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Do We Want a Democracy or a Pantomime?
The next general election is hurtling towards us with the force of a damp sponge. We have, at most, 20 months until Decision Day- but who expects there to be a great fizzing debate? Who thinks we, the people, will have a chance to dig deep into our country's problems and tell our leaders how to put them right? Nobody. Instead it will be like an X-Factor final in a bad, bad year: which empty shell sounds sweetest? It's a bleak thought: in one of the world's oldest democracies, none of us expects democracy to work as it should.
But elections do not have to consist of the airless circulation of soundbites, bike-riding photo-ops and ignorance. We can do better than this. While we still have time, the three main parties can together table a Democracy Bill before parliament - to make sure we can make an informed choice between them. I would put at the very top of this bill public funding of political parties, and proportional representation. But Cameron's Tories have combined with a weird coalition of Labour Party Blairites and Bennites to thwart both. So let's stick here to simple measures all three parties could swiftly agree on before the looming election.
Item One: Deliberation Day. The American political scientists Bruce Ackerman and James Fishkin have come up with a simple democracy-deepener. Declare every general election a national holiday, and offer every citizen £150 to take part, there and then, in a day of debate, modelled on jury service. In the morning you watch a televised debate between the main political leaders, and then you divide into groups of 15 who go off for an hour to discuss what you've seen. Together, you figure out a series of questions you want to put to local representatives of the political parties - about any issue on earth. Then, when all the groups come together, the "foreman" of your "jury" puts your questions. After lunch, you reassemble to debate what you've heard. Then you vote, and take your cheque.
The national political debate would then no longer consist of10-second soundbites. Suddenly, politicians would be able to talk in proper nuanced paragraphs - and we could argue back. We could move beyond thought-halting slogans - like "tough on crime" or "war on drugs" - to a more rational discussion of the evidence. To Independent readers, this might seem unnecessary, but two-thirds of British people tell pollsters they have not had a single conversation about politics in the past two years.
What kind of meaningful democracy can emerge from that? For many, Deliberation Day would be a bottle of Perrier in a political drought, a chance twice a decade to think seriously about the future of their country and their planet.
Item Two: ban opinion polls during the election campaign. Great slabs of election coverage are dominated by the horse-race: look at this Mori poll! Have you seen this Harris? People know the result of the election in advance - so they don't bother to vote. In France, they stamped this out by banning polls in the run-up to voting. It forces the media to cover the issues, and it injects suspense. Their turn-out was almost double ours.
The Democracy Bill also needs to deal with the way we receive our information in between elections. Put bluntly: newspapers - the most sophisticated way of analysing the news - are sickly, with ageing and dwindling readerships. In the US, they are dying. At times, being a newspaper journalist can feel like being a coal-miner in 1985. While blogs can be great, they depend on newspapers doing the heavy lifting of sending costly reporters out to conduct investigations. If newspapers die, a large part of our democratic debate dies with it.
So... Item Three: In the US, the president of the Carnegie Corporation, Vartan Gregorian, has proposed a solution: a law requiring universities to add a small amount to their students' tuition fees, to pay for a daily newspaper subscription of the student's choice. It would help inform young voters and get many into the ink-habit, giving newspapers access to a lucrative new demographic. Poor students don't pay fees, so their bill would be picked up by the state. As an added bonus, papers would be pressured to be more progressive, since this new student market tilts left.
We can take these three steroids to bulk-up our democracy now, or we can sit back and snore through another narcoleptic election, only to wake up sometime afterwards with a jolt to ask why our government isn't doing what we wanted. Isn't the few billion pounds this Democracy Bill would cost us a price worth paying for a proper participative democracy, rather than this feeble husk?
--Johann Hari
©independent.co.uk
13 Comments so far
Show All"Democracy or a Pantomime?"
You have neither....
it is a PUNCH AND JUDY PUPPET SHOW; with the same corporate puppet master behind the screen, operating both puppets with either hand,
Punch(McCain) and Judy(Obama)beat on each other for your amusment....while the Corporate Puppetmaster's operatives mingle with the crowd and pick your pockets clean.
A perfect childish amusment for a childish nation.
re canuckchuck August 18th, 2008 12:37 pm
i can't disgree with your sentiments, but i think you missed the fact that the article is about elections in the u.k.
Yeah canuckchuck, its not like your country is any better; just different.
Dear Bruce Ackerman and James Fishkin: Silly rabbits, representative democracy is for corporations!
Democracy is being dismantled everywhere with the possible exception of South America. The anglophonic nations - along with former jewel of their empire - India - are leading the way.
A perfect childish amusement for a childish nation.
Yes, that's us, a childish nation is exactly what we are. I WANT IT! I WANT IT! Don't worry . . . . you'll get it but it won't be what you wished for.
You mean: Do we want a Democracy or a Dictatorship?
It's amazing, but the ignorant masses in the UK, America and everywhere, savour every tv doc on Hitler, Stalin, and the others; and that which constitutes a Dictatorship continues to elude them.
"a law requiring universities to add a small amount to their students' tuition fees, to pay for a daily newspaper subscription of the student's choice"
Why not require them to purchase buggy whips and learn Morse code as well?
Or America could have compulsory voting as Australia does.
Mind you, this does not prevent either of the two main political parties in Australia being beholden to corporate lobbying.
At least, however, a recent change of government got Australia out of Iraq.
The Presidential debates in the United States are limited to the two corporate parties. These parties have lots of issues that are "off the table"--that is, there is no way these issues will be discussed. Issues such as ending the war, providing single payer health care or impeaching the squatter in the White House will not be mentioned by McCain and Obama.
We need Ralph Nader to be included in the debates. If we can't hear the candidates speak on issues of vital concern to 80% of the citizens, how can this be a democracy? Nothing should be "off the table"! Open up the debates!
I have a swell idea!
First, in the US, we have to start an anti-corporation campaign.
Hey, these cats control what happens to our everyday lives.
We can start nationalization movements against Big Oil, the Federal Reserve, etc.
Or we can argue for corporate demonopolization, adding environmental, citizen's, union members and representatives of affected communities on their board of directors. So these reps won't be swallowed up, they must have a large outside-the-corporation constitutency to answer to.
we must get the huge US military-corporate-media complex under control; that can only be done via huge spending cuts.
And most US intelligence agencies are nothing more than bureaucratic carbuncles that waste the trained talent we need for more important and more benign activities in the US.
So they must be greatly diminished. In fact, there should be an independent panel set up -a truth commision- in order to start criminal procedings against members of the intelligence community who broke various internation, national and domestic laws.
Foreign and domestic bases must be closed. Their infrastructures can be rehabed for community-oriented activities. These must be bottom-up, non-manipulated communities.
No NGOs please!
However, the big point is what to do with transnational corporations.
If we want to remain citizens rather than becoming subjegated, debt dependent consumerists of a garrison state, we must promote economic democracy.
The dictators of the eocnomy and the polity are big business.
Get Big Business off of the government's back!
I think presidential candidates should have to pass a SAT. It should be, like the one you take to qualify for college, a four-hour exam without benefit of on-hand resource materials. Areas covered should be world-wide current events, science, history, basic math, and fundamental geography. Maybe they should also have a written portion -- just to prove they can write, and spell. Well, maybe they wouldn't have to "pass" it, maybe it would be sufficient to publish their scores.
The only true democracy is opposed to representative democracy. It places the power directly in the hands of the people in decisions that affect them. Do you have the will and the courage to fight for this?
I just want to plant the seed.