Just What is Democracy?

Just what is democracy?
If you were to define it, the definition would inevitably fail because there is too much behind the word.

With a word used so often, and in some very prominent contexts, it is worth taking some time to reconsider what the word signifies.
 Begin by saying it: “democracy”— touch the syllables on your tongue and “taste” them, paying attention to your body as your mind connects the word with meaning, for mind and body are both the same person. Notice the your own aesthetic reaction — a gut feeling we all get from such a charged word, not just the sounds or the look of the word itself, but from our compounded associations that give the word shades of meaning by connotation.
Maybe the word inspires a lift of pride that swells the chest. Maybe it produces a certain cynicism, a halted breath reserved for such clichés as apple pie and baseball. Outside of America, especially where democracy has never been in practice, the word probably suggests America, and the physical reaction will follow whatever is reserved for that association. For a very few, the reaction is clinical — the reaction to a technical term of political science like bicameral or disestablishmentarian. Still others might react with nausea, or lightness in the stomach or chest, or a recoiling of the spine from their own associations.
The word democracy — for some it is synonymous with idealism, uttered in the same breath with liberty and justice and other divine incarnations of Principle. For others it is a political justification founded on the force of that idealism. For still others, though, democracy holds uncertain value. Perhaps it is even unimportant to some, although the places where this is the case are quite rare. It is difficult in most places on earth, among most people, to escape the necessity for anyone who would have public legitimacy either to pay homage to it, or to reject it as a threatening incursion. Rarely can democracy be ignored. In some way, it has penetrated thought virtually everywhere.
The word democracy — possibly more than any other one word identified with a complex set of concepts about our multifarious human world, this word is glossed over. Almost all of us assume we know what it means to us, and never give it a second thought to why it means what it means to us, or to what it means to others, or to what it means in practice.
So often the mind is supposed to slide past “democracy” — to fail to consider it well or entirely take it for granted as a known quantity, and ultimately grant a fuzzy, warm legitimacy to those who wave the word about as though it were solidly understood. It is quite impossible in this day and age to escape this rather mindless homage and the leverage thereby applied on a semiconscious level, whether in political speeches or in product advertisements on days around a national holiday.
So, we should know what it is, and what it means to us.
In fact I suggest this is not at all a question with a quick or easy answer, and an ongoing aim of this series will be to explore it. But first of all, it is important to recognize democracy in at least two senses: as a cultural emphasis, and as a political system which has evolved through those cultural trends.
Cultural Democracy
The cultural aspects are exceedingly complex and interwoven, of course. But we can draw out from them a few differentiable threads. One is the principle that any person regardless of their birthright might be important and worthy and might achieve, and should be allowed to do so — a trend which became something of an antidote for the aristocracy by birth which kept down in lower stations even some of the most exceptional people. Thus “democratization” often means nothing more than widespread access to a thing previously hard to access, even just goods or services previously too expensive for most. Coming along with this democracy-as-openness is a new willingness to pay attention to the lives of the “common” man in writing histories and creating art, and all other respects in which, previously, the lowborn would have been excluded out of hand as uninteresting. This too is called “democratization” sometimes. From the standpoint of what has advanced individual life, I will not take issue with democracy in these senses of the word.
But, not unconnected to this, there has emerged a glorification of the truly commonplace as though it were equal to the exceptional. Extending beyond the purer idea of a “democratic” end to artificial barriers, this implies an overthrow or reversal of traditional aristocratic values, deliberate in many cases, vengefully in most of those, whether the vengeance is hot-tempered and violent, or cool and slyly resentful. In the practice of “democratic” politics this has led to economic redistribution by taking from the prosperous and giving some to the “common” poor. This can be seen as a parallel to socialistic and communistic cultural sympathies elsewhere, in social movements and arts of all kinds. As an example: what after all was the great difference between the focus of democratically-inspired artistic glorification of “the common citizen” in the west, and that of the arts of socialist realism pursued in the Soviet Union according to supposedly antithetical ideology — that is to say art for “the average Joe” compared to art approved by Joe Stalin — besides the latter having official endorsement and sponsorship? (This distinction actually dissolved during the Great Depression when Franklin Delano Roosevelt wielded the presidency.) That insistent valuation of the common, average, or mediocre is the same sort of cultural drive prominent behind the democracy of the French Revolution; the slogan did not stop with liberty but demanded equality as well, by guillotine if need be, and by the burning of great art by mobs.
The “cultural” democracy has then been a mixed bag indeed — on one hand, a quest for freedom absolving the world of the worst legacies of an aristocratic or royal heritage, on the other hand a rebellion against the very idea of the exceptional and the great.
Political Democracy
Following these cultural sentiments came the establishment of political institutions, the second meaning for the word “democracy” we must understand. We can only know “political” democracy by understanding cultural “democracy” as being composed of interwoven but different threads with very distinct motivations behind them at the individual level, ranging from a yearning for openness, opportunity, and freedom, all the way to jealousy and spite.
The political system of democracy consists of the essential principle of majority rule, expressed both in the election to determine officials who will hold invested political power, and in voting directly on laws and political resolutions. Although these have been endorsed as a result of all the sorts of cultural democracy discussed above and as a means for fulfilling any or all of them, it is worth noting that throughout the history of democracy those who predominantly sought individual freedom through democracy have most often considered political decision-making by the majority a necessary means for freedom, whereas those who have represented a vilification of the exceptional or an endorsement of the common over the exceptional have reveled in the pursuit of majority power through elections and direct voting. The difference is not to be found in the means found by both, but in the motivations underneath, and in the degree to which political power and government of any kind is trusted. There is quite a difference between democracy as “the worst form of government, except for all of the others” and romanticized visions of democracy as though the process is a worthy or worthwhile one in itself.
If political democracy does not serve as the best means for freedom, it must and should be surpassed, according to the real aims of the great cultural pushes for openness, opportunity, and freedom which produced it. And indeed, now this precisely describes the situation at hand. Democracy in a political sense is not a worthy and substantive ideal which has merely been corrupted behind political machinations. Rather, the practice of democracy masks and retards what is worthy, and the theory is without substance.
The major point made in The Promethean Manifesto about democracy as a political system, and I believe the major point which should be made, is that democracy in practice is largely a justification for political power. It is the latest in a series of smokescreens taking various forms of enshrined mandates, from loyalty to tribal or clan hierarchy, to the pharaoh’s descendance from the gods, to the divine right of kings according to the apostle Paul, to the voting booth today, fronts behind which the more important affairs of politics can be conducted — exertion of control and dominance, maneuvering for factional advantage, power-brokering, exploitation and oppression. We may grant some credit to those who advance each stage for the dissolution of the convention which came before, and nothing less is deserved by the early proponents of democracy for overturning the rigid, stratified classes of aristocracy and monarchy.
But democracy remains one of many species of government, which in the greater scope of possibilities is not so much different from other types as it is the same, however much we are presently conditioned to regard democracy as a really fundamental source of progress. As in all other governmental social systems, which is to say centrally and ultimately forcibly ruled systems, those administering democracy use and justify a conceptual political power which can otherwise be supported only by naked force. That in some form is the basic pattern of government. Specifically, in the case of democracy, the idea of granting choice to the individual is subverted. The appeal of this apparent choice justifies a rule which otherwise would be unacceptable. But as The Promethean Manifesto (2003 edition) put it, “Perversely, in the electoral process a vote “against” a candidate actually amounts to a vote for him if he is elected; by voting, one confirms the process, and implies a pledge to accept the authority of whoever is elected by majority.” Participation in democracy becomes an endorsement of more than a particular government official. Participation also serves to endorse the legitimacy of whatever officials are elected and their actions, and the legitimacy of whatever unelected bureaucrats operate under the nominal control of those elected officials (and in turn their actions), and the legitimacy of government itself.
Despite the similarities, it is worth understanding the differences between democratic systems and others to learn what is unique about democracy as a sociopolitical system, even as we must remain willing to face the potentially harsh conclusion of that lesson: that difference, that democratic uniqueness may not deserve idealization, as in fact I will argue.