What is Democracy? What is a Politician?

Like a lot of people who have been looking at the news lately, I've spent a lot of the last month thinking about both democracy and the role that politicians play in it. Unlike most casual observers, however, I have had a fair amount of experience in political organizations which has given me something of a particular perspective on the subject. In lieu of writing anything else this week, I thought I'd put out a few somewhat random ideas on the subject to share with my readers. Make of them what you will.

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Over the short years of my life, my political orientation has wandered pretty much all over the map. But I can remember one particular time when a text produced a revolution in the way I think about such things. The book in question was Hitler's Pope. What struck me was a short passage where the author argued that Pope Pius XII sold the pre-war German Christian Democratic party "down the river" in order to secure protection of Church property and personnel from the NAZI party. 

This really stuck with me because like most people who've read much about politics, I'd never really thought very much about democracy as an ideal. I don't think that this is because of my own idiosyncrasy so much as our society-as-a-whole.

To start with, the two courses at university that I took on the subject promoted two ideas. The first one was that politics is ultimately a mechanism for allocating scarce resources between groups with different ideologies by using the minimum use of violence. The second one built on this idea by suggesting that liberal democracies can only exist if a ruling elite exists that is willing to manipulate the masses (through things like propaganda and lying) into voting for things that are in their objective best interests, but which they don't consciously want. 

Consider the above as two "book ends" that cover the same worldview. That is, the idea that political decision-making all comes down to groups of people with interests who use politics instead of naked force to get what they want.

Most of what I would call "radical progressives" believe much the same thing. The only difference I find is when I talk to them they tend to oscillate between venting outrage with the state of world and snide, and, exasperated, cynical comments to the effect of "what else do you expect from a capitalist system?"

I've come to the conclusion that the reason why politic discourse often ends up like this is because our society has lost the ability to have cogent conversations about ethical issues. This is a very big deal, in my humble opinion, because democracy didn't come about because people could use it to gain power but because lots of people over generations believed that it was the only really moral way to govern a society.  

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Previous generations of people spent a lot of time writing and talking about the concepts of "right" and "wrong". Highfalutin philosophers talked about things like Kant's deontological theory, Mill's utilitarianism, Sartre's existentialism, and others. The masses, however, usually based all their moral beliefs on what the priests told them.

The problem with this is that the priests are usually in the same boat because they don't know how to reason through their ethical teaching either. In other words, it is a case of the blind leading the blind. That's why, for example, even in the face of dramatically rising inequality, racism, sexism, ecological collapse, potential nuclear war, etc, many religious leaders still routinely say that the most important ethical issues people should be concerned about are keeping women from having access to safe abortions and gay spouses from their partner's dental plan. If you doubt this, take a look at the following excerpt from the speech "Mother" Teresa gave when she was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. In it she opines that the gravest "threat" to world peace is women's access to safe, therapeutic abortions. 

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The old churches used to have institutional leadership that were able to keep the wilder flights of fancy among parishioners from taking hold of the congregation. As religious freedom expanded through generation after generation, however, more and more independent congregations came into existence---and each of them was free to embrace their own set of ideas. Next came cults that were led by charismatic leaders. The last iteration of this splintering process are groups like Q-anon and others that are based upon an on-line "group-think" process. These conspiracy theory messages mutate based upon the promptings of "clicks" that individuals can read through social media analytics. The result is akin to what game designers call "Live Action Role Playing" (or "LARP"). 

A LARP is like a big game of Dungeons and Dragons where each individual piece is a real human being making their own personal choices, and the Dungeon Master has to interactively play with them to keep them in the game. It's a bit like the fake news that was coming out of Macedonia when teenagers found out that they could make a lot of money by printing stories about things like the Pope endorsing Donald Trump for the presidency. If a story had "legs" and made a lot of money, they wrote more like it. If one dropped like an anvil, then they didn't do another like it. It's much the same thing with regard to writing stuff about Q-Anon and other conspiracies---whatever gets clicked is reinforced and whatever doesn't gets dropped. 

Donald Trump was a star from a "reality tv" show, and these too are a type of LARP. The show-runners and producers' job is to interact with the people in front of the camera and create new stresses and situations as the audience learns more about the cast. That's why Trump is so fluid about policy and truth---he's not stating facts that he believes in, he's just constantly throwing dust in the air to find out which way the wind is blowing.  

This is an insane way to make decisions---far, far worse than simply doing whatever the priests tell you to do. That's because the priests at least had to go to a seminary and not get too far from what the Bishop wants. It's hardly surprising that given this type of ethical reasoning we ended up with a horde of wack-a-doodles storming the Capital Building---in defence of "democracy" as the social media AIs have defined it.

Image from the L. A. Times, used under the "Fair Dealing" provision.

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There have always been arguments between cynics who see politics as being exclusively a game of power, and, idealists who really do believe that democratic decision-making is a type of ethical paradigm. If you read Plato and Machiavelli, you can see the same arguments and types of personalities that are on display today. I do think, however, that there is one significant difference. All past societies above hunter/gatherer seem to have been dominated by elites: all types of politics were politics by aristocrats. 

The people who founded the US democratic system, for example, were mostly wealthy landowners. There were many problems with such a system, but one thing that probably was good was the fact that most of them had benefited from a good education. And this included the people who were religious. That's because even if they were pious, they had been taught by very well-educated priests. This is why the writings of various leaders from the past often contain some very fine ethical reasoning. 

Now, however, we are to a large extent at the mercy of the "unwashed mob". And it simply doesn't have much experience thinking through the choices it makes. That allows them to embrace idiotic ideas like Q-Anon, antisemitism based on the idea that Jews are Lizards from outer space, etc. 

This lack of understanding also allows the mob to fall for the patent venality of opportunists like Mitch McConnell. Taking a look at the following clip, you might be excused for thinking that McConnell voted for conviction of Donald Trump---but he didn't. If you pay only slightly more attention, you might be fooled into thinking that he wanted to vote for conviction, but that he felt that he couldn't because doing so would go against the rules of the Senate---which is false. There is a precedent that says it can. Moreover, there was a vote by the Senate that also said that you can---and the tradition is that once an issue is settled this way, everyone taking part should abide by the decision made. You might also have the idea that McConnell would have voted for impeachment if the trial had happened when Trump was still in office. But you'd be wrong, because he was the man who decided to delay the process so the vote would happen after Biden was sworn into office. McConnell may not be an illiterate boob---but he is certainly a Machiavellian who doesn't believe in democracy as a moral imperative.    

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Personally, I think that we are currently going through what the philosopher Karl Jaspers called an "Axial Age". This is a period of time when human society dramatically changes for one reason or another. In the first one, Jaspers said that the major religions of the world came into existence. This second one that we are currently living through is based on the profound changes to society that modern technology is imposing upon us. The Web has created the problem of weird conspiracy theories because of a variety of factors. It has also triggered the rise of populist authoritarians---like Donald Trump. It has also created the pandemic that we are facing now because of the universal fast transport through jet airplanes. And, of course, there's also climate change. One big problem after another is roaring down the historical highway and humanity is going to have to rejig just about everything we do if we are going to survive the potential pile-up. Democracy is perhaps not the most important item on this list---but it's one of the big ones.

The first step of fixing anything is to understand it. I hope that the above will get at least some of my readers thinking about it.

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Moreover I say unto you, the Climate Emergency must be dealt with!