The
Democratic Farce
Note: this is merely an excerpt taken from a rough draft of an essay that will appear in my forthcoming book, Visions of Reality. —Greg Nyquist
The
Florida Presidential election fiasco, which generated so much
controversy in its day, is now mostly forgotten. Only a few
unrepentant Leftists, bitter over George W. Bush’s accession to
the
Presidential office, still gripe about the 2000 election. Thus we
find Eric Alterman, columnist for
The Nation, speaking of the
President’s “proven political illegitimacy.”
And why, might we be
so bold to inquire, does Mr. Alterman consider Bush’s Presidency
illegitmate? Because, he smugly assures us, “we know that
Al Gore
. . . beat George Bush by roughly 537,000 votes nationally” and
“also
handily defeated him among legally cast votes in Florida.”
Yet
even so, we find Bush, and not Mr. Gore in the White House. What
does this say about the President’s “proven political
illegitmacy”?
Illegitimacy
is that plainly a subjective concept. A “legitimate”
President is
simply a President accepted by the overwhelming majority of the
country. Bush, whose approval rates have held between sixty and
eight percent since the terrorist attacks on September 11, easily
passes the test. Indeed, if we go by public approval rates, he
would appear more “legitimate” than his successor, Bill
Clinton.
It
is true that not everybody approves of President Bush. It is
among this crowd that one finds questions about the President’s
legitimacy. No one else cares about that Bush failed to win the
popular vote or the “legal” votes in Florida.
Legitimacy is a
state of mind. It has little if anything to do with technical
questions regarding suffrages and vote counting.
Nonetheless,
it is certainly understandable that Bush’s political enemies
should
desire to question his legitmacy. Disputed elections provide a
convenient pretext for such cavilings. But it is only when a
nation remains divided that such issues have any genunine
importance. Somebody has to win an election, one way or the
other. The problem of legitimacy only exists for those on the
losing side.
But
what about all this talk we hear of “sacredness” of
democracy? “The fiasco [in Florida] provides a rare
opportunity to rethink and improve our voting practices in a way that
reflects our professed desire to have ‘every vote count,’
opines Lani
Guinier in The Nation. Note the smugness of
Guinier’s
conviction. She writes of our “professed
desire”
to make “every vote count.” Whose “professed
desire” is she
referring to exactly? The readers of The Nation, or
everyone in general? I will assume she means all
“reasonable”
people. That is usually what people mean when they use
“we,”
“our,” or “us.” After all, who could
possibly be against making
every vote count? Perhaps a few stray reactionaries (mostly
fascists), but all decent men and womean, without question, believe in
the glorious credo of democracy, which can be summed up in
Guinier’s
conviction, never questioned, never analyzed, never even fully
comprehended, that every vote should count, regardless of the
circumstances. A government “of the people, by the
people,
for the people”—that, we are constantly told, is the only
“just”
government.
This
uncritical attitude towards democracy does little to shed light on the
phenomenon itself. It is all fine and good to pontificate about
the glories of democracy. But if we want to understand what
democracy means in terms of facts, rather than in terms of mere
rhetoric and emotion, we do well to look beyond all the sanctimony that
shrouds the word and fix our gaze on the political reality of the thing
itself. Democracy, as is obvious to anyone with eyes in their
head to see, clearly cannot mean government of the people, by the
people, for the people. In fact, there can be no greater
distortion of the facts than to describe democracy with this phrase,
for the simple reason that there is no such thing as “the
people.” Nations are made of individuals, not
“peoples.”
The term people is simply a vague description of individuals in
general. Because of its vagueness, it can be used as either the
subject or object of a sentence representing anything definite in
reality. Lincoln’s hackneyed phrase is little more than
eloquent
patter. As rhetoric, its value is immense; as science, its value
is zero.
Those
who confuse democracy with such phantom concepts as “General
Will,”
“the people,” “the public,” the “rank and
file,” etc. etc. are merely
spouting empty gibberish. No such entity exists. If it did,
democracy would be superfluous. The raison d’être of
democracy arises precisely because of heterogeneous nature of the
social order. The nation as a whole is not a unity, as democratic
rhetoric suggests, but a disunity, made up of various factions and
classes competing with one another for wealth and status. If this
disunity did not exist, if the social order were completely harmonious,
there would be no need for elections, ballot boxes, campaign speeches,
national conventions, legislatures, parliaments, plebiscites, or any of
the other vulgar trappings of democracy. If everyone in society
agreed, elections would be meaningless. Since there would only be
one collective will, shared by everyone, it wouldn’t matter who
was
elected. It would be far more efficient to select the government
on the basis of a random lottery. Indeed, if there such a thing
as a pure democracy “of the people, by the people, for the
people” were
really possible, a lottery would prove the most democratic method of
choosing the governing body of society. An election, by its very
nature, implies a disunity the body politic. It introduces
disagreement into the very heart of democracy.
Curiously,
few have noticed this salient fact. Democracy is almost
everywhere identified with elections. If things rather than words
had essences, then the essence of democracy would be representative
elections. No elections, no democracy — it’s as
simple as that.
Yet,
oddly enough, this view of democracy does not square with the
sentimental view that equates democracy with the will of the
people. I contend that the sentimental view is mistaken.
The will of the people is a fiction. No such thing exists.
Elections, however, do exist. To understand democracy, you must
first grasp the rationale of elections. What purpose do they
serve in society? What are the benefits and hazards of holding
them? Why are they important to a free society?
Right
off the bat we can shoot down the most common misconception about
elections. The purpose of democratic elections is not to
determine the will of people. Since no such thing exists, there
is no way an election could determine or express it. That should
be obvious from the start. But if the purpose of elections is not
to determine or express the will of people, than what is its purpose?
To
answer this question, we need to return to the problem of social
heterogenity. Consider the difficulty faced by every society,
especially “open society” characterized by widespread
heterogeneity of
beliefs and lifestyles. How does such a society go about making
political decisions, when its populace is so divided? On the one
side, we find the “far right” — the traditionalists,
the nationalists,
the fundamentalists. On the other side, we find the far Left
—
the radical professoriat, the chic artists, and other assorted
intellectual riffraff. In between you have an entire spectrum of
opinion, including bizarre combinations that borrow from both
extremes. It is clear that if everyone in society had to agree
before any kind of “collective” action was taken, public
policy would
be impossible. In order for a state to exist and function, it is
necessary that some solution be made to the problem of social
disagreement.
[This concludes the excerpt of the essay "Notes Toward a Theory of the Business Cycle"]
