Representative Democracy as a Failed Experiment

By Glen Wallace

In NY Times columnist Nicholas Kristof column, A Failed Experiment, he points out how in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy there has been a rush by the wealthy to equip their homes with backup generators as a workaround to a crumbling infrastructure that has led to frequent power outages in the NE.  While he is not entirely clear in his column what the experiment is that has failed, he seems to be indicating that it is our political system that has failed to address the problems of not only our infrastructure, but also crime, education, healthcare costs and climate change. (On a side note, I am still skeptical about the dominant paradigm of climate change, but I will leave that for another essay.)

In addition to not clearly stating what the experiment was that failed, perhaps out of the limits of space that the NY Times allots him, he didn't present a clear solution either.   Well, let me chime in on both accounts.  I will present the experiment that failed as the representative democracy that we and most of the western world lives under and a solution of a return, as much as is practically feasible, to a true democracy as was originally practiced and invented by the ancient Greeks. 

If one is to stand aside and think mindfully as an observer it should quickly become clear that there seems to be some inherent flaws to our representative system that are intractable.  The cause and nature of those flaws can be found by looking at basic human nature and psychology and the vulnerabilities therein that are easily taken advantage of and manipulated by certain vested interests in their interests.

One psychological tendency is to affiliate oneself to what could be called a clan, tribe or wolf pack.  We are inherently very social creatures and any perceived threat made by another group directed towards the group we identify ourselves as being a part of will frequently provoke an instinctual reaction to protect one's group and also fight the offending group.  Clan feuding or warfare, then, can quickly develop from seemingly small offenses.  Additionally, one could imagine it would be easy for someone knowledgeable about these human tendencies, to deliberately manipulate the masses by means of either engaging in false flag attacks or by pushing the emotional buttons and convincing one side that some act by the other side should be considered an insult.  In the group dynamics there is nothing more uniting than having a common enemy.  That unity is only strengthened the more the common enemy is despised.  I have become convinced, then, that the biggest ally for any political candidate is his or her biggest critic.  And the more outrageous that critic is, the greater the boost is for the target of that outrageous criticism.  Eventually the supporters start to lose touch and forget why they even support their candidate and merely focus on why they dislike the opponent and his or her supporters so much.  As a result, the supporters, the constituents, also forget, or demand, that their candidate, once in office, takes care of things like the infrastructure, education and health care costs.  All their energy is focused, as if under a trans like delusion, on the enemy clan as the root of all the ails of society and the world.   

Here in the US we have two main political clans and they go by the names of the 'Republicans' and the 'Democrats.'   And within each clan there are figures, the politicians, that take on patriarchal and matriarchal roles to the adult citizens who subconsciously want to revert back to comfort of childhood when they could always look to Mommy and Daddy to take care of everything.  Childhood was such an easier and simpler time for most that the lure of the comfort of that time makes it difficult to resist when a politician offers to effectively"kiss the boo boo and make it all better."  The elected official then is effectively offering to act in a parental role, where they are taking care of everything on a societal level, that the parent took care of, on a household level, when the constituents were children.  Most of us, as we were growing up, didn't have to occupy our thoughts with whether the roof was due for new shingles, or that the electric bill was paid on time or the myriad of other details of daily necessities of modern life.   So why, our reflex becomes, do we need to be concerned that our politicians aren't making sure that the infrastructure, the house of civilization, is being kept in good repair.  Sure, such questions may occur to us from  time to time -- especially during a crisis like Hurricane Sandy,  but as soon as the crisis passes, those questions quickly fleet from the forefront of our mind and become like a fictional story of history. 

The solution then, is to force upon ourselves the role of being the grown-ups that we of voting age are all supposed to be.  We can no longer kid ourselves into believing that the responsibilities of governing a society can be left in the hands of a few individuals that are confronted with a plethora of temptations while being afforded a level of ivory tower isolation that protects them from public accountability.   And the only way we can stop primal regression into feuding clans, is to come to dissolve our political clans and come to the realization that we are one big family with a lot of adults that are perfectly capable of sharing the burden of deciding how to run this country.  It is when we are faced with a true democracy, where every adult citizen gets an equal say in how things are run, that we realize we can no longer escape dealing with our adult responsibilities of dealing with things like infrastructure maintenance and repair.  And like a family all living under one roof, we will realize that there is no other acceptable solution than to find ways to get along rather than finding ways to fight each other.  There are already many examples where we as a society automatically realize that, when we are all together a one group in an enclosed space, whether it be an airplane cabin, an elevator, or a restaurant, that we must achieve a certain degree of civility that facilitates everyone getting along with each other.  I believe that same automatic realization of peaceful coexistence and cooperation will also kick in once we realize that in a true democracy we all have to work together as adults to come to solutions to all of our shared problems.