Contra Democracy?

Or perhaps a democracy that actually works ...

The nature of British politics (the best account of it remains Ralph Miliband's Capitalist Democracy in Britain ((1982) if you can find a copy) is dependent on a peculiar unwritten constitution. This gives something like dictatorial powers to whoever commands a majority in the House of Commons, subject only to laws (which are reversible as Brexit showed) imposed by previous administrations who had commanded such a majority. The implications of this are barely discussed because it seems we have all decided that life inside the Matrix is vastly more preferable to facing our own political condition as the masking of a nightmare.

There are constraints on this dictatorial power, of course, including the implicit power of the population to riot and resist en masse ((which helps to explain the panicked authoritarian response recently of our prosecutorial Prime Minister), the power of capital to withdraw itself from financing public debt and private investment, the vague influence of 'public opinion' expressed as both the opinion of journalists and the ranting and emotional outbursts of an internationalised social media, the social engineering instincts of white collar managers and intellectuals, the defence and intelligence dominance over the country expressed through the 'special relationship' and through complex networks of international alliance which are barely noted by the Commons, the mysterious role of the Crown and so on and so forth ... but, so long as it can handle the consequences, the monopoly of force and the power to conscript, oblige and constrain remains firmly in the hands of a few people who only have to enforce the compliance of a majority in the House of Commons (a few hundred men and women) between elections to exert those powers.

This is called a democracy although, in fact, it is oligarchical rule operating through competing networks of professional politicians who have no incentive to change anything in the system unless they can do so to increase the chances of becoming apex predators in a game of control over patronage and policy. The limits should mean that the rules of the game foreclose any chance of civil war and this is a benefit that we will admit. Benign tyranny is always going to be preferable to the sectarian warlordism we might see if this system broke down over night. However, such powers tend to encourage ‘democratised’ authoritarianism to cope with each successive crisis as it is created by the system’s own ‘internal contradictions’. The political class since the eighteenth century has never been so happy as when its self importance is magnified by external warfare.

Yet politics remains a curious game. A largely passive population observes it at a distance as a form of entertainment, sometimes as a blood sport, in which a component takes the same tribal interest in it as they might take in supporting a football team. If engaged enough and frustrated by the administrative system, they can 'write a letter' to their MP with the implicit threat of that MP losing their vote at the next election but the MP will generally feel safe in calculating whether that threat is real or not and acting accordingly. It rarely is. All the MP has to care about is that his party machine will be on hand for election day and that the Government he supports or the Party he supports on the path to Government (and to personal patronage in many cases) does not screw things up in the mean time.

The active political class includes activists and intellectuals. Activists are always a problem for professional politicians. They make demands in return for their service in sustaining the politician's power that are often fantastic, potentially unpopular with the voters and time-consuming. In general, the political class is reasonably effective at allowing the activists to let off steam and yet ensure they have only a moderate influence on the conduct of Government. The intellectuals (which term does not imply intelligence but merely an education sufficient for some to get access to the means of communication for their 'ideas') are not unimportant yet are fundamentally no less impotent than the general population. Like activists, they can be an embarrassment or an irritation but often they can be used through flattery to manipulate the general population (those who criticise the system at a fundamental level are exuded from it). In return, their 'ideas' can sometimes be used to manage the population or even solve a genuine problem by generalist politicians whose only core skill is 'politics'. This is the world of policy wonks and think tanks, job creation schemes for people who probably could not manage the proverbial whelk stall. In this sense, politicians are simply administrators of opinions in their relation to the actual exercise of administrative power, most of which is actuallu out of the power of the political class, at least on an every day basis, regardless.

The total system works (insofar as ‘working’ means its maintenance as a system) a bit like money or religion - if you believe in it and do not question it, it survives no matter how inept it is, how unjust and unfair, how corrupt and how many people it ends up killing through warfare. To survive, it simply has to be insufficiently inept, unjust or corrupt for the mass of the population not to notice enough to take to the streets or to result in a capital strike or a foreign invasion. It has to ensure that the wars it undertakes are just on the right side of 'justification' through some narrative about itself that the intellectual class can adhere to even as it may criticise the war performatively as if the State honestly gave a stuff what they think as soon as they go off message. This is rather like the technique of the Wizard of Oz. Everything certainly depends on no one questioning 'liberal democracy' as democratic, as effective, as just in its conduct and as honest and wholly operative in the interests of the voters.

The problem for anyone who wants a truly democratic, effective, just and honest system is that, apart from the obvious issue of the many very different interpretations of what these terms mean, the entire system, whose very nature results in party oligarchies fixed in relatively small conspiracies of interest, is inherently inept in an age of technological complexity. Those who rise to the top will also and often lack any form of moral compass or capacity to stand against the conformity required to maintain the system. Liberal democracy now mimics the structure of the contemporary corporation to the point where even the elected representatives seem to be under the cosh of something like Human Resources. Like Oz, this system is believed in, by custom, habit, laziness and delusion, by the majority of the population until someone is prepared to tear away the curtain or take the red pill.

Any force wanting change (towards their own definition of competence and decency, let alone 'interest') cannot progress without becoming exactly like that which it seeks to displace. It has to play by regulations and laws that force any challenger ultimately not merely into compromise but acceptance of public acceptance of the system and of the need to make use of an often irrational activist base in tension with the general population. It has to accept the informal but important powers that restrain change and it needs to create its own political cadre that eventually attracts those without moral compass or any other skills than political manipulation and overweening ambition.  It also has to ‘believe in’ Parliament and believing in Parliament is effectively believing in Oz.

In other words, some sort of change is possible if an organised alternative can persuade enough people, raise enough funds and have sufficient intellectual base to know what to do with power when it acquires it - and can hold to a critique of the current form of representative democracy that cannot be interpreted legally as ‘overthrowing the State’ or ‘terrorism’. It remains ‘reformist’ while, in fact, being revolutionary but in a bluntly populist and democratic form that accepts that the revolution is not one of training the guns of HMS Belfast on Big Ben but of a long process of disciplined transformation of the political system against forces fighting for their own existential survival. As we write, ‘liberal democrats’ are seeking to overturn a democratic decision in the Caucasus. A ‘liberal democrat’ is always a liberal before they are a democra: its animal commitment to survival in office is as strong here as it is amongst anyone else.

The capacity to effect change necessarily includes understanding and handling the external pressure points on the system. The activist Left has been notoriously bad at this but the worst example of failure in this respect actually comes from the Centre-Right and the abysmal handling of a highly tuned and complex capitalist economy by Prime Minister Truss. Already we can see the barriers to change as formidable. Yet we have nothing but the promise of continuing ineptitude, risks to the lives and livelihoods of at least some of our citizens (actually subjects of the Crown) as the fruits of a morally disgraceful foreign policy, scandals, discontent, decline and despair and all because no one is prepared to face the facts that a) our current form of liberal democracy (essentially a nineteenth century constitution with a twentieth century state attached) is no longer truly fit for purpose and b) that it could only be made fit for purpose by dealing decisively with the incompetence, ignorance and greed of the political class of all parties and with the self importance and increasing absurdity of the national intellectual class. Americans may adjust that assessment by referring to a vibrant twenty-first century State trapped in an eighteenth century Constitution.

Of course, the answers given to this assessment are that, first, for all its issues, contemporary liberal democracy is our least worst option (the argument of Winston Churchill) and, second, that, given everything written above, it is utopian to believe that human nature will change and that a) the public at large will understand their situation, b) the activist class will learn to understand the pragmatic limits on their aspirations, c) the intellectual class can rise above their class interest and develop a concern for the whole rather than for the 'idea' and d) the political class will abandon their goodies without a fight that could only make things worse. 

Honestly, while the first argument has no intrinsic merit 'all things being equal', the second set of arguments should be taken far more seriously. It is true that the political class has cornered the acquisition of power at the expense of the community and that it will do anything (including banging up emotional pensioners and arresting journalists) to retain that power. It is true that there are too many 'intellectuals' for the resources available to them and that they are at severe threat from the rise of artificial cognitive intelligence so the last thing that we can expect from them is a critique of their own situation and value. It is true that excitable single issue, ideological and party activists, hyper-fuelled by social media, will continue to rant and rage impotently and yet be ignored by the political class because, well, this is who they are. Without them it is equally true that the political class really would ride rough-shod over the rest of us. They may often irritate but at least they are raising questions and issues even if they collapse too often into baboon-like subservience to the alpha class of politicians. And it is true that the population at large is detached from the practice of politics, that it rants and raves when it feels like it without actually doing anything and that it tends to follow the line of Wyndham Lewis in accepting the art of being ruled.

So there we have it - a nation truly trapped by its history. Having rejected revolution in 1926, its history is one of compromise and decline with effective change (such as the welfare state or, on the other side, the creation of a vibrant but wholly self-centred private sector economy) relying wholly on small elites emerging with a vision that can capture a party and persuade the public to buy the offer and let that party run with it for a few years. A change happens but then a different sort of decline sets in as we lurch from one paradigm to another without any planned process of learning by doing what new special interests need taming in the collective interest. Thatcher radicalises and Blair merely tries to put a painted human face on things instead of humanising what had happened.

If there is discontent amongst our population, it is perhaps arising from the sense that our political elite has inconveniently itself exposed the reality of Oz by not maintaining the curtain in place, of being too obviously a bunch of inadequate chancers who have systematically allowed all the external special interests, including overseas interests, who have built up their power base since the 1950s to constrain the ability of the nation to be a nation. It thus becomes logical for Scotland to wonder what it is doing trapped in the nightmare instead of developing a nightmare of its own. Nevertheless, the public probably quite liked the rule of Oz so long as it believed in it so that the process of tearing away that curtain over the last three decades indicates the depth of our elite’s stupidity. A system can carry on for ever if its cogs and components never question its purpose or reliability but years of mounting ineptitude and neglect (of which the sewage situation is symbolic) can now be attributed to both major parties and as inherent, as a potential continuation of the state of affairs into the future, within all the parties now represented in Parliament.

Perhaps a degree of pessimism may be in order here. It looks as if we are stuck for nearly five years with a weak government which inherited a mess from a long series of inept governments but which has no strategy for national regeneration beyond trying to be a competent version of what its predecessors were. Yet this ‘minding the house’ approach fails to understand that our political class is generically incompetent because of its very nature, faced with a world whose complexity defeats it. Changing captains on the Titanic makes little difference in the long run. The entire structure is flawed. Nothing will change until new parties arise that understand this and are not simply attempting a mutiny and to capture the bridge of the ship without the skills to steer it. Nor is this to be interpreted as an authoritarian and anti-democratic analysis because it is our current system that is authoritarian and anti-democratic when a massive majority in the House of Commons is based on the votes of only a fifth of potential voters and a third of actual voters. 

The answer lies not in more 'policy' to be applied within a broken system where the welfare state is badly managed (although everyone on the Left is trying to deny this) and the private sector is narcissistic and incapable of thinking in terms of national survival but in giving primacy to massive institutional change to create a much more representative democracy detached from party. This must be structured to contain and educate the instinct for activism away from single issues and emotional outrage and towards functional problem-solving within a framework of 'shared moral compass' ((like not contributing to the means by which children are being killed in refugee camps which is just plain wrong whatever the ‘intellectual’ justification) . As to the 'intellectuals' in general, they may soon be surplus to requirements as a class if they are not technicians and engineers if only because artificial cognition is going to displace most of them - the alternative should be to enable every citizen to be his or her own intellectual, contributing in their own interest, family and community, no longer just observers of a system collapsing before our eyes but active participants in its revival. In short, and I know this is a tall order but the Romanovs and Habsburgs thought they had jobs for life, we must dispose of all the current parties in Parliament and put in a structure that means that they can have no function - instead, our representatives will be us and people drawn from us.