our lives, natural and necessary. In short they are making it into the focus of a general will (even if that will eventually means it will be hated).

  Democracies are then caught in the deepest of paradoxes. They claim so very much and yet when all is said and done, do rather little. That is they offer relatively little choice to their subjects, they merely have to make up a lot of fuss about that choosing. This by itself might not matter that much, if it was confined to us in the West. The trouble is though that we believe all this fuss and nonsense we tell ourselves about ourselves, and turn it into something for the rest of the world to ape (all must copy). And then wonder with foolish concern why it is that things do not then immediately come good, as if the general will was really what we pretended to ourselves it was….