The Democracy We Deserve

Canada’s democracy is weaker today than it was a decade ago. The problem starts with us and so must any solution.

As we watch events unfold in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya, as the media chronicle acts of extraordinary courage in the face of grotesque brutality, I expect many of us – inspired, hopeful, uncertain – are led to reflect on things here at home. For me, at least, this has meant a recognition of our own very good fortune, accompanied, however, by worry about our increasingly enfeebled democracy and perhaps some shame that we don’t seem able to muster the will to do anything about it.

A consensus is indeed emerging in much of the developed world that both our democracy and civil society are weaker today than they were a decade ago. Politics and public service are no longer honoured vocations – though they must be. Citizens are less inclined to vote or to join political parties or to pay taxes. Young people in particular have turned away from our conventional political institutions. Parties are in disarray trying to find ways to reconnect to voters. The bonds of trust between citizen and government have come undone and the trust between citizens seems to be fraying as politics increasingly polarize and divide.

U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron, heading a Conservative-Liberal Coalition, has pronounced U.K. society “broken”:too many people are excluded entirely from economic opportunity and political participation, and a gaping chasm now exists between the government and the people. Scholars and pundits worry increasingly about the depletion of social capital and the loss of “mutuality.”

While we may quibble about details and degree, thinkers across the political spectrum are writing and talking more and more about the risks of this deterioration and the possible remedies to it. But while we might find convergence on the diagnosis, there is nothing close to consensus on the causes and remedies.

Some find the source of decay in the expansion of government into every aspect of our lives and the increasing centralization and bureaucratization that make government more and more remote from and inaccessible to us. Even neoliberalism failed to deliver a smaller, more accessible state; protecting the market, it turns out, is pretty expensive and quite intrusive. So Australian John Keane has pronounced the death of representative democracy and the difficult birth of a new “monitory democracy” whose shape and capacity to deliver results is yet to be determined.

Some find the source in creeping authoritarianism – especially in the context of the “war on terrorism” and the expanding security state seeking to become omniscient and omnipresent. Have a look at the recent piece by Linda McQuaig here and an older piece by Chris Selley here.

Others see the source in the unconstrained rise of individualism and consumerism, fed particularly by a neoliberal ideology that defines us – and treats us – entirely in terms of our self-interest, and views mutuality and interdependence as constraints to freedom. In this frame, we become consumers and workers – not citizens. Whatever one thinks of Cameron’s “Big Society” initiative, his concern that society is broken seems so much healthier than Margaret Thatcher’s pronouncement that there is no such thing as society, reflecting the dangerously atomised view of humanity that has prevailed ever since. So republican theorists such as Michael Sandel now wonder, in the face of the hollowing out of civil society, how we might begin to rebuild a sense of the common good and the civic virtue necessary for its pursuit.

Yet others see the real problem as the intolerable growth of inequality over the last decades that has no equal since the twenties and thirties, before the great depression. Then, as now, social trust and democracy were undermined, as was the capacity to develop a shared sense of the public good. So we now have thinkers as diverse as Francis Fukuyama and Bill Moyers worrying about plutocracy, and we are confronted every day by new evidence of how money shapes politics.