This is the page where I reply to academics etc on why D2 can’t work.
Not that these people are referring to D2; mostly they never heard of it. Someone else is using them as “authority” to tell me that D2 can’t work.
I believe that nearly all the time I’ll turn these alleged rebuttals of D2 into reinforcement for D2. You’ll judge, I hope, and tell me if you don’t agree
I’ve said, and will keep saying, the job of this site is to convince you that D2 is good for you. My plan is that before they put me in the wooden box I want to know that my country is en route to the benign and contented place that I myself have never lived in. That’s a big objective. It gives me licence to push D2 in any way that comes up.
So when my friend J becomes the fifth person to tell me "Fareed Zakaria says you're wrong", I go and read Fareed.
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Reply Number 1 – to FAREED ZAKARIA
Fareed is editor of Newsweek, and has been making big waves with a captivating idea. He says the world has had an overdose of democracy, to the detriment of liberty.
Fine; nice easy message to imbibe. (And to thump the tub with over tables -- much easier than "the world hasn't got enough democracy yet", which, I regret, but I see no way round, only makes sense when you've done a bunch of reading).
On the face of it, here you have a straight head-on barney, (never mind a slightly one-sided one, Fareed being oblivious).
But on the face of things is not always right. Let's work through it.
I wholly embrace Fareed’s idea that democracy and liberty are not the same thing. Democracy is the right of the people to determine how affairs are regulated. Liberty is your freedom or mine to live in our own way rather than the way that others choose. So far so good. Fareed is also marvellously right when he argues that democracy as now conceived means the leadership of the biggest herd nibbling away at the rights of the smaller herds.
However, Fareed makes a few niggly small errors, and one huge one.
Niggly bit 1: “you can have democracy without liberty, eg Ancient Athens”.
Scuse, but with respect this Ancient Athens story is a crock. That place was no kind of democracy, by our standards. It was called democracy then because the upper-class males could meet in the forum and argue the issues. This differed from most countries the Athenians knew of, where a tyrant got on top and called the shots until he was deposed by a replacement tyrant. Athens was a pioneer, for its time. But people’s rights were defined by their birth. Some people were born to be other people’s possession, property like your horse or your shoes. Some people were free, yes, in that they were no-one’s property, but nonetheless had nil chance of standing in the forum and shouting the odds, which is what “democracy” was. There was no secret ballot, no ballot at all for the little man, only for main men, the well-born. And when I say men, men, men, feminists can ease up on the stern pursing of the mouth. Men it was. Hardly anywhere – if anywhere at all -- did women get a look-in until less than a hundred years ago. It’s an accident of words that Athens is called “democratic”.
Next niggly bit: that you can have liberty without democracy. Oh, no. You can have disorder or at best a brand of laissez faire where there is no legislation over ways you run your life, (or no enforcement of token legislation). But that is not liberty in any meaningful sense. You might be free to smoke dope or snort coke, free to play loud music, free to go to mosque, shul, or neither, but if you don’t have some degree of democracy you’re never sure how free you are to say “the king is wrong”. By which I hope it goes without saying that I am not talking only the few countries ruled by a king – down to about four now, isn’t it, with Nepal off that circuit? “King” can be “Party” or boss or ruling clique.
Then Fareed’s big error...
He’s dead right when he charges elected governments with throwing their weight around. Nobody will argue with him that the custom is for big government, nation, to erode small government, local. (Many places, it’s worse than “erode”. “Erode” is what you get in America. Much of Africa there is no small government; every power-wielding entity is part of the same single pyramid headed by the president.)
So how does Fareed err? By saying that the answer is a brake on democracy.
What I would say to Fareed, as you guess, is: no, no; press the accelerator.
In fact I will say this to Fareed. I’ll find an e-ddress and send him this note, and I will make you a prediction, which right now will make you laugh, though not nearly as loud as it will make Fareed laugh, that in a while to come he won’t laugh at all. He’ll be saying, yeah, good, much democracy answers the problems he has with little democracy.
I don’t blame Fareed. He hasn’t met Version 2 Democracy yet. Each fault he cites relates to raw democracy, and each fault has the same antidote: rich democracy.
Ethnic dominance? Yep, when the millions turn up once in five years to restate their identity, distortions occur; dominance most notably, with the ethnic brand ever-hovering. (As an aside, I feel that Fareed underrates, or forgets, how much of an improvement even raw democracy is on what went before.)
New democracies? Yep, gigantic failure rate. Fareed’s stipulation that a new democracy must have per capita income of $5 000 to get started is, excuse me, bizarre, and some of his other assertions are one-dimensional. (Did the ending of Russia’s tyranny really ruin the legal system? Or did smoothly-operating charade courts give way to teething-troubled real courts?) But in general, yes, new democracies break civil institutions, cause poverty, and restrict liberty, and that is finally because democratic institutions haven’t worn in.
My case would be that D2 automatically eradicates ethnic dominance and automatically effectively removes the need for democratic institutions to wear in.
There is a degree of counter-intuition here. Your instinct, or Fareed’s, would naturally say: “If new democracies can’t handle plain old-style democracy, obviously this supercharged D2 model would really mess them up.”
I recognise your instinct. Mine said the same when I first tinkered with D2. I appreciate your instinct. But I again use the camera metaphor that I have probably already thrust at you. The camera companies made us good photographers by giving us A for Automatic. D2 Democracy makes us good democrats by giving us a system we cannot break.
Let’s go through Fareed’s indictment. I’m doing you short headline replies here, as there are longer substantive replies all around this site.
Number 1, the liberty thing
This isn’t actually Zakaria’s only, or even biggest, point, but it’s the one that has become the most grabbable, nice and simple and lending itself to glib metaphors (“America’s immigrants didn’t sail in under the Statue of Democracy, they sailed in under the Statue of Liberty.”)
Question: How does D2 affect my liberty?
Answer: It leaves you free to do whatever does not upset society around you.
Question: But it would let society around me object to anything?
Answer: Yes. The logic says that if a faction in your society objects to the colour of your socks, you want that faction in the system and objecting lawfully.
Doubt: Aaaarrrggh! You’d let majority tyranny dictate the colour of my socks!
Response: Yes, D2 gives a strong enough majority the right to do anything at all. That’s its point, the people rule. However, that majority is no longer a clique of activists subject to party discipline, with careers depending on the president’s nod. The majority means ordinary voters repeatedly, in varied contexts, and paying certain prices, restating via the polls their objection to your socks. Now never mind absurd examples, like socks, my point is that in this context there is a much fuller, sounder, guarantee of reasonable freedom than any written constitution could ever give.
Number 2, Fareed on ethnic dominance
I state a simple case: bald democracy, one vote per five years, your history/identity/blood/class/race/faith/etc is big in your mind. Rich democracy, perhaps five times more votes in 5 times more contexts which include places where your vote has clout on whether the school opens on time or whether clean water comes out of the taps... you’re five times freer to vary your vote. ,
Number 3: Fareed on new democracies
At the risk of (again) repetition, it’s to new democracies that D2 matters most. When some brand of D2, under whatever name with whatever specifics, comes in to the Denmarks or the New Zealands, it’ll be like adding a fifth gear to a system that’s humming along fine in fourth. When it comes to the Zimbabwes or the Kenyas, it’ll be oil in a gearbox that has seized in first. That’s not, obviously, to say all will be smooth instantly. It is saying that once 10 000 villages have an elected leadership owing its stature to the villagers, you have the basis to tame dictators and obviate chaos.
Now on this basis I want my friend J, who referred me to Fareed, either to say "Yes, I see, D2 disposes of Fareed's objections to democracy", or to say "No, here is why your reasoning is wrong..."
Actually, of course, he won't say either of those things, yet. He'll keep on thumping the table with the handily discussable proposition "you know what, people, democracy is wrecking our freedom." But I'll keep on nagging, because I told you what my ambition is, and to achieve it I need the Js of the world to join up in the Really Revolutionary Revolution. And sooner or later (doubtless long after I cease getting invited to his dinners) J will thump the table with a different message -- "you know what, people, for real freedom we need the next step up in democracy..." (Whether he adds "as I have always said" is optional). And there we are, J is in the Movement.
In saying farewell to J and Fareed, for now, I do one more repetition. I have explained the Movement and the Really Revolutionary Revolution, but some people come across the words and not the explanation and get a fright -- Eek, images of secret meetings and dark plots and black cars prowling without headlights at dead of night...
Well, sorry, I beg pardon, I suppose it is a bit incautious. However, you'll allow that there is delicious irony. Forever, revolutions have involved the replacing of one clique by another clique, who pretty soon start discovering the appeal of the old clique's bad habits, like spy services and Press laws. I love the fact that the real revolution, the revolution that genuinely revolutionises the way things are done, will involve a total of nil gunshots, black cars, interrogations or secret passwords, and the movement that brings it about will entail neither the giving nor receiving of any fear to anyone. So I hope you'll indulge me in a it of innocent fun with the RRR, Really Revolutionary Revolution.
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Reply No 2 – to JACOB DLAMINI
Jacob is a writer who was bred in Katlehong at the time it was being torn to pieces by ANC/UDF activists and Inkatha vigilantes each trying to make the place their stronghold, against the other. Jacob has subsequently done a good deal, mostly in the late and roundly lamented Weekender, of analysing the workings, or more often failings, of Katlehong's local democracy as embodied in the ANC branches.
I love what Jacob does, to say nothing of the lively way he states it. He does, however, become a good ammunition-supplier to sceptics of D2.
When someone starts on “localdemocracyduzznwork...” (with or without the frequent sub-clause “...in Africa”) I wait a while. Often their evidence will be that they and five neighbours (who, they specify, have walls full of high-class degrees) came to blow-out over how to deal with a shared service-lane. Sometimes their evidence will be “and look at that guy who writes about what a fraud the ANC’s local democracy is.”
I have a spasm of sympathy for Jacob, valiantly searching for depth and nuance that a skim-reading crushes to inanity (I know the feeling, broer!) More than that, I say, sorry, no, no parish-pump tale in existence has any reflection on Themba.
Where Themba’s case differs is:
- The local democracy that Jacob is talking about is branch democracy, a democracy of activists. D2 transfers power to the hands of non-activists.
- Today’s democracy gives the average resident of Katlehong no reason to give a damn. D2 gives each resident a vote with visible impact.
- D2 does not punt “small is beautiful”, or rely on local practices being wise or sound. It says that the web of overlapping powers makes awful practices impossible.
Or to say this another way: No-one can point to a local experience that invalidates D2. There has never been a D2, anywhere. When you say that the parish council couldn’t decide where to place the pump you may (or not) have a valid criticism of “local power” as it is exercised in raw democracy. You have not the beginning of a basis to use that as a case against D2.
May I add a slight heresy about participation. The Democracy 2 that I see will make nil request of people to participate out of duty. Whoever participates will participate out of interest.
Jacob, I think and hope you’ll join the Really Revolutionary Revolution before very long; you’re a classic candidate.
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written by factdress , May 08, 2012
written by factdress , May 08, 2012
as a journalistic oracle in America. He was a child when Indira Gandhi, the high priestess of Democracy One,
in that until her time no one had been elected to power by more people and since her time, owing to the
large majority he received, only her son, Rajiv, has received what can literally be termed a more popular
(or, anyway, more populous) mandate - not that it did either of them any good, but then even Denis's
supercharged democracy does not claim to make you immortal, if I understand him correctly. During Fareed's
childhood, Indira imposed such a draconian form of tyranny, suspending democratic freedoms for which millions of Indians had demonstrated with a conviction and persistence that must strike a chord with South Africans of our era, that it deserved its own capital letter. And so it had one: E for the Emergency.
With one fell swoop - and in many cases it was of the scalpel because the Emergency also signalled the
Emasculation that was her favoured (now what word shall I choose here?) instrument for curbing India's
burgeoning population growth. I would ask Fareed - as you might, Denis, when you get his e-dress - "Would you have counselled less democracy for India when the dictator emerged from behind her voter-friendly sari?" If he said yes, the natural follow-up would have been to ask what sort of government would have followed Indira's just-as-inevitable assassination when as a totalitarian, rather than the turfed-out, chastened and then re-elected authoritarian she became, she ordered a military assault against the Sikhs'
most sacred site and then foolishly kept Sikhs around her in her personal security detail? (A detail she
rather overlooked, you might think in retrospect.) It was only a reaffirmation of democracy that enabled an orderly transition of government in 1979, and again upon her assassination in 1984. What would have
followed if Fareed's call for "less democracy" had been heeded? We have only to turn to the days of imperial Rome to see, or, sad to say, a number of African autocracies today, South Africa being one of the
honourable exceptions. Should Democracy Two ever dawn, Fareed - even if he gets to hear of it - must be
asked the same question, because if Democracy One was vital enough to sustain itself in the event of a nascent dictatorship, what would it take to sustain Democracy Two, if it can ever dawn? Surely the answer cannot be "Less of the same"?
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