Democracy: Good or bad? To adopt or purge?

11/11/2022

The adoption of Democracy has long been seen as a major positive political decision among those in the West. Yet, time and time again, Westerners complain about issues endemic to Democracy, or at least the democratic system, if it can be called that, that prevails within Western countries.

The system adopted within Western countries, perhaps with the biggest exception being Switzerland, is a system of (nearly) fully indirect democracy. This means that instead of people voting directly on the issues, laws, decisions, etc. that to them concern, representatives are elected through lists, usually parties, that convene at a parliament or similar place to vote on those subjects, representing the electorate that elected them.

The major problem within this system is the fact that these representatives don't necessarily need to, and a lot of the times outright don't, represent the will of those that voted for them. In fact, if they are elected in order to simplify the voting process, as every single citizen voting on every single issue would be a bureaucracy and logistics nightmare, then the system assumes that the individual voter agrees fully with the programme of the party they just voted in. The problems start when we realize that not only voters almost never fully agree with the party they vote in, but that the party reserves the right to change their opinions and/or stances on issues after they got the votes in the ballot box counted.

A simple reply as to why this would be impossible to actually occur would be that parties need to preserve their electorate for the next elections, so they can never change their stances wildly, as that would lead to them losing the votes. This is easily dismissed by observing that most countries have merely two or three parties that can actually win elections; as such, even if a party actually messes up in a way that they lose the next election, the system will simply lead them to win an election eventually, thus removing any real edge to the election and democratic process. In fact, when there is an actual change in the party that wins an election, that is, the party is ouside of the usual two or three, it is usually either a party that defends the same principles of those other parties, and a party that defends far-right ideologies.

This is an important point to also consider: the problem that indirect democracy creates for itself, be it corruption, misrepresentation of the electorate, political indifference, political decision that borderline on suicidal made for the purpose of gaining votes from the uneducated public, often lead to the rise of far-right, anti-system parties promising big, radical changes. A great example is France, where the far-right National Front has seen a massive rise in popularity, Sweden, where a former disgraced and mocked Neo-Nazi party is now essential to the government's operations, and Italy, where the far-right won the elections outright.

After this, the problem is apparent: the current system leads to the rise of two main forces;

• A block of centrist parties who defend absolute political drivel, promising things that will never be delivered, almost never changing anything;
• Far-right forces crafting their meteoric ascension by simply waiting for the usual political screw ups and piling upon them.

Adding to this the fact that for a system that is supposed to simplify and agilize the decision making process, indirect demcoracy is still hellishly slow in moving anything forward, thus always giving an advantage to non-democratic systems, we are left with the conclusion that indirect democracy is not only a tyranny, in this case, a tyranny of how many people are sitting in parliament in opposition to the usual tyranny of one, but the inferior tyranny out of those two when it comes to almost any part of the decision making process. That being said, a tyranny is still a tyranny, at the end of the day.

The solution to this problem is extremely intricate and depends on the specific circumstances of any single place on Earth, but it always rests on one major point: the decentralization of power must be extended much more broadly. Not only would this give people the actual power to decide upon themselves, remove large amounts of the potential that a typical democracy has of the power landing in the hands of fascists and authoritarians, and agilize the process because someone making something happen for their specific town will always be faster than some big shot sitting at a desk in the capital city actually getting around to it.

Is this solution easy to implement? Most certainly not. But indirect democracy is a disgrace of a system only being kept around because of its biggest strenght: being able to fool the People that it is actually the best system out there. So, maybe it may not be time to kill it outright, but it's certainly time we start planning its funeral.