Is it time to Dump Democracy?

In the wake of Brexit, with far-right parties and extremist groups gaining power across Europe, and with the looming dread of the very real prospect of ‘President Trump’, I decided to share a thought that has been gnawing away in the back of my mind for some time now: could we all be better off without democracy, as we know it?

Now, before going any further, it might be prudent to establish just what we mean by ‘democracy’; any perceived attack on which is more or less guaranteed to result in an anti-histamine requiring rashy reaction from pretty much every moderately literate American with access to the internet, probably due to the association of the word ‘democracy’ with ‘freedom’. Let’s be clear: democracy and voting are not the same thing. Democracy, as defined by the Oxford Dictionary of English, is “ … a system of government in which all the people of a state or polity … are involved in making decisions about its affairs, typically by voting to elect representatives to a parliament or similar assembly,” Now, ‘freedom’ to ‘choose’ is all well and good on paper, but starts to go awry when tens of millions of people are given the responsibility of making decisions on things they have little-to-no knowledge of. And it can turn into an absolute disaster when populist demagogues and pseudo-racists are able to influence or control the media to further their own political agendas. Not to mention the fact that the aforementioned ‘elected representatives’ rarely have any expertise in the areas they are making policy on. So, liberal democracy – in principle – seems like a fair and valid choice for a modern government, but looking at democracy’s biggest standard bearers in the world today, the USA, UK & Europe, there are clearly some serious flaws… one of which, in my opinion, is electing a government of decision makers – or making decisions themselves – by popular vote.

A kind of perverted Robin Hood

Let’s forget about the scarcely believable rise of Trump over in the states for a while and consider what’s been going on in the UK over the past six years, where the Conservative Party has been busy cutting the funding of public services, squeezing the life out of some of the most impoverished areas in Europe whilst simultaneously giving tax breaks to the very richest members of society and writing off tax debts owed by some of the world’s largest companies. Honking out the soundbite ‘we’re all in it together’, David Cameron has been a kind of perverted Robin Hood figure, robbing from the poor and giving to the rich, with an affable British charm which seems to have confused the general public into thinking they’re actually watching a buffoon Prime Minister in a feel-good movie, where everything is bound to turn out well in the end, rather than the slow and miserable strangulation of their own society. The sickening thing about this situation is that the very people who are suffering, and will continue to suffer most from the Tory policies (and whose children and grandchildren are likely to suffer even worse, in turn) are the people who voted him in. Twice. The lack of a credible alternative, the grip of the right wing media over the working classes and the fact that the global economic crisis happened whilst the Labour Party was in office (staining them indelibly) combined to create the perfect storm, where people with little to no knowledge or understanding of politics, economics or the world in general, willingly voted to sail themselves up socio-economic shit creek. The ugly rise of the British National Party, with their neo-nazi sympathies, and then UKIP, with their barely concealed racism, helped to taint British politics with an anti-immigration, anti-foreigner flavour, making the Conservatives seem like a friendly, progressive party by comparison. A populace unwittingly voting itself to ruin; here lies a glaring example of the failure of democracy in its current form.

The obvious inadequacy of voting in the governance of a nation is that people can have a say in matters that they have no understanding of; see ‘Brexit’ for a recent example. Charged with the responsibility to vote, but not equipped with the requisite knowledge or data to choose properly, people tend to vote according to their ‘feelings’. Feelings are fallible at the best of times, but when they are open to being manipulated by a scare-mongering media, demagoguery, and – as in the case of Brexit – outright lies, those votes are easily corrupted. This leads to a dangerous ‘feelings based politics’, where governments are elected and decisions are made based on little more than emotion or popular sentiment. World changing decisions, once-in-a-generation referendums; farcically determined in the same manner as the most puerile and vacuous form of popular entertainment: the TV talent show.

Feelings based politics

If people really are capable of deciding what’s best for them, then how does one explain situations such as this, where an area in Wales voted. overwhelmingly in favour of leaving the EU, despite being one of the biggest beneficiaries of EU funding? Governments and politicians needn’t bother concerning themselves with making decisions to benefit their nation or voters, when they know that voters are easily manipulated, swayed by spin and rhetoric, and in the case of the world’s largest democracy, pretty much just bought by the campaign with the most funding. An elected government can basically do whatever it likes, to the benefit of the party’s backers and according to its leaders’ whims, so long as it can manipulate and mislead the general public into laying the blame for their problems elsewhere. The reason there’s no free childcare anymore? It’s because there are too many immigrants! The NHS is going to shit? That’s because we have to pay for EU bureaucrats! Of course, manipulating voters’ feelings using the media is nothing new, but in the age of social media and instant information, with the public’s appetite of choosing politicians based on entertainment value (Boris Johnson, anyone?) the ability to make important decisions based on superficial popular opinion rather than detailed analysis is amplified to a terrifying degree.

Feeling-based politics has been with us for a while now; take UK Prime Minister-elect Theresa May, here deciding that feelings trump evidence when discussing her plans to make life tougher for immigrants. Or former journalist / demented ventriloquist’s dummy, Michael Gove, recently declaring that ‘people have had enough of experts’ when dismissing evidence backing Britain’s case to remain in the EU. Modern democracy has reduced decision making to the level of a farcical popularity contest, with no room for rational debate.

So what’s the alternative? Clearly, the answer isn’t to throw out democracy wholesale and go down the tried, tested and failed model of totalitarianism, or to dabble with the opaque politics favoured in some countries outside the western hemisphere. But there is a growing cry for a new model of decision making: evidence based politics.

What if the role of the people in a democracy was to ‘be the data’?

What if all the decisions that were made by a government were rational, based on hard evidence, on scrupulously collected and analysed data, for the greatest benefit of the majority? What if the role of the people in this democracy was not to cast a vote, to give an opinion (informed or otherwise), but to be the data in the system? Currently, decisions are made by a cabinet of the PM’s cronies, who was in turn chosen (or not, in the case of the incoming Theresa May) by an ill-informed public, with little understanding of what they were voting for. What sense is there in having George Osborne, a history graduate and former journalist, as Chancellor of the Exchequer, making decisions (such as his catastrophic austerity programme, repeatedly slammed by the IMF and a recent UN report) about the economy? Why not have a Chancellor who is an economics expert, analysing the country’s economy and making decisions based on evidence and expertise? Why was Michael Gove, with degree in English and (again) a background in (right-wing) journalism, given the post of Secretary of State for Education? Surely Britain has a wealth of individuals, with the knowledge, experience and qualifications necessary to make decisions on the UK’s education policies?

Perhaps important and complicated decisions would be better left in the hands of well-intentioned experts, appointed through a meritocracy, using modern data analysis to shape policy; rather than being left to the whims of populist opportunists and demagogues.

Democracy may not be dead, but if the modern democratic system means the great uninformed majority voting for an ill-informed, whimsical and unqualified group of populists, it might as well be.