Why democracy is rubbish
It struck me recently, while listening to various enthusiastic people in Egypt, Tunisia and elsewhere enthusing about the prospect of ganing democracy, that they were likely to be in for a disappointment.
Getting rid of dictators is all very well, but actually they are a symptom rather than an embodiment of the problem. The problem is an oligarchy which concentrates almost all the power and wealth of the country into the hands of a select few. These people -- military top brass, industrialists, financiers -- have not been touched by the removal of ben Ali and Mubarak: they still control just as much of Tunisia and Egypt as they did before, and so the chances of anything materially improving for the poor and underprivileged of the countries is pretty remote.
You may think that democracy allows the people to elect a populist government which can address these imbalances of power and wealth. Maybe so in theory -- but in practice that seems impossible, other than at the level of tinkering. Brazil has had a populist government for the last eight years, which has promulagated a number of redistributive measures, but the most it's managed to achieve is to prevent inquality from worsening as sharply as in other comparable economies. In Venezuela the populist government has all but declared war on the oligarchs, with similarly limited success: they remain as powerful as ever. And of course there are countless examples of politicans being elected as populists but then turning into puppets of the oligarchs once in power. This is not because populist politicans are uniformly incompetent or easily bought-off (although some of them are, of course) -- rather that the oligarchs already hold sufficient of the cards that they can make it functionally impossible for an opposed government to materially harm their position.
In the UK and other first-world nations we may feel comfortably superior to all this, as we have a democracy that's well established, rather than being in the unfortunate situation of setting one up from scratch in the face of insurmountable opposition. But I would argue that in fact we aren't much better off -- we just don't realize it. In this country too, power is held by industrialists and financiers, who can force the policies they desire onto governments of whichever party. This is not conspiracy-theory ranting -- there are countless obvious examples, with today's governmental rubber-stamping of Murdoch's takeover of BSkyB, even while another arm of his empire is unwillingly revealing the most egregious invasions of privacy, only the latest.
Now obviously it's easy to make comments along the lines of "if voting could change anything, it would be illegal", or take the other line and point out that "democracy is the worst governmental system possible, apart from all the others that have been tried". Or indeed "I'm all right, Jack; pull up the ladder." Cynical defeatism seems inadequate, though. I know a few people who believe that armed revolution is the only solution (cf. Cuba) -- that power can only really be taken at gunpoint. It'll be interesting to see if the nascent democracy movements in the Arab world are prepared to buy into that notion.
Getting rid of dictators is all very well, but actually they are a symptom rather than an embodiment of the problem. The problem is an oligarchy which concentrates almost all the power and wealth of the country into the hands of a select few. These people -- military top brass, industrialists, financiers -- have not been touched by the removal of ben Ali and Mubarak: they still control just as much of Tunisia and Egypt as they did before, and so the chances of anything materially improving for the poor and underprivileged of the countries is pretty remote.
You may think that democracy allows the people to elect a populist government which can address these imbalances of power and wealth. Maybe so in theory -- but in practice that seems impossible, other than at the level of tinkering. Brazil has had a populist government for the last eight years, which has promulagated a number of redistributive measures, but the most it's managed to achieve is to prevent inquality from worsening as sharply as in other comparable economies. In Venezuela the populist government has all but declared war on the oligarchs, with similarly limited success: they remain as powerful as ever. And of course there are countless examples of politicans being elected as populists but then turning into puppets of the oligarchs once in power. This is not because populist politicans are uniformly incompetent or easily bought-off (although some of them are, of course) -- rather that the oligarchs already hold sufficient of the cards that they can make it functionally impossible for an opposed government to materially harm their position.
In the UK and other first-world nations we may feel comfortably superior to all this, as we have a democracy that's well established, rather than being in the unfortunate situation of setting one up from scratch in the face of insurmountable opposition. But I would argue that in fact we aren't much better off -- we just don't realize it. In this country too, power is held by industrialists and financiers, who can force the policies they desire onto governments of whichever party. This is not conspiracy-theory ranting -- there are countless obvious examples, with today's governmental rubber-stamping of Murdoch's takeover of BSkyB, even while another arm of his empire is unwillingly revealing the most egregious invasions of privacy, only the latest.
Now obviously it's easy to make comments along the lines of "if voting could change anything, it would be illegal", or take the other line and point out that "democracy is the worst governmental system possible, apart from all the others that have been tried". Or indeed "I'm all right, Jack; pull up the ladder." Cynical defeatism seems inadequate, though. I know a few people who believe that armed revolution is the only solution (cf. Cuba) -- that power can only really be taken at gunpoint. It'll be interesting to see if the nascent democracy movements in the Arab world are prepared to buy into that notion.