Policy Bytes: Of Democracy

There are dozens of variants of democracy. However, in almost all cases, the idea is that some significant measure of influence over the policies of government and their implementation falls to the body politic. Usually, the idea is that all members of a society are enfranchised equally in political terms.

This may not be a good idea for various reasons. Apparently the world's leading democracies think so. That's the reason for everything from representative democracy (MPs representing voters), to Westminster parliament, to the American electoral college.

In any case, Western nations like the US and Australia do not have real democracies. Democracy is more than just electoral roles, voting machines, and parliamentary procedures.

The fact that social democrats recognise that the media is what makes the difference in an election is enough to prove this. If corporations, media, huge finance (including individuals with huge finance), and delusional, infidelophobic megacult institutions can all control the outcomes of elections, then you don't have any kind of #democracy. Not participatory democracy, anyway.

And that is apart from the enduring farce of two-parties-as-one duopoly.

We've known since at least the work of Alexis de Tocqueville that the tyranny of the majority can be a problem. There is a sense in which participatory democracy's own failure is built into it. At the very least it requires constant, and very strong, maintenance. Else the agency of the body politic will be supplanted with, and subverted by, institutions like megacults, with their delusional, atavistic memetic narratives and memes.

How do you know if your democracy is a failure? It is easy to tell. If science is maligned and demeaned, but delusional megacults like Christianity are elevated and esteemed and are what really influence the foreign and domestic policies of the nation: then your democracy has failed in every way that matters.

If your Prime Minister has a male, unbelief-hating, omniscient imaginary friend: your democracy has failed.

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