Columnists
The death of democracy
So the tennis season has ended with a glorious victory for Canada, and it is now time to turn our attention to politics. We’ve got a federal election here at home, the Democratic candidates for US president are having at one another and the field is narrowing, and Boris Johnson will get his wished-for election in the UK sooner or later. It should be a great time for democracy.
But a cloud has entered the scene. A report in the online magazine Politico raises the troubling assertion that democracy is done for, according to a paper delivered this past summer by American political science professor Shawn Rosenberg to the International Society of Political Psychologists.
According to Rosenberg, elites—who managed, or advised on the management of the tricky business of day-to-day democracy— have lost their influence and the floor has been turned over to the uninformed and intellectually lazy. People have thus turned to simplistic right wing solutions. The result will be that “in well-established democracies like the United States, democratic governance will continue its inexorable decline and will eventually fail.”
Rosenberg argues that to live in a functioning democracy requires work—thoughtfulness, discipline and logic—and respect for others and their views, Yet human beings are wired with biases and look for confirmation of those biases. Social media allows demagoguery to make an end run around the moderating influence of elites. And all that right wing populist movements demand is the abandonment of critical thinking in favour of loyalty. Ironically, it’s fulsome democracy that has allowed social media to spread its elitebashing tentacles.
You don’t have to agree with Rosenberg’s conclusion that functioning democracy as described above is dying, in order to accept his assertion that democracy is hard work. Just take a look at Britain. Voters were asked a “simple” question: “Do you want to leave the EU?” Yet implementing the result of the referendum is proving to be anything but simple. Who knew that the prospect of a hard Irish border and a second and successful Scottish secession referendum would be the prickly problems that would face those whose job it was to implement Brexit, never mind the existential threat it presents to the Conservative party itself. People take to the streets to yell “We voted for it, now get on with it.” Yet it has taken many possible forms, and if it were simple to get on with, it would already have been gotten on with.
It is beyond my pay grade to hold forth on the importance of elites in a modern democracy. But I do like the approach taken by Steven Pinker in his book Enlightenment Now. He frames the issue not in terms of class, but in terms of expertise. He calls for a renewed respect for knowledge derived from the scientific method, which will enable steps to be taken to address problems. How can the challenge be described? What is the evidence before us? What solutions are known to address the problem? Let’s experiment and record the results. And then, if the outcome is what we hoped for, let’s see if they can be replicated. The dogmatic approach is out of the question.
The funny thing is that people are quite selective: they’ll defer to the expertise they do like and challenge that which they don’t. I don’t see many people challenging the ability of NASA to send a spacecraft to Mars, yet when a United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change tries to present a consensus model of the foreseeable future, its work is dismissed as a hoax.
If you do accept that elites play a valuable role in democratic society, then two other issues beg to be addressed. The first is: instead of blaming social media for everything, ask to what extent elites contributed to their own superfluity—by failing to ensure that government was government to benefit all and not just the elites. This was essentially the pitch that got Donald Trump elected (Vladimir Putin aside). A lot of history has yet to be written about this. The second is: if elites are so essential to a functioning democracy, but have been knocked off their pedestal, how do they get back on it? If we are hardwired in our biases, can you appeal to reason alone? Will it take a mass contagion of some sort to convince the average person to give elites another chance?
And what are we to do with the political season now upon us? The simple answer is to do the heavy lifting of our democratic duty, as Rosenberg suggests, and engage with the process, employing thoughtfulness, discipline and logic, and respect for others and their views. To do anything less would make us complicit in a less than satisfactory outcome.
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