Holding Out for a Hero!
Politics, for the people, by the people! Sounds fine, but...
To talk of politics is a difficult business. For one thing, a lot of the words and definitions used in political discussion keep shifting in their meanings – think, for instance, of terms like ‘liberal’, ‘patriot’, or ‘progressive’. So I’m going to keep with a few very basic terms here, and I’m certainly not going to be digging into party politics. Instead I want to dig quite a bit deeper than any specific issues that might be around in political discourse today. For that, we can start by going back to one of the most basic of questions – why have government at all?
There are of course folks around who think we could do without a government of any kind, and indeed, that we could do without much or all of the institutions associated with government. For this to work, there needs to be an extraordinary level of good will and engagement by all citizens of a nation. Are we up for that? Well, probably most of us would say no. But I think that idea of doing without a government is a good issue to raise nonetheless, because it gets us thinking about why we might need a government in the first place.
None of us really chose the political system that we are born into and governments generally don’t make a habit of asking us whether or not the system we have is what we citizens actually want.
But it seems unlikely, let’s face it, that if given a choice we would choose to have a monarchy (by which I mean a monarchy that actually wields power) or a dictatorship instead of a democracy.
Democracy though is a slippery term. We normally mean, for one thing, a government that is elected by free and fair elections. But that’s not really a definition of a democracy – we could, after all, have elected to choose a dictatorship.
Democracy was originally rule by everyone. But it was on the scale of a city-state, and in theory every citizen could gather in some public place and give their opinion and then cast their vote for whatever decision was being discussed. Today we call that ‘direct democracy’, and whilst we now have nation-states as opposed to city-states, nonetheless, because of technology, we could in theory still have citizens debate and vote on all issues by way of referendums.
Maybe some of us would like this. After all, it gives most of us more of a say than we might ever hope to achieve under other systems.
But the arguments against such a system are ancient. For one thing, what if a whole population just came to a really bad decision? There is then no-one on the ‘outside’, as it were, to call the system to account for its mistakes. And what if some people – through great rhetoric or just personal charm – are just very much better at persuading others that their opinions are correct? Might not whole nations go off track as a result? The biggest worry with direct democracy though is that most people, most of the time, are not that inclined to be interested in the huge number of decisions that governments need to make, or to put in the necessary time and effort that would be needed to make informed decisions. Many of us realise that the world is a very complex place and we need experts to interpret what’s going on. And many of us would prefer those experts to decide what’s best to be done. So instead of direct democracy we have representative democracy.
We can think of that ‘representative’ part in a few different ways. The easiest way (and perhaps the way we might hope that it would work) is for our representative to listen to their electorate and come to some kind of balanced view about what we, the citizens, want or need. The alternative is that the representative (on the basis of being an expert) draws their own conclusions about what is best for us or for the nation as a whole and reaches decisions on this basis. And the third and more cynical view is that the representative is swayed by other forces – political parties, big business, rich donors – into making decisions that benefit those vested interests rather than serving the needs of the people.
The reality might be somewhere on a spectrum across these three options.
Well, let’s step back a minute and take stock. What if, miraculously, we were given a vote as to whether or not we wanted a government at all. And if we said yes to having a government then we were given further votes on exactly what kind of government we wanted. And let’s say that, by an overwhelming majority, we still wanted a representative democracy. It would be very welcome to be given the choice! But my question now is, could there still be room for change within this system that we’ve all decided is best?
My answer is yes! And there are two sets of issues that I think are options for reform.
The first set of changes might best be described as ‘constitutional reform’. We noted above that there is something of a spectrum in our representative democracy. There are representatives who truly have the will of the people and the good of the nation and of the planet at heart (plus the careful balance that needs to be struck between these three). At the other extreme there are ‘representatives’ who have their political careers and business interests at heart. Most of us (hopefully) would wish for more of the former and less (or none) of the latter. As I’ve said, the details of how this might be achieved could broadly be defined as constitutional reform. This, I’m sure it can be seen, is a whole lot more complex than simply choosing what kind of government we want – in terms of democracy instead of monarchy, for instance. It would take quite a level of engagement by citizens to get the kind of changes needed to achieve representatives who truly represent us. This level of engagement might be achieved by means of a partly ‘bottom-up’ style of governance. Such things as citizens’ assemblies and deliberative democracy can feed into the broader political narrative so that all voices have the chance to be heard.
The second set of issues that might be further things to reform take us right back to that question of why we have governments in the first place. Here are four potential reasons:
For the safety and protection of citizens.
To allow all citizens to achieve their full potential – that is, to flourish.
To avoid gross disparities of wealth, such that all citizens regard society as organised fairly, so far as that is possible.
To protect the ‘natural commons’ of land, air and sea and the natural eco-systems that these support.
Reform, in respect of these four aims, would mean trying to get these aims more central to the decision-making of our representatives. You might of course disagree with some or all of these aims. Maybe the only place we could all agree is to say that there is some kind of absolute moral law that lies beyond human society and which we need to try to interpret in order to achieve good governance. I’d hesitate to say that I think any such absolute moral code really does exist. Introducing the idea of a philosophical or theological basis for morality and therefore governance might seem a very abstract notion. But actually, society itself does indeed have a background of shared moral value (however this has actually been derived) therefore it is not such an alien concept. People will, for instance, refer to some standard of fairness in discussions of all types, without (thankfully) having to justify where exactly this notion of fairness comes from!
If only, we might be thinking, things were not so polarised! If only there was more co-operation across the political spectrum. If only politicians treated each other with more respect! If only people listened to arguments and responded rationally and in terms of policy rather than merely reacting with aggression and personal insults! (But I have to say there is a certain sick voyeurism in the political fighting, back-stabbing, mud-slinging and abuse!)
You might say, given the way things are, we can but put forward our own views with a good deal of forcefulness and we should not see ourselves above deploying the kind of dirty tricks adopted by those who oppose us.
But, no! Granted, as things stand (and I’m thinking mainly UK and USA here) the types of constitutional reform I’ve described above seem desperately out of reach. But, call me naïve, I think that despite everything we are open to a story of a hero or a heroine to promote some of this change for us and as an alternative to the murky goings-on alluded to above. Such a one would be clear and forceful in their views, but would still treat their opponents with respect, no matter how despicable those opponents might actually be! So that is my modest hope – a political hero. Could we make it to at least that level of political competence? I hope. I hope….
