What Do We Expect From Democracy?

 Not a question I have ever put to myself in exactly those terms, but one raised in The Guardian's ‘We the people’: the battle to define populism.

Thanks in large part to the persistent failure of governments across the west to enact anything resembling a credible vision of shared prosperity and security in the post-manufacturing era, we are now living through a time when familiar webs connecting citizens, ideologies and political parties are, if not falling apart, at least beginning to loosen and shift. As a result, the question of populism is not going away. The coming years are likely to include all of the following: more movements being labelled as populist, more movements calling themselves populist, more movements defensively insisting that they are not populist, and more conversations about the extent to which populism represents the problem or the solution.

The academic debate on populism shows us that making sense of this landscape requires more than just a usable definition of the P-word. In short, it shows us that we can’t really talk about populism without talking about our conflicting conceptions of democracy – and the question of what it truly means for citizens to be sovereign.

It seems to me populism is the modern version of our Founder's mobocracy. Which was a manifestation of an idea born in Ancient Athens and Plato's ideas about the danger of unlimited democracy. For the Founders, democracy needed the constraints of a constitution that protected minorities. I will stand for democratic constitutionalism.

That which supplants one group's rights over another - effectively denying the humanity of others - I will oppose.

These academics are likely to stress the extent to which mainstream political parties in the US and Europe have converged in recent decades, narrowing the range of opinions that find real purchase in national decision-making. They take as a given that this has swelled the ranks of people who feel that what gets called democracy responds to their concerns much less than it caters to the whims of a small, wealthy, self-dealing class of elites – elites who vigorously deny their own complicity in this state of affairs, often by insisting that there is no alternative.

As you might expect, these scholars tend to be most interested in challenges to the status quo that come from the left – from “the 99%” of Occupy Wall Street and the Sanders campaign, to the “many not the few” of Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour party – and foreground an insistence that politics is not yet serving the correct constituency. They are also instinctively alert to the possibility that the self-preserving centre will try to defang outsider challenges by making anyone who endorses them appear unreasonable, frightening and constitutionally unequipped for the sober task of governance.

If populism is democracy over oligarchy, then I am for it. However, we do not need a dictator to do that. A dictator will only replace an oligarchy of entrenched power with an oligarchy of resentful outsiders.

We can reform the federal (and state government) without a dictator:

1. No more life terms for federal judges.
2. Recall for all elected officials.
3. Term limits for all elected officials.
4. Make all elections publicly funded.
5. Realign legislatures so that there is proportional representation.
6. Open primaries with a provision for none of the above.

sch 7/20