Why Do Democracies Fail?

From time to time I would take questions on a discussion page called Quora. A couple years ago I got a question sent my way titled “Why Do Democracies Fail.” It seems a lot of folks are tossing that one around of late so it struck me that this new blog site was a pretty apropos venue to post the answer I wrote back then.

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This is a good question but it requires one to first surmount the presumptions on what constitutes a “democracy”.

In reality, most accepted western “democracies” all really function in the manner as contemplated in a republic (which is generally accepted as a form of democracy) whereby significant powers are delegated to elected and appointed officials. The procedural dictates of how those parties are placed in their respective positions can vary. For example, in a parliamentary system the party in the majority is the party that runs the government. In a presidential system like the United States, one party can be in the majority while the other party holds the White House and the vast number of administrative functions underneath that branch respectively.

A pure form of democracy is probably better represented in scenes like the council meetings with Ten Bears in the movie Dances with Wolves or the famous oratories reflected in The trial and death of Socrates. But these are both social dynamics involving a far smaller voting bloc. It is much easier to have an entire tribe involved in deciding whether to wage war on a neighbor a couple of leagues on the other side of a valley when there are only a hundred or so engaged in the process. In the broader populations of nation states there is just no way to avoid the function of delegation, and once you cede a portion of your power the dominoes get harder to stand against the tip of that first domino.

There is no debating money and business interests pose a challenge to representative democracy but money and business are animals in every form of government so it is not sufficient to simply say democracies fail due to money, special interests and corruption. I hate to rely on a movie clip but there is a line in An American President by Michael Douglas that really captures this.

“America isn’t easy. America is advanced citizenship. You’ve gotta want it bad, cause it’s gonna put up a fight. It’s gonna say, you want free speech? Let’s see you acknowledge a man whose words make your blood boil whose standing center stage and advocating at the top of his lungs that which you would spend a lifetime opposing at the top of yours. You want to claim this land is the land of the free? Then the symbol of your country cannot just be a flag. The symbol also has to be one of its citizens exercising his right to burn that flag in protest. Now show me that, defend that, celebrate that in your classrooms. Then you can stand up and sing about the land of the free.”

Now, I get this is Hollywood but the words quoted above bear consideration and if we can’t get our heads wrapped around the first two phrases then it pretty much answers this question posed here. Democracies fail because people get tired, because they get apathetic, or because they get nervous and because they get scared. Democracies fail because people give up. But they also fail when the so-called government loses any credibility with the governed. This is a catch-22 because we like to believe, in a democracy, that the governed are the government. Which means democracies fail because the governed lose credibility within themselves.

I observed 2016 with very critical eyes and ears. If there is one mantra I heard again and again, in the 2016 race for the White House, it was the claim that this was an election focused more on the lesser of two evils. No shortage of pundits exclaimed that polls showed people were “settling” for the candidate they disliked the least.

Wow! Think about that because that is an indictment on the governed. This is a tough nut in a more polarized society which retreats to the comfort zones of the social media that reinforces each person’s individual confirmation bias. And, as Mark Twain allegedly said, “It’s easier to fool people than to convince people that they have been fooled.” The lesson is that when people surrender their own power of critical analysis to a Twitter feed any hope of “informed” choice in a democracy is severely diminished. The “truth” is not just how many “likes” one gets on Facebook, nor is it simply the number folks who show up at a rally.

When I was growing up there was this old coot at my church named Gene. He was a Noam Chomsky clone only he had less hair. He wore the same tired green blazer over the same ugly mustard yellow turtle neck every Sunday. He was as “left” and as “green” as you will find, and he never missed an opportunity to stand up right in the middle of a sermon to interrupt the preacher and remind everyone of the horrors of war and to fear any policy of government that would lend credence to armed conflict. While I was only a teenager at the time, I am nevertheless ashamed to admit I used to snicker at him and shake my head at his antics.

Then one day I saw Saving Private Ryan. The movie makes its point in the very beginning with the scene at Omaha Beach. As I watched the screen depiction of soldier after soldier cut down by bullets and shrapnel something hit me as hard as the bullets flying in the scene. Gene had been one of those infantry who landed on the beach that fateful day. He lived this nightmare I could only watch in celluloid. My heart sank at that moment as I realized I could never judge him again and I resolved to respect that man’s right to expel to his last dying breath his passionate cry that no man or woman ever be subject again to what he endured. I wouldn’t say I fully embraced his entire gamut of policy positions but I absolutely grew to admire his dedication to fight for them to his dying day.

That is part of what Michael Douglas’s fictional president meant when he said “America is advanced citizenship.” The survival of any “democracy” rests in how bad you want it and how many other folks feel that same passion.