Will We Ever Have Real Democracy?
As a media analyst, life on Twitter these days is difficult. There is so much negativity, so much bigotry, hatred, abuse, racism, and outright insanity. As someone tweeted a few days ago:
“Social media has been destroyed by Trump.”
And he is right. It has. At least for us working in the media. Twitter has become a cesspool to the point where it has an impact on both my personal mood and my productivity, because I get so frustrated by it every morning.
One of the first things I saw this morning was this:
What the frak?
First of all, this is 100% racism in its worst form, and the simplest way to illustrate this is if you change the word ‘immigrant’ to ‘black’, and try reading it again:
The White House will publish a weekly list of crimes committed by blacks
You see what I mean? There is absolutely no difference between this and what happened in the 1950s and 1960s. Consider these pictures:
But the biggest problem with Trump’s plan to release weekly lists of crime done by immigrants, is that it demonizes an entire population group, which will lead to an increase in hate crimes.
This is unacceptable on every single level.
But it’s not just Trump who is doing this. It’s also politicians in Europe and in many other parts of the world. It’s like the past 50–100 years just didn’t happen, and we are right back with the nationalistic intolerance of the past.
As a woman so wonderfully wrote on a sign during the #Womensmarch
She is exactly right. This is what is happening. People have gotten afraid of change, and as a result has retreated into the past, complete with 1950s prejudices and racism.
We have replaced progress and hope for the future with fear, as Edelman’s 2017 Trust Barometer so clearly illustrate:
Fear now dominates how people react to things. Fear of the unknown, fear of strangers, fear of the global world, fear of … well, everything.
And what’s the result of this fear? It’s protectionism, nationalism and extremism. As Edelman also found, 72% now believe that the government should focus on protection, even if it means that the economy grows more slowly.
People are in shock, and populistic and fascist leaders are taking full advantage of it.
The really insane thing about this, though, is that people have nothing to fear. If we actually look at the real world, everything is generally going better.
The U.S. Economic Confidence Index is going up, and is now 10 points into the positive zone.
At the same time, consumer confidence and consumer expectations are now at their highest point since 2007.
What the heck are people so afraid off? It makes no sense. The world is awesome.
Wait… didn’t we have a democracy?
However, there is one more issue here that I want to point out that I think is even more important than all the things I have just talked about. And that is the problem that we have with democracy itself.
You see, many trends point to the fact that we are losing our democracy … not that we ever really had it to begin with. But there are some really troubling signs ahead.
Let me explain.
What is a democracy?
Well, if we look at the way the dictionary defines it, it’s:
“Democracy (noun): a system of government by the whole population typically through elected representatives.”
In other words, a democracy is a form of government where we, the people, agree on the path forward. Often this is done through elected representatives, but that’s not the important part here.
The key here is that we agree on things. In other words, we govern through consensus. But this is not actually how any democratic system works today. Not a single country works like this. And the reason is that we have designed our democracies so that it favors and promotes disagreement.
Think about it like this:
Imagine that there are two paths forward, Path A and Path B. In order for us to reach consensus (the definition of a real democracy), we would have to agree on either A or B.
If, however, we can’t agree at all, we instead end up in the middle, the point of no consensus, where 50% of the population votes A, and 50% votes B.
This is what we have today. Every election is like this, and every time a new law has to be legislated, this is what happens.
We have managed to design a system of government that has been optimized for not agreeing on anything.
And it’s not like we in the media are any better. Every single article published by the media is optimized for this as well. We aim for the conflicts, we encourage politicians to disagree with each other, and we create presidential debates where, like in a boxing match, the more each person disagrees with the other, the happier we are.
This is not a democracy. This is an anti-democracy.
But what is worse about this, is that this level of disagreement widens every day. Here is a study done by Gallup that looks at how the party gap in approval ratings have widened over time.
As you can see, back in the 1950s, the approval rating gap between each political side was only 35 points. But then look at what happened. Over the past 50 years, the public disagreement has grown so that, today, with Trump, there is a 76-point gap in approval between Republicans (90%) and Democrats (14%).
76!
Look at the graph. And then remember that a real democracy is this:
“Democracy (noun): a system of government by the whole population”
It’s not a system of government where only half the people get to do what they want.
This is the real problem. It’s not Trump (or Clinton). It’s not what they do. It’s not Brexit, or other similar things in other European countries. Those are merely the symptoms of the problem.
The real problem is that we have forgotten what it means to be a democracy because we designed it to be optimized for only 50% of the votes.
How disagreement enables populism
It’s one thing to have a system of government where disagreement is the goal, but we also have to realize that this is exactly what enables people like Trump to rise to power to begin with.
There was a good explanation by an unnamed official recently, and I want you to pay particular attention to the 2nd and 3rd points (I have no idea who this person is):
If you are puzzled by the bizarre “press conference” put on by the White House press secretary this evening (angrily claiming that Trump’s inauguration had the largest audience in history, accusing them of faking photos and lying about attendance), let me help explain it. This spectacle served three purposes:
1. Establishing a norm with the press: they will be told things that are obviously wrong and they will have no opportunity to ask questions. That way, they will be grateful if they get anything more at any press conference. This is the PR equivalent of “negging,” the odious pick-up practice of a particular kind of horrible man (e.g., Donald Trump).
2. Increasing the separation between Trump’s base (1/3 of the population) from everybody else (the remaining 2/3). By being told something that is obviously wrong — that there is no evidence for and all evidence against, that anybody with eyes can see is wrong — they are forced to pick whether they are going to believe Trump or their lying eyes. The gamble here — likely to pay off — is that they will believe Trump. This means that they will regard media outlets that report the truth as “fake news” (because otherwise they’d be forced to confront their cognitive dissonance.)
3. Creating a sense of uncertainty about whether facts are knowable, among a certain chunk of the population (which is taking a page from the Kremlin, for whom this is their preferred disinformation tactic). A third of the population will say “clearly the White House is lying,” a third will say “if Trump says it, it must be true,” and the remaining third will say “gosh, I guess this is unknowable.” The idea isn’t to convince these people of untrue things, it’s to fatigue them, so that they will stay out of the political process entirely, regarding the truth as just too difficult to determine.
This is exactly how the populists win, and not just in the US, but also in the case of Brexit and in almost every other election in Europe.
First, you divide the public into three groups. You strengthen your ties to your own supporters by attacking ‘the other side’. And then you confuse the third group of doubters to such a point that they don’t vote.
As a result, you can now win the election by only reaching a small fraction of the total population. This is true for Trump, but it was actually also true for Clinton.
This is an: “Anti-democracy (noun): a system of government by 26.3% of the population.”
Right?
Add that Clinton actually ended up getting more votes than Trump, and this whole thing just feels completely idiotic. But even if Clinton had won, we would still have this problem.
And, again, it’s the same in Europe. The UK Government only got 37% of the votes, which allowed it to control 51% of the government, which gives it 100% of the control.
So… how do we fix this?
The solution to all of this is actually quite simple… in theory. But it will be exceptionally hard to do in practice.
All we need to do is to change the system so that instead of an election being defined by a percentage of the people, it is defined by a percentage of consensus.
In other words, politicians can only be elected and laws can only be legislated if they reach 50% consensus. This would give us a real democracy.
“But, wait-a-minute,” you say. “Isn’t that exactly what we have today? 50% of the votes?”
No, and let me illustrate why:
If we look at the illustration from before, we see that agreeing on either A or B will mean we had reached 100% consensus. This will obviously never happen, because even in the most utopian world, 100% agreement between 318 million people (USA) just isn’t possible.
We also see how only getting 50% of the votes means that we have zero consensus. Because, at 50% of the votes, we are effectively not agreeing on anything.
50% consensus is the point in-between these two. It’s the point where we don’t fully agree, but at least we half agree on it.
This is what a real democracy is like. This is what it means when we say that it’s a system of government by the whole population.
And with a system like this, people like Trump would never have been able to get elected, because his entire campaign was designed to divide the public. To reach 50% consensus, he would have been forced to work together with other people.
The same is true for Clinton. Even though her campaign was ‘Better together’, she too campaigned on disagreement more than agreement.
Or what about when GOP shut down the US government because they didn’t like Obama? That too couldn’t happen in a real democracy, because to reach 50% consensus, they would have needed to get the backing of at least half the Democrats to do what they did.
It’s the same with Brexit. UKIP won because they could run a campaign where disagreeing with each other was the best way to win. In a real democracy, this wouldn’t have been possible, because with 50% consensus, the public would actually have to agree on leaving the EU …rather than now where they disagree on it.
You see why this is what we must do?
Mind you, I have no illusion that this will happen anytime soon. I know that I sound like a hopeless dreamer living in a world of fantasy with pixel dust and unicorns. But we must try to do this regardless.
Think about all the problems we have with racism, bigotry and hate I mentioned in the beginning of this article. Look at all the abuse that we all face on Twitter every day, from people who think they are cool because attacking the ‘other side’ is the way to win.
All of this is a product of a culture where disagreeing means you are a winner.
But also, again, look at this graph that I showed you earlier. Look at the trend line. Trump might be the most dividing president in history, but, from looking at this data, do you think the next president will be any better at unifying the public?
I don’t.
So regardless of whether we think this is impossible to change or not, we must do it anyway. We need a real democracy now more than ever.
And there are plenty of examples in human history where such impossible changes have been made. In my country, for instance, we made such a change back in 1848.
Before that point, Denmark was ruled by a King, but, on March 21, 1848, facing of public pressure for democracy (non-violent I might add), the King of Denmark absolved his government and resigned as absolute monarch.
In its place we created a constitution, which lead to a democratic government the way we know it today (which is BTW one of the best in the world).
But we, and every other country made a mistake. We looked at the wrong metrics. We thought that defining our democracy based on 50% of people’s votes would lead to a system where we would agree on the path forward. As we can clearly see today, this didn’t happened.
Instead, we should have defined it as 50% consensus, because that is the right metric for defining whether the public agrees on the path forward or not.
Just as we have fixed the problem before, we need to do it again. We need to fix the real problem so that, in a generation from now, we will have a real democracy.
It’s not impossible to do. It just takes a long time and it requires enough people realize what the real problem is.
So… as Bill Nye, the Science Guy, says when he ends his lectures:
“Let’s change the world!”
