verging_on_random

A new democracy?

May 16, 2007 on 2:35 pm | In Uncategorized |

Andrew Bartlett has a post on his blog in which he discusses some issues about blogging and its links to conventional politics and the mainstream media. It prompted me to write down some thoughts that have been half-articulated in my head lately.

We all know that ‘democracy’ is a term that gets thrown around in so many contexts that it has become meaningless. We also acknowledge, or should do, that most countries labelled ‘democracies’ are anything but. The label is applied to virtually any nation that has a form of representative government and a halfway-respectable legal system, but that falls a long way short of a genuine democracy.

The problem with the long-standing model of democracy is that it makes unfounded assumptions about human nature. Fundamentally it assumes that individuals will take an informed interest in issues that affect them and exert themselves to achieve the outcomes that they believe are correct. If people actually behaved like this democratic government might work, albeit with the kind of occasional disruption that we see in France or Mexico. However we know that in most developed countries, people do not behave like this.

In ‘democracies’ like the USA where voting isn’t compulsory, half the population can’t even be bothered to vote. The same applies locally to micro-democracies like the NRMA and other member-owned co-operatives: most members completely ignore their entitlement to have a say in running the place.

The result in countries like Australia is that government has been hijacked by the major political parties, which like most contemporary organisations are run by management for the benefit of management, with citizens regarded as customers to be provided with the most marketable collection of policies and leaders that management can put together based on endless market research. This would be fine if it led to acceptable outcomes but on the evidence, it doesn’t. It leads to an opportunistic obsession with short-term popularity at the expense of long-term planning.

It also leads to government being in the hands of incompetent individuals. We’re prone to complain about the quality of politicians in both the Labor and Liberal Parties, and with good reason, but it’s pretty much unavoidable that we’ll get dysfunctional individuals in politics under the party system as it exists now. Let’s face it, very few normal, rational people would endure the life of a contemporary politician: on duty 24/7, every aspect of your private life subject to intense scrutiny, constantly being called upon to meet a menagerie of special interest groups, spending endless tedious hours at meetings and dinners and god knows what where you’re expected to be sober, serious and a good mixer. No wonder it attracts people who are a bit peculiar. No wonder they get a bit full of themselves when they get into power.

Online communications have created opportunities for alternative models of governance that we have barely begun to sense. Certainly I don’t pretend to be able to predict how they will develop but I’m confident they will. The singular benefit of online interaction is that it will allow citizens to take back control of government without having to resort to professional politicians.

Politics has become a full-time profession for practical reasons. Until now, the function og governing has required the presence of a group of people in the same physical space at the same time. Once the voting franchise extended beyond the aristocracy (who had nothing better to do), the only way to involve people in government was to make it their paid profession. However that need no longer be the case. The internet makes it easy for people to make collective decisions without having to conform to the tyrannies of time and place. The amount of time and effort that many people put into blogging is testimony to their willingness to participate in public debate without payment. In time there is no reason why that can’t be channelled into not just debate and discussion but decision-making as well.

Blogging, and co-operative online ventures like Wikipedia, demonstrate how democratic principles could be applied in practice by encouraging decision-making by consensus. That is at the core of genuine democracy: it’s not dictatorship by the majority but a process in which all interest groups are heard and their interests are taken into account to the maximum extent practicable.

Online democratic government would allow different groups of people to take control of public policy in their own fields of expertise. When you think about it, the notion that a bunch of lawyers (Coalition) or trade union officials and party hacks (Labor) should be allowed to decide on issues like global warming and industrial relations is ludicrous. What the fuck would they know? The fact that they now do so reflects unplanned institutional evolution, not some deliberate act of public policy.

Even the crude Wikipedia model demonstrates how a large number of informed people could contribute to a consensus decision about virtually anything. Why shouldn’t a group of 500 employers, workers, academics and public servants develop by consensus a new industrial relations system for Australia? Does anybody seriously think it would not be a
substantial improvement on any ideologically-driven model devised by either the Labor or Liberal parties?

As I said, I don’t pretend to have any idea what kind of mechanisms will actually emerge. Being online 24/7 using wireless technology is going to change a lot of our social institutions in ways we can’t yet imagine and there’s no reason to think politics will be exempt. I just think it’s exciting that at last there’s a practical alternative emerging to what seemed until recently to be the relentless concentration of governmental power in the hands of a political class increasingly disengaged from the bulk of the citizenry.