What is Democracy?

What is Democracy?

O what fine thought we had because we thought
That the worst rogues and rascals had died out.
----- William Butler Yeats
from Nineteen Hundred And Nineteen.

When one comes to think of it, there are no such things as divine, immutable, or inalienable rights. Rights are things we get when we are strong enough to make good our claim on them.
---- Helen Keller

Recently I had the opportunity to take part in a program that was simply a discussion between myself and Zoe Weil of the Institute for Humane Education entitled “What is Education For?” I’ve talked about Zoe’s work in other essays, but this was the first time we had worked together in this way. The audience was invited to participate at all times.

Zoe began by presenting a plastic model of a fast food hamburger and asked the audience to name as many positives and negatives, as many ramifications, as they could that go into the production of such a hamburger before & after it is eaten. (A real one, not a plastic model.) Many things came up: Factory farming, cutting rain forests to graze beef, enormous amounts of corn and soybeans raised with chemicals & pesticides, a dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico from all the chemical runoff, billons of gallons of fresh water used for beef production, inhumane treatment of the animals, pollution by animal waste, poor nutrition, obesity, families not eating together, cars idling at drive thrus, cheap food, many calories for little money, a culture that cares much more for your money than your health. And many more. Zoe’s point was that every item in our consumer society needs to be looked at in this way. We need to look behind the mask of convenience to examine what’s really there. And that this way of thinking needs to be taught in our schools. Schools should not merely be grooming kids as facilitators of corporate profit when the results are dangerous to their health, the environment, and our communities.

When it was my turn to speak, I asked the audience a simple question, “What are the essential ingredients for a democracy to work? What are the things without which we can not have democracy?”

There was a pause while people began to think about it. Democracy is something we are lulled into taking for granted, not dissecting. But, one after another, key attributes were named:

1. Freedom of Speech. One woman said, “We’ve got to be able to speak our minds.” But immediately another woman said, “Yes, that’s important, but it may be more important that we are told the truth, that our press is truly free so that we know they have it in their interest for all the people to know the truth.” So, freedom of speech is as much about the freedom to be informed accurately as it is about freely speaking. And, after some discussion, we agreed that we can’t have democracy without a free press because the people, who are ultimately responsible for the actions of the government, can’t do their job if they aren’t informed accurately. And it was agreed that we do not now have a free press because the major media are owned by corporations whose financial interests are not in accurate information.

2. Accountability. Someone in the audience said that our laws have to be enforced fairly and evenly for everyone regardless of social or political position or rank. Democracy depends on fair laws being written and enforced. This is what we mean by “The Rule of Law.” When common people begin to suspect that powerful people are able to operate above or outside of the law, trust in democracy disappears. Cynicism grows. There is a great tendency among people in power to embrace a belief in the rule of law except when it is really needed. For instance, many of the actions and policies of the Bush administration ( and now the Obama administration) violated the Constitution and the Geneva Accords and the Nuremberg Principles about preemptive war, torture, surveillance, etc. Many of these laws are considered the most important laws we have. Breaking them is considered a crime against humanity. They are not being enforced now because it might not be politically expedient to do so. If the lawmakers don’t enforce the most important laws of a democracy, do you have a democracy?

3. Money. A man brought up that a democratic system can’t allow undue influence of money by campaign contribution or lobbying. If money gives rich people or corporations access to candidates and office holders that voters don’t have, democracy is lost. It’s as simple as that. And everyone agreed that we now have a system completely permeated in the election and governing process with special interest money and corporate power. I mentioned what Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis had once said, “You can have a democracy or you can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of the few. You cannot have both.”

4. Secrecy. Someone said, “Let’s assume that the government is by and for and of the people like Lincoln said. Then the people are the government. But how can the people be the government if the government keeps secret the information that it uses to make its decisions.?” Democracy then would depend on trust not on transparency. I told the audience that I had once a good friend who had spent many years in the CIA. He had told me that he thought secrecy was the enemy of democracy. A government based in secrecy is more like a benign monarchy than a democracy. It was agreed that our current government uses secrecy to hide its real motives rather than to protect our security.

5. Voting. It was brought up that most people think of voting as the cornerstone of democracy, that as long as they are able to go into a voting booth and freely select their leaders, democracy is working. It was pointed out, though, that voting doesn’t mean a lot if the people who are offered as candidates are not representing the real needs of the people, or offering real solutions to the problems. I think that most people at this meeting felt that the two party system has devolved into a one party system with a lot of rancor. Also, many people were skeptical of the vote counting in this country. We know that in the 2000 presidential election, and maybe the 2004 election, the votes were not counted accurately. With this question we came back to accountability. What does it mean in a democracy when it becomes clear that an election was stolen and/or rigged and nothing is done about it?

6. Education. This meeting was held in a school and it was easily agreed that we can’t have a democracy without well educated people, people who seek the truth, people not easily manipulated by fear or propaganda, people who can differentiate between policies meant to help them and policies meant to exploit them. Uneducated people are easy prey for tyrants.

7. Citizenship. The consensus of the meeting was that the only thing that might guarantee the maintenance of a viable democracy is citizenship. The people must always see it as their obligation to be involved in civic affairs. One of the most important aspects then of education is the teaching of citizenship.

8. Courage. We talked about the propensity of every form of society and social organization to get mired in the status quo ---- leaving power and decision making (and profit) to those who take it. This is why good citizenship almost always takes courage. As Jim Hightower says, “The opposite of courage is not cowardice, it’s conformity.”

9. In conclusion we were rather surprised to agree that by the benchmarks that we had established, the United States does not have a democracy. It was asked then, what do we have? We weren’t sure. I said that few governments ever live up to their own ideals, but if we were ever to have a government resembling a democracy, it would depend first on citizenship and courage.

10. If there are teachers reading this, I would suggest that you lead your students in a similar inquiry into the fundamentals of democracy. I would be interested to hear what they come up with.