For a truly Representative Democracy

We are once again involved in many electoral campaigns where individuals offer themselves as representatives of a sizable number of citizens. People are running for national, state and local offices, for President, or the Senate as well as for quaint local offices such as “Registrar of Deeds.” Each candidate offers to represent voters in their specific job. So it is an opportune time to reflect about representation.

The elected representatives have a difficult job because they are expected to speak on behalf a large number of voters who disagree with each other in many important ways.  Some of the people who vote for a given representative are poor or are barely getting by, living paycheck-to-paycheck, and always owing money to the credit card company or a bank or perhaps a friend or family member. Others are, to put it plainly, filthy rich.  Many of the supporters of any representative are seriously interested in sports and are willing to see public monies used to build stadiums or race tracks. Others are into books and want to spend more money for their public libraries. The academic programs in colleges mean more to them than their football teams.

The elected representative clearly cannot speak for all these different groups. Moreover different sets of voters have very many different interests and concerns . There are too many of them for one representative to speak to or to support by fighting for relevant legislation.  In our system, it is quite unclear what I should expect from a representative I might choose to vote for. I have no guarantee that voting for one representative rather than another will advance my interests and the values that matter to me.

This is a real problem when a candidate runs for an office for the first time. But don’t voters know their representative who has been in office for a long time? You would think so. But the representative has an interest in getting the support of as many of his constituents as possible. He is better of if his stands in Congress are not so well known so that more of his constituents might be willing to vote for him, not knowing that he actually does not support one or the other of their interests. Unless representatives run unopposed in their districts or, if they run opposed, have little problem winning re-election, it is in their best interest to have their constituents remain in the dark about what they believe in and stand for.

This has a number of serious consequences for our democracy. Since I am not clear what my representative will actually stand for, choosing to vote for anyone candidate on the basis of issues  is not really possible. I do not have the necessary information for making a reasonable choice. I might just as well vote for a candidate whose family is really cute or who promises to be good company at a barbecue. Not knowing what a representative will stand for encourages voters to make their choices for irrelevant and often trivial reasons.

More seriously many voters abstain from participating in elections because they know that casting their vote for one candidate or another may very well not make any difference to them.  So why bother?
The representative, on the other hand,  does not feel obligated to take specific stands on behalf of the voters. It was never clear quite what the representative stood for and it was always obvious that the representative could not represent all the interests or all the values of the people who voted for them. In advocating  for very special interest groups—as they most often do-- the representatives are not really violating their commitments to their voters because they never made any definite commitment.

Other countries deal with the problem of whom the representative represents by having representatives clearly identified as members of specific political parties where these parties have more or less explicit written party platforms. When I vote in an election like that I have some reason to be confident that the persons I vote for will  share my values and represent my interests. ( Obviously that does not always work. ) But in such a system you need more than two parties. Where, as in the US,  there are only two major parties there is no way you can know, most of the time, what you are voting for. The person you vote for frequently does not represent you in any specific way.

In our existing electoral system with only two political parties representatives cannot be clearly distinguished from each other and so no one quite knows what they are voting for . The choices we are asked to make are most of the time completely irrational because we don't have any definite information about the difference between the candidates . Everyone stands for freedom and prosperity. What more specifically a candidate stands for we don't find out until after he or she has been voted in.

If we are ever going to repair our democracy we need to abolish the two party system.  Each voter is entitled to be offered a party platform that summarizes  the central concerns of this citizen.  Since there is a significant number of persons who are profoundly invested in the present arrangements that is not going to be easy. But it is essential.

A second change that is equally important is for some sort of proportional representation.  If, under our system, you vote for the losing candidate your vote will not count for anything. The promise of democracy where everyone's vote counts equally is not kept under the system of voting that we have. Under proportional representation, the proportion of voters a specific party wins determines how many representatives they will have. Above a certain minimum every political party will have some representation. Every vote is counted; every vote  makes a difference. There is no such thing  as wasting a vote.

Until we make at least these two changes in our electoral system , ours will be a democracy in name only.

          

Is our democracy a blessing ?

We have a government that seems in many respects dedicated to exclusion. The president spends a whole lot of time criticizing and denigrating different groups of people - his political opponents, immigrants to the United States, people from Mexico and other Latin countries, Muslims and many others. At the same time groups that demand more attention and power for themselves because they claim to be of a superior kind –for instance white supremacists-- are growing and becoming more powerful. Not too long ago white supremacy was thought of as a holdover of slavery and Jim Crow - a movement stuck in an inglorious past that was bound to wither away. Instead white supremacy has become, once again, a serious movement.

Nor is this true only in our country. Comparable groups have grown and are in the governments of quite a few European countries. Hysteria in the face of large numbers of immigrants from the near East and Africa dominates politics. The main desire of large groups of people is to exclude masses of immigrants who are poor and looking for work. In a clearly global economy where are many countries profit from trade and where industry is dominated by large multinational corporations, nationalists in many countries resist the global labor market, the free movement across frontiers to where there is work. This resistance to folks who don't speak your language or don't speak it well, who may have different religions from yours and certainly bring with them different traditions in food and family structure is a major theme in Brexit, England's attempt to distance itself from the European Union. The claim to national superiority of Jews over Palestinians is the motivating force in much of Israeli politics.

The right-wing movements in different countries are different but they have some common features. They have no respect for political equality. Democracy does not seem to them to be important, neither are political rights - the right to free speech, to political participation,  to form associations and for those associations to meet. Police violence against critics of right-wing governments is readily accepted as legitimate.

The frequent tendency of peoples to move away from democracy raises many interesting questions and gives rise to many controversies. But today I want to pay attention to one specific aspect of these occurrences. Very many of the right wing, ultra right-wing, or fascist movements come to power by democratic means. The persons who end up as fascist dictators are first elected. That was true of Adolf Hitler as well as of the president of Turkey, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, or of Egypt’s General Abdel Fattah El-Sisi and many others. The current president of the Philippines, Rodrigo Duterte, soon after being elected president instituted a regime of violence against alleged drug dealers or users. Thousands of Philippinos have lost their lives, killed by police or vigilantes for alleged drug selling or use, without any judicial process. It looks as if proved very popular in the mid-term elections of this past weekend. The thousands of alleged drug dealers and users killed by police in the last 4 years have not made him unacceptable to voters in the Philippines.

Most commonly when we talk about democracy, what we have in mind is a political system of regular and honest elections, civil rights and political rights for all citizens as well as the rule of of law to protect those rights. But it turns out that that is not enough for a lasting democracy. In countries that have regular elections, a functioning legal system and civil and political rights, the electorate has more than once voted and continues to vote for enemies of democracy. People have more than once passed referenda to extend the term of office of the strongman whose rule spells the end of democracy. People have acclaimed these dictators and have gladly followed their commands and have after the end of their term been happy to re-elect them in clean and ordinary elections.

A well-functioning and honest electoral system is not what democracy is. A functioning democracy exists only where the people at large not only participate at least by voting but also participate by protesting loudly as soon as the candidates they have elected turn out to be enemies of democracy. If the state legislatures in States like Ohio or North Carolina draw the electoral districts in ways to deprive black voters of any political power to choose black representatives, they show themselves to be enemies of democracy because they exclude black Americans from the democratic system. If voters in Ohio and North Carolina don't protest vigorously and insist that these electoral districts be redrawn, democracy in Ohio and North Carolina is not functioning. Without an active electorate that will not tolerate exclusions, that will not allow elected officials to violate the rules and spirit of democracy, democracy exists in name only.

Many prestigious political organizations continuously exhort voters to go and cast their ballots. But that is not good advice. They should advise citizens to protest loudly when elected officials pass laws that in effect exclude some citizens from participation or from making use of their rights. An example is any law that requires picture-IDs from voters who have no possible way of procuring such an identification. In the present situation where only half the people vote and very few people are willing to demonstrate their displeasure and the need for change, we can no more claim to be a democracy than the Philippines , or Turkey, or Germany in 1933.