Could we upgrade democracy?
It was about 4am on a Wednesday, and I sat on a couch in the living room watching US TV networks on my laptop. My stomach clenched up in a ball as the results came in. It was clear what was happening, but I still couldn’t really believe it. Donald Trump, one of the most misogynistic, racist, aggressive, petty and unpredictable candidates in history, was about to become president of my father’s country: the United States of America, despite receiving 2% less votes than his opponent. Five months earlier, in June 2016, I was on a train when my brother sent a link to the BBC article showing that 52% of the population of my mother’s country, the UK, had just voted to leave the EU. On 9 February 2014, I had followed closely the debates raging in the Swiss media about the referendum to “Stop Mass Immigration”. It was still a shock to my system that the 50.3% of the country I grew up in and was now also a citizen, where I learned about tolerance, peaceful political participation and consensus, had just voted to reimpose quotas on “immigrants” from the EU after a vicious campaign using all stereotypes and fears possible.
These three examples come from 3 very different countries, all of which are clearly democracies, and yet in each case, these votes left nearly half the country (including me) feeling distraught, furious and disempowered. Many people say this shows how it shows the stupidity of trusting in the “wisdom of the masses”. I believe they in fact demonstrate some of the key limitations to our current democratic systems. Because, of course, for each of these examples, there are hundreds of others which ring true for people of a different political persuasion or world view — where they are left feeling furious, fearful and hurt. Be it archaic systems such as the “electoral college” in the US, or “popular referenda” into which everyone packs every frustration they can’t express through any other means and which lead to polarising debates and contentious results, or the many other areas which we have described here, our current democratic political systems are letting us down.
I believe we are able create better democratic systems and democratic cultures to govern our communities, cities, regions and countries. I believe we can upgrade our democracy, not to a perfect system and culture, but certainly to something better than we have today. Indeed, I believe we must make this change, lest we see disillusionment, political apathy, conflict and frustration turn into more angry populism, social violence and polarisation.
That is the purpose of this series of blog posts, and of the regular conversations we, at “Upgrading Democracy”, are holding: explore what upgrading democracy could look like in various places around the world, what it would take to achieve such an upgrade, what has already been done and to begin testing new ideas out in reality. We don’t believe we have the answer to these issues, yet. We aren’t promoting any political agenda or even an ideal system or way things should be. We believe that the political systems and cultures we need must by default be co-created by as many of us, from all backgrounds, viewpoints and persuasions, as possible. We aim to start this exploration here!
