The End Game for Democracy?

What a mess Europe is in politically. Last week two governments fell, as a direct consequence of the Euro crisis. This sort of thing usually only happens during wars or in the run up to wars. And the impotence of the political leaders is stunning. They can all see where they are heading. Most of them can see how to escape. But collectively they are unable to stem the tide.

How did we get here? One thing that caught my attention was the Greek prime minister’s call for a referendum. The poor chap had his career finished over this call, and, to be fair, his timing could be questioned. But wasn’t this one of the few honest acts in the whole charade? He had a democratic mandate from two years ago. He had used it to its limit, trying to find ways out of an inherited mess and to do deals with creditors and partners. It was clear to him that his mandate was expiring, since the packages he came up with were not accepted on the streets and were leading to slow paralysis of the state.

So he called a referendum, in an attempt to shore up his mandate. He had a good question to ask, since he had just negotiated a landmark deal. He had something to gain, since a yes vote would have enabled him to face down the protesters and start reform properly. And the people should have been able to see the consequence of their choice.

So he took a brave step. And was immediately vilified by his so called democratic partners, with a stunning hypocrisy. The British press call for European referenda all the time, about the most ill- defined issues, yet someone else calling a referendum was not acceptable. In the end the elites completed a coup, and followed it up with a second coup in Italy later in the week. In both cases, the new leaders are bankers. Ah, bankers. The very people who got us in the mess in the first place.

In the short term we will all probably muddle through. Pundits and politicians lazily refer to the abyss, or meltdown, or some other term for a disastrous endpoint from which there is no return. Yet no one really tries to describe what such an abyss would feel like. Argentina had such an abyss ten years ago. Anyone with savings got badly burned, and for a while it was hard to find a job. Then the country started to recover, and now is arguably better off than it would have been if it had muddled through. I am not sure that such a thing as an abyss exists, and one of the reasons the Greeks were not allowed to have their referendum was that they knew it.

In the longer term, the casualty may well be democracy. It was also struck by an Economist quote this week, where it was made clear that there was never any democratic intent behind the EU, even when it started as a small trading block. “Ordinary Europeans see Brussels as remote and elitist. As it happens, the European project was like that from the very beginning”. What a statement that is. The article defends the project as inspired statehood, a way to defend the people from themselves and to avoid a third spiral into war. Fair enough, but let’s not call it democracy, then.

And the long term consequence may be the very spiral it was trying to avoid. Look at the anti-elite parties all over Europe now. Surely these will all grow as a direct result of the crisis. Look at the protesters on our streets. They will surely find a voice in anti-elite parties eventually. This is not a movement of some thugs any more, it is people like us, the 99%.

Yet the politicians continue to lie, and to make no attempt to win over their citizens with any logic. Virtually every elite party in Europe queues up to blame Brussels, at the same time as knowingly ceding power. They have their cake, and they eat it. But in the end there will be no cake left for anyone. They consistently champion democracy, while eschewing it.

Is the US any better? Arguably, it is worse. Their economic fundamentals are even worse than ours, only hidden away by the elites because an abyss for them (at least the elite them) would even be more unthinkable than an abyss for us. Their social fundamentals are clearly worse than ours. And their politics is even more cynical and even more dysfunctional, dominated only by money and media access. And the cheerleaders for freedom invade others at will, and have intelligence agents undermining societies globally. At least they have to answer for their wars in their sham elections every so often, the clandestine stuff is wholly unanswerable. Should we be pleased or scared by the Americans managing to stymie the Iranian computer systems? I am not sure.

So our system is dead, while our leaders still champion it. I am not promoting other systems of national governance, since they all seem to fail too. There is still wisdom in Churchill’s quote that democracy is the worst form of government except for all those others that have been tried. But let us at least start being honest about it. There are alternatives, and soon we will need them.

We don’t run companies by democracy. We don’t run Churches by democracy. We don’t run families by democracy. Those institutions have lasted as long as most countries. We now have such powerful technology available, and education is so widespread, that models that were previously infeasible become interesting. We could probably take the best from the models used by each of those institutions and create something strong.

Perhaps this is what the 99% are saying, much derided by the elite for being directionless and without coherent solutions. They (we?) might simply be declaring the imminent end of the current Western system, called democracy, but in practice rule by an elite and high finance. I get annoyed when multinational corporations get blamed for everything, for they are usually quite honest in their methods and their goals. But finance as an industry is another thing. Banks and bankers have not come through this era well. Nor have politicians.

A friend last week told me to stop observing and stop moaning about this crisis, but to come up with some ideas. Now that is a tough ask. But I’ll have a go, next blog. As long as there is time, before we all fall into the abyss. All ideas are welcome.