1992 – Democratic Practice
In October 1992, I was tucked away in the seclusion of the Wye Woods, on the eastern half of Maryland, USA., taking part in The Aspen Institute’s Executive Seminar, a two-week moderated discussion based on extracts from the works of philosophers, historians and political scientists, written over some 2,500 years. Far from any town, the only noise to be heard was from the thousands, possibly hundreds of thousands, of Canada Geese stopping on the Chesapeake on their annual migration. An ideal place for around the table discussion, as there were no other distractions. Our group met with our facilitator every morning and most afternoons, although there were a few excursions: one was to a collection of consignment stores, an outing that seemed rather out of kilter with our serious morning debates!
The evenings were free, although we each had a massive folder of readings demanding attention, all to be read for the sessions on the following days. Despite this, after dinner the group watched the television news: the reason that drew us every night was this was in the final months running up to the 1992 US Presidential Election. There were three candidates, George W H Bush, the sitting President, and the nominee of the Republican Party, William (Bill) Clinton, the nominee of the Democrats, and Ross Perot, businessman and independent. Compared to more recent debates, this was conducted in a rather considerate fashion. It was Ross Perot who managed to capture surprising attention, though hardly any votes.
In a time before politically correct speech, Perot was far from careful in his remarks. I heard him refer to African Americans, as “you people”. However, for me his most memorable contribution came in an individual interview when he was explaining his views on the issues of economic management and inflation. He’d prepared some points on two-foot square cards. Putting one on an easel, he talked about the way inflation was rising, but the card showed it dropping. When this was pointed out, quite unfazed he took the card, rotated it 90°, and put it back. Yes, inflation was clearly rising! The group in the Wye Woods laughed and moved on to talk about some of the issues at stake between the Republicans and the Democrats: most were Republicans, Perot was quickly forgotten.
However, those evenings had another significance for me. Brought up in the ‘western tradition’, I knew about democracy, and was coming to terms with the US variant. I was used to the idea that in an election people voted for their local representative. The party that returned the larger number (the majority) of elected representatives then chose from among their number the leader who would be appointed Prime Minister (this person usually known well in advance). I suppose you could say that the electorate that voted in the candidate who became Prime Minister were ‘choosing’ the Prime Minister, but that wasn’t how it was seen.
In the USA, it was different. Everyone did get a chance to vote for the next president (although as in the UK, and unlike Australia, voting is not mandatory). Whatever the other advantages and disadvantages of this system, you did get to see and hear the would-be-Presidents. I found it a little surprising, having been brought up in a Westminster system world. Previously rather uninterested in the US process, it was the first time I grasped the immense power the president had, both legally, but also through the ‘bully pulpit’. The contrasts between the three candidates were almost stereotypical: Bush was patrician, confident, affluent, with an oil industry background; Clinton was charismatic, enthusiastic, an upstart from a smaller southern state; Perot was like an elf who had wandered on to the television set by mistake, excited and excitable, and a little confusing. What would each do if elected? Bush had a track record, and was running for a second term, comfortably conservative. For the Republican electorate, he was safe and sensible. Clinton was already mired in controversy, with some of his early sexcapades coming to light and he must have provoked alarm, even in the Democrat camp. Would he do the right thing? Was he moral? As for Perot, since we knew he wouldn’t be elected it was as if the television gods had thrown in some light relief to make the debates and interviews less weighty, less boring!
Clinton won, of course, and did again four years later, leaving behind a series of legislative changes, a series of increasingly dubious appointments, and a collection of tawdry scandals. Could we have believed, back then, he would be something of a reformer, only to see the Bush family return with the somewhat less patrician Bush junior to settle everything back down. As I learnt after that 1992 introduction, Presidents have power, but they also face battles. If Congress is with them (it usually is in the first couple of years), they have power and the ability to wield it; but once they lose Congress, they lose effectiveness. Many a two-term President achieves most in those first two years, and Biden may not even have that long.
Is the US system any more consequential than the Australian one? In both cases, general elections are rather irrelevant. A superficial sense of democracy is sustained each time the people go to the polls, but, well, it’s like buying a pig in a poke. It is only when you get the bag home and open it that you know whether the pig was fat or skinny, healthy or diseased. When you vote for a party, it is only years later you find out in what your vote resulted. Of course, circumstances change, and events that party political platforms neither considered nor had articulated can become important. In Australia that year, the most important was well outside the government. This was when the Australian High Court handed down its ‘Mabo Decision’, a land rights case that recognised the Torres Strait Islanders ownership of Murray Island and confirmed the British 1788 view of Australia as terra nullius was a legal fiction.
Watching those presidential debates in the Wye Woods, I was struck by what is meant by democracy in a country dominated by size and complexity. Each person has a vote, but the vote is largely ephemeral. Every few years, cast your vote, and for the rest of the time your preferences are unknown and ignored, except for opinion polls and constituency meetings. At Aspen, we read Plato’s plans for a Republic, ruled by guardians. Plato had no interest in democracy and wanted the rulers to be the best possible people for the task, philosopher kings, who would receive no special benefits in their role. Just imagine, a government run by people who lived simply, and who received less than those around them! Nice idea were it not for human nature: even Plato seemed to concede that people were largely driven by the desire to achieve and obtain more and more, striving for a never-ending list of ‘wants’. He believed his philosopher kings would be different , but his ideas seem rather unrealistic.
Are we doomed? Will government leaders always succumb to the temptations that their advantageous positions permit? It was around the time I was in Maryland that an interstate colleague came up with his solution. His inspiration had come from reading about the UK’s peacetime National Service, a conscription scheme for men that began on 1 January 1949, whereby healthy 17–21-year-olds were required to serve in the armed services (army, navy or air force) for 18 months, and remain on the reserve list for four years, from which they could be recalled for up to 20 days no more than three times. There were exemptions, for ‘essential workers’ and ‘approved’ conscientious objectors. When the Korean War began, the service period was extended to 2 years. The requirement began to wind down from 1957, and those born on or after 1 October 1939 were no longer called up. In November 1960 the last men entered National Service, and the last conscripts left the armed forces in May 1963.
My colleague’s idea was simple. Why not have government national service? In his system men and women would work for two years in government, at the national, state or local level. This would have three advantages. First, it would provide a stream of new recruits into government, rather than stuck with public servants remaining in their positions for years. Second, it would ‘demystify’ government, helping everyone understand what governments did and how they did it. Third, he thought it would make elections more effective, as voters would know what it was they were voting for, having seen the system from the inside.
Would it achieve those goals? The evidence from the UK’s National Service suggests not. Unwilling conscripts finished their time in the military with relief, and no love for their time or the people who commanded them. There were exceptions, of course. Some signed up, and some loved playing with guns, an enjoyment that continued in their civilian life, a predilection that would almost certainly have appeared without those enforced military years. In the same way, for many time in national government service would be seen as two wasted years, with no continuing love of government, and only a small proportion might decide this was the life for them. It seems unlikely propinquity would lead to passion! Many would be likely to support Winston Churchill’s assessment that “democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others that have been tried”. Well, the first half, anyway!
Some years after that time in the Wye Woods, I read Robert Dahl’s book, Democracy and its Critics (which had been published in 1989). It was and remains an outstanding work. Dahl is consistently clear and wise. Here is his opening line in a chapter critiquing Plato’s guardians: “Lofty as guardianship may appear as an idea, its extraordinary demands on the knowledge and virtue of the guardians are all but impossible to satisfy in practice”. He considered rule by philosopher kings inferior to democracy both as an ideal and in practice, arguing government cannot proceed with some version of technological or scientific rationality alone. People do not behave like inanimate objects, and as government is concerned with making choices about policy, it must confront the tricky trio of risk, uncertainty and trade-offs. These combine to make judgements contain a balancing act between probabilities, possibilities, a sense that things will change in some way as yet indeterminate, combined with the ever-present Murphy’s law that ‘if things can go wrong, they probably will’.
At the time he was writing, Dahl saw ‘polyarchy’ as the best form of democracy in large nation states, where more immediate and face-to-face democratic processes couldn’t be sustained (although the Swiss still attempt to keep them). He saw the basis of polyarchy as universal suffrage, the right for anyone to stand for office, and an electoral system in which all senior government positions are held by elected individuals. Other elements central to a polyarchy included the existence of alternative sources of information, freedom of expression and freedom of association. He also warned that size and complexity would make it easy to slip from democracy to rule by bureaucratic systems and, worse, to oligarchy.
Partly out of date now, the last third of Dahl’s book examines what democracy means in a ‘modern dynamic pluralist society’ (MDP). Does an MDP offer the ideal characteristics to sustain a polyarchy? Carefully, he explains that it nether necessary nor sufficient. His concerns are many, but the central issue is about the distribution of power. An MDP does ensure that power is distributed among many groups: these include class groupings, pressure groups, occupational groups, religious groups and many others. Political parties struggle to keep as many of these groups as possible aligned with their agenda, but inevitably, each group tends to want to wield its power for the benefit of its members and may resist linking with others. The history of occupational groups, from lawyers and doctors through to traditional trade unions, shows how these have shifted in their preferences, alliances and opposition. To put that the other way around, over time groups vary in the power they wield, and their influence on the political process and government operations. Pressure groups do have more impact on policy than individuals, as pressure is exerted daily while individuals only assert their preferences at the time of elections. De Tocqueville marvelled at the existence of cross cutting groups and affiliations in America; today we despair at the power and influence some have at the expense of our rather idealised concept of a democracy.
Are there any solutions on offer? First, surprisingly, is Dahl’s view that democracy should be extended to economic organisations. Dahl points out that shareholders do not run organisation, even if their claimed preferences are used by managers to justify many actions, and by directors to assert policies and broad strategies. Managers do. Dahl wants to see the enterprise as democratically governed, just like the state. He makes a telling point in considering the standard objections to such an idea, arguments about knowledge and access to information. These, he points out, bear an uncanny resemblance to the arguments used many decades earlier to suggest democracy could not be applied to the government of states. Those arguments failed in relation to political government, and he suggests should be set aside in relation to introducing democratic practices into enterprises, too.
His greatest concern, however, was with the tendency of governments to come under the control of a modern alternative to Plato’s guardians, a policy elite, a group which sustains its control through esoteric language, special education, and a rigorous control over who can be admitted to their ranks. Some writers have gone so far as to suggest governments are ruled by a dominant and exclusive minority, a political caste if you like. Given his concerns, Dahl comes up with a counterproposal which resembles my colleague’s thoughts from the past, but through a different process. He suggests we begin to use minipopuluses to look at important issues, each a group of randomly selected citizens, perhaps a thousand at a time, who are asked to deliberate on a topic, and, after a year perhaps, identify appropriate policy options and actions. A minipopulus could operate at any level of government, complementary to existing legislative bodies, and providing a path for citizens to directly address a key topic.
It wasn’t all bad in the Wye Woods in 1992. Americans did have the opportunity to see and hear their presidential candidates. Seeing is important, observing how a person responds to questions, how they look at you, and offering the opportunity to catch those slight but significant ‘tells’ that indicate whether the person is lying or not, and whether they mean what they are saying. Each candidate was expected to explain policy in relation to various issues, and, with good moderators, to describe how policies would be put into practice. In that American system, when election day came, Americans could vote for the candidate they preferred, and could do so with some sense of the policy alternatives on offer. Thirty years ago, candidates hadn’t perfected the skill of never answering questions, only addressing the topics they preferred, and moderators were less biased in questioning, and less willing to allow style to subordinate substance. The United States was an oligarchy, but with some elements of democratic practice in place. We didn’t realise how much worse it would get.
Don McLean’s American Pie had been recorded 20 years earlier, a memorable evocation of the way the world was changing. With a few tweaks to his words, it’s an apt commentary on politics then and now: Do you recall what was revealed, The day democracy died? We started singin’, Bye, bye Miss American Pie, Drove my Chevy to the levee but the levee was dry, Them good ole boys were drinking whiskey and rye, And singin’ this’ll be the day that I die. We’re not dead yet, but if critics like Dahl are ignored, I fear democracy is terminal.
