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Sunday, February 06, 2005Several days old, but still worth noting: Cicero took another run at the utility of democracy question, asking why we bother to vote, giving the unlikeliness that our vote will make the difference.It seems pertinent, given my post below on Iraqi democracy, so I'll restate what constitutional democracy is and isn't for. It isn't to give full voice to the people. It is to create a relatively stable structure in which natural or God-given rights can be protected. The particular appeal of democracy is not that the people can vote, nor that they have power. Its appeal is that it screws up all the old power equations enough that tyranny becomes very tricky to manage. The old bit about "some of the people all the time and all the people some of the time..." applies. Individuals may not shape society by voting, but the mass of men can make the pendulum swing hard and fast enough back and forth that those who would "lead" are given strong incentive not to rustle too many feathers. Which means that if you start out with a system with some fundamental rights enshrined, they're unlikely to erode. Furthermore, they're likely to expand as leaders seek to curry favor. Once expanded, it's tough to put the genie back in the bottle, so democracy, if sustained, becomes a tool for ensuring that people are given a framework in which to become who they truly are so long as they don't infringe this right among others in the process. (And lo, the major arguments in our society today, from gay marriage to abortion to greater aid to the poor center less on what we, as individuals, can or must do, but on how we want other people to be or act.) The value of an Iraqi democracy, likewise, would not be that it gave the mass of the people authority to rule Iraq, but that it would break down the sort of monolithic authority that has made it and other Middle East states such a mess, and turn submission to Allah into a matter of conscience in which the state has no business. All hail democracy, with its messiness, its inefficiencies and its tangles of competing interests. The value of a good constitutional democracy is not that it gives the people power, but that it keeps anyone and everyone from gaining the kind of power most any other system allows, which leaves greater room for individual freedom and growth. 
posted by gbarto at 3:33 PM |
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