Democracy and Division
November 08, 2004
“According to the popular idea [democracy] is a form of government where the government does what the people want; and the people secure a government, which acts according to their interests, by participating in governmental procedure through the election of legislative representatives and executive and judicial officers who depend for their re-election on the conduct of affairs while they hold office. This is a fairly correct description of the structural side of democracy, and the only trouble with it is that the structural side does not mean very much. We know–through the efforts of the leading scholars who have analyzed the problems of parliamentarianism and popular representation in the last hundred years, through Hegel and Bagehot, through Grey and Renan, through Mosca, Pareto, Le Bon, and Max Weber–that the essential problem of a working democracy is not the vote of the people but the type of governing elite and its relation to the mass of the people. The election of men and the voting on issues is the last and relatively least important phase of the democratic process. The decisive question is, who shapes the issues and who presents the men?
“For the purpose of this study we may say roughly that the democratic quality of a government hinges on three points. (1) the type of the elite who shapes the issues, (2) the issues themselves, and (3) the state of mind in which a voter goes to the polls. The three problems are closely interwoven. The first condition of democracy is that the governing elite permit only issues to be shaped which do not stir up emotions too deeply and are not apt to produce an irreconciliable cleavage in the people. This requires, of course, an express or tacit gentleman’s agreement between the party leaders to refrain from vote-getting by stirring up emotions beyond a definite limit. It requires a relation of mutual confidence between the leaders that none of them will take undue advantage of the others by using unfair means of rabble-rousing in his favor. When a situation exists like that in Germany where the National Socialist party, even during the days of the Weimar Republic, persistently arrogated to itself the monopoly of fighting for national honor and resurrection and branded everyone else as a traitor to his country and a sub-human beast fit to be wiped out, democracy is gone, even though its forms are preserved and are used to gain power in a legal way.
“This brings us to the third point, the voter’s state of mind. When the voter is worked up to a state of hysterical frenzy by permanent unmeasured calumniation of the opponent, by constant appeal to and glorification of aggressiveness, by Jew baiting, etc., he is not a democratic voter even if he casts his vote as a secret, free vote. At least the classic democratic thinkers of the 18th century and the fathers of the constitution of this country [the United States] would not have acknowledged him as such. And he is even less a democratic voter when he casts the vote against his will because he knows what will happen to him if he does not.
“To summarize: The plebiscite is an effective screen pattern because the idea of democracy has become formalized, and because the opinion-shaping agencies such as newspapers, intellectual magazines, texts used in the educational organization, etc., seem not to be even aware that there is the problem of substantial as distinguished from formal democracy. The knowledge of the problem is reserved to types of men and literature who have no possibility of influencing opinion to a politically relevant degree.”
–From Eric Voegelin, “Extended Strategy: A New Technique of Dynamic Relations,” Journal of Politics 2 (1940): 189-200.
This is Democracy and Division in The Japery, a part of The New Pantagruel. Previously: Hows the Cows Wuz Humped | Next: The Church of England is for Sale | TrackBack (0) | Comments (0)
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