The Failure of Democracy

It is an indisputable fact that ‘democracy’ is failing around the world, with many of the institutions of democracy not meeting the ideals of the system, and even the most ‘democratic’ nations showing increasing signs of at least some elements of dictatorships.  Why is that?

There are many apparent reasons for the phenomenon.

One of the major reasons is the Party system.  Under this system, members of the electorate band together to form a union of voters.  The union then chooses who their representatives will be, and these representatives then choose their delegates who will select the candidates for the Parliament, Congress or other legislative body.  The process of the choice at each of these levels is hardly democratic.  It is subject to influences that have little or nothing to do with the suitability of the candidate to represent that section of the electorate, with the inherent honesty of the candidate, with a proven ability to understand the essence of an argument, with the legal knowledge to take into account the effects of proposed actions on the rights of the voters, or with the economic understanding required to ensure that the policies do, in fact, promote the good of the community as a whole.  It is subject to emotive advertising, which, in turn, is subject to the funding available to the Party, funding which, in the main, comes from organisations desiring to buy favour with the Party which is elected.  The process of election is fraught with many threats to the essence of democracy.  It is almost designed to ensure that the real desires of the electorate, unformulated as they generally are, are frustrated by their representatives.

Once the representatives are in a position to make the policies and laws they desire, the electorate is generally totally removed from the process.  There is no effective control of the laws that are made by those governed.  That is a fact that is desired by those in power, who use the anonymous processes of the formulation of laws and their passing into legislation to create systems and conditions that are desired by those controlling the purse strings.  The only so-called control lies in the re-election process every four or five years, a process which is, once again, subject to the same dictatorial controls as previously.  Until then, someone in the Party decides what the laws or policies will be, and that decision is imposed on the representatives, the threat being that failure to toe the Party line will result in their nomination for re-election next time being reviewed in the light of any dissenting votes.  When was the last time that any representative cast a vote against the Party line in any matter of importance to the Party?  What that tells you is that the ‘democracy’ exists only on paper, not in fact.  The Constitutions of the countries are generally good on paper, but that is where they stay.  In reality, most democracies are in fact dictatorships, controlled by the Party bosses, and the representatives of the electorate are in fact seldom better than stooges for the Party bosses.

In practice, laws are passed by a majority of representatives, most of whom do not bother to read the laws or to understand their purpose or implications.  Laws are heaped upon laws, making a legislative mess, in which the vast majority of citizens are wittingly kept in the dark.  The quantity of new laws passed every year, piling on those already in existence, is such that no ordinary citizen is able to know the meaning and intention of every law, and even specialist lawyers are bound to read and reread the laws applying to their field each time they are confronted with a new set of facts.  That mess is compounded by the fact that most laws permit the Minister (read: the civil servants dealing with the matter) to make regulations which have the force of law, and it is not unusual for these regulations to be retained as internal documents, unavailable to the people affected by them.  To make it worse, the regulations are then read in the light of ‘internal policies’.  As an example, the Public Health Act of South Africa imposes on the Police the obligation to assist a citizen who makes a statement under oath that a close friend or relative is suffering from a serious mental disturbance, taking the affected person to a suitable health care facility.  The Police have a policy that no person may be taken into custody for any purpose, even to prevent the suicide of that person or a threat to the public that may result from the mental delusions of that person, unless that person has actually committed an offence.  The effect is that the internal policy of the Police overrides an Act of Parliament!  In this situation, the legal presumption that the average citizen knows and understands the laws and regulations that affect him is impossible to achieve in real life, with the effect that thousands of members of the public each year breach one or more of the multitudinous laws in existence, and can be punished by the Courts for an offence that he or she did not know of.

The South African Constitution is touted by politicians as ‘the best Constitution in the world’.  The problem with this statement is that the people who make that claim have seldom read the Constitution with intelligence, and even more seldom applied their minds to the real meaning of the detail in the light of the real world.  Almost none of them have read any other Constitution.  It is clear to any thinking person that the South African Constitution bears the fingerprints of the political parties, the Trade Unions and impractical idealists, each one heavily influenced by political theories without any understanding of the real-world working of those theories.  It fails to consider the implications of its clauses and the rights they grant and the obligations they impose when they are confronted by the greed and self-interest of the politicians who will be called on to implement them as they interpret them, or the fact that the implementation will be done at the hands of dishonest politicians and Party bosses who have only their own interests in mind.  While it is a flagrant example of poor legislation, of being written by people with their own interests in mind, the South African Constitution is not the only example of a failure of the basic law of a land to meet the needs of the day.  The American Constitution was drafted at a time when the population of the entire country was about the size of a present-day large city, when transport was by horse and buggy, when a message was transported, sometimes for weeks at a time, by the Pony Express, when Adam Smith was unknown, when the largest company in the country was smaller than any one of the Fortune 500 companies, and when the biggest threat facing the country was a possible invasion by England or France.  Practically none of the conditions facing the country today could have been imagined at that time.  Perhaps the biggest threat to a just Constitution that existed then and still exists today was the fact that big money was able to make its presence known.  The British Constitution is equally defective, largely because it does not exist as a single document or law, but is a collection of precedents and practices and a collection of laws.  No more glaring example of the deficiencies of this system exists than the promise, made by the British Prime Minister during the debates on the desire of the Scottish people to secede from the Union, to ‘allow the Scottish Parliament more power in deciding matters related to Scotland’.  Could this be a democracy?

If all this is so, is there a country in which true democracy is practiced?  The answer, fortunately, is yes.  Switzerland is a truly democratic State.  Each law is subject to the approval of the people, not only once every four or five years, but as it is passed.  It is not possible for a political Party to sneak a new law into existence under the radar, as happens so often elsewhere.  The politicians are made aware, with the passing of each new law, what the desires of the people really are.

That, of course, shows up one of the major causes of the collapse of democracy.  As a country grows, its citizens become increasingly divorced from the people who represent them in the making of new laws, and from the process, systems and institutions that give effect to those laws.  This is clearly to the liking of the politicians, who enjoy the freedoms they gain from public control of their actions almost as much as they enjoy the increasing scale of the pot of wealth for them to plunder.  How many voters have a month-to-month contact with their representatives?  How many actually know who their representatives are?  And how many of the comments and requests made by the voters to those representatives are actually taken back to Parliament or Congress, to be given effect to?  The answer to these questions is a resounding ‘none’, and the result is that the voters no longer believe that they are able to have any meaningful voice in Parliament or Congress.  They express that belief by ignoring the actions of the legislators on their behalf, and by failing to vote.  The legislation of the country has drifted into the hands of the Party bosses, the dictators who manipulate the laws and the sentiments of the country to ensure their election, using public funds, taxpayers’ money, to do it.  The Civil Service has taken on a life of its own, with only minimal accountability for their actions to the Ministers, and none at all to the public, who pay their salaries.  The State has grown to be a giant grey cloud, overshadowing the tiny, helpless citizen. 

It is no wonder that internal terrorism has grown dramatically, as quickly as the regulations and bodies set up to ‘protect the citizens’ have grown.  The citizens are increasingly estranged from the threatening State which no longer represents them or serves their needs, or gives effect to their desires.