Democracy's Bugbears:

Been reading a lot about failed and failing states in Africa and around the world, and political history in general. Gives you a feel for the common themes between states. On paper, a democracy is the best system of government we've come up with so far: a politically involved and aware populace elects some of its peers to act in their intrests to develop the state for the good of all. However, in practice this is almost always not the case, and the populace no more rule themselves than they did under a kings or dictator. Why..? Where does democracy go wrong..?

To me, the biggest threat to a state's balance between an oppressed or ignored electorate to an empowered and involved electorate, are the self-interested elites. Some definitions:

By elites I'm referring to groups of people who can guarrentee the support/votes of a large number of the population to whomever they may designate. These groups are self-serving, and will ally themselves with the state for their own ends, be they money, power or whatever other reward they may seek.

By the term weak state I'm not referring to a state's GNP, or military stature. A weak state is formed when political parties cannot attract enough support/votes from their populace directly to obtain or stay in power, and as such, are forced into alliances with elite groups to maintain/extend their control.

I hesitate to include this elite, as it is more of a background hum pervading the political scene all throughout history, rather than part of a progression. The state is always bound to pay at least lip-service to the prevailing religion, except in the case of Communism perhaps.

I think Soviet Russia was the first state to ever try to expunge religion totally and replace it with atheism, but you could argue that they had no choice but to do so - as religious faith and a faith in Communism both probably compete for the same socio-psychologic niche in the mass psyche - and as such are bound to come to blows. In truth though all they did was drive religion underground. This also turns it into a seam of buried political gold which will become increasingly attractive to future political parties - the first party to cave in and appeal to religion will possibly recieve a landslide of support - as is seen in modern Turkey for example and the success of the first openly pro-Islamist party after 80 years of strictly secular politics.

Origins: For a quick summary of why religions naturally arise and spread see: Here, and here.

Effects: A political candidate or party only has to appear pious and adopt the vocabulary of whatever the majority religion may be to get the religious vote, all other policies being equal. Tax breaks, donations and other favourable economic sanctions for religious bodies don't hurt either. Build a mosque or two. The downside of trying to secure the religious vote is the backward mind-set behind it, that parties end up having to support, however obliquely. Creationism taught in schools as 'fact' and a general distrust of mainstream science - and the state-wide brain-drain this sponsors, varying degrees of intolerance for other religious and ethnic minorities - intolerance of sexual diversity, abortionist issues, birth-control issues. On the judicial side, the interference between, for example, Sharia/biblical codes with more abstract state law.

But then, how much of this would occur anyway, even without active state support, is debatable, as is the plus side of a religious enviroment - increased moral restraint, not to mention a possibilty of alliance with other states of similar beliefs - the crusade effect/Muslim brotherhood of nations etc. - though such polarization of foreign policy along religious, rather than practical, lines is also a minefield.

Removal: In the sixteenth century Henry the Eighth dissolved the Catholic monastries and appointed himself the head of the new "Church of England" basically for a divource and a whole shit-load of gold collection plates. ie. The grip of a religious elite external to the state can be broken, though usually only by its replacement with another form of religion - or ideology as with communism. However, a democracy does not usually have the brute-power of a king/or totalitarian regime, so the direct "burn the churches" route is closed to them. A quiet emphasis of religion-related atrocity - whether it be fiddling with choirboys, Waco and Jonestown, or historical blooper-reels - in the media will undermine the stature of religion in the group mind; the materialist usurption of religious festivals - Father Christmas and the Easter bunny on every corner; entertaining alternatives to piety, cheap booze, porn and reality tv, all under the pinkly beneficent cloud of "freedom of expression" and "freedom of choice".

Ideally, a nominally religious country, with a very lazy collective congregation and a secular state is the best that can be hoped for.



Pretty much the common theme running through the political development of all countries I've read about is the constant battle between the state and the extended family. These kinship circles can vary in size from a single family to a whole ethnic minority. Ideally in a 'perfect' democracy, voting is absolutely anonymous and peoples' choices are individual and inviolate, in practice however, this is seldom the case. And this is the problem. The situation is compounded once a state ratifies and protects the ownership of land, (usually making it safe from its own arbitrary sequestration, at least without fair compensation).

Origins: With land, as with any economic resource, the ancient rule of "to those that have will be given, to those who have not even that will be taken" means that in practical terms the majority of that land will end up in the hands of the powerful few over time. Basically, inheritance of all assets by the first-born son and judicious marriages between land-owning families will tend to create a rural elite, with large extended families dependent upon them and a number of other tenant farmer families effectively under their control. The landowner-patriarch eventually gaining enough clout to control enough votes in an area to guarrentee the election of whomever he chooses.

Effects: This elite is the most damaging to a country. A corrupt politician has many things to offer:

Jobs: - Members of the rural elite will end up sitting on the boards of state-owned buisness, banks, utilities, institutions as well as in cabinet positions - either doing nothing but drawing (very large) salaries, or worse still, attempting to run ventures they have no idea about running. Much of the infra-structure of South Africa under Mbeki was ruined by completely corrupt and under-educated management recruited from his supporters after the end of apartheid for example.

Government Contracts and loans: - For goods and services either shoddy or non-existant in nature, produced (or supposedly produced) by businesses and factories owned by rural elite families. The loans of course are large, and never repaid.

Immunity: - Are the police hassling you..? Not any more they aren't.

The list is endless. Rural elites are the locusts of politics and the chief cause of failed states.

Removal: - Throughout history, land-reforms - the widespread seiziure and re-distribution or leasing of land - pretty much instantly destroys the powerbases of rural elites. However it takes a strong-state or a military junta to put into effect. Industrialization; urbanization - the movement of the rural populace to cities - also gradually leaches the power of rural elites as families disperse and scatter geographically, and become less reliant upon each other for employment as increased opportunities for education leads eventually to more diverse career choices; the emancipation of women and state control of inheritance laws tends to break up the wealth of any particular extended family over time.

When a state gets into bed with the rural elite it becomes a race against time as to whether uncorrupt sections of the government can finesse a reduction of their power before the entire state collapses.



I'm guessing, but I think in the interim between the fall of the rural elite, and the rise of the workers' elite there is a window for a short golden age of democratic politics where there is no short-cut for corrupt politicians to get easy votes - no elites to appeal to and no-one to force the voting choices of the electorate. So then, in this period, elected politicians are almost by default, of the people and for the people.

After America won its independence I think there was such a period, because the colonists, though rural, were such a heterogeneous bunch - hailing from all ends of Europe - there were no large land-owning extended famillies, able to exert pressure on their members and dependents, for a corrupt politician or party to exploit. So then, the notable politicians of the time were true giants, elected for their own merits, policies and personal charisma. You know the ones - they've got their heads on that mountain that Cary Grant climbed in North by Northwest.

But then of course, these things never seem to last...



Trade Unions are necessary. That said, when they get out of hand, things get economically ugly. If a country was completely self-contained - a closed loop of resource/production/consumption - and global competition not an issue, then screw it, let trade unions take over, but in the real world...

Origins: When a state goes through a period of industrialization - factories popping up like mushrooms everywhere, dark satanic mills etc., it gives a government a huge infrastructure headache. To facillitate industry you need large amounts of electricity, steel, coal/oil, water, transport systems - shipping, trains, canals - and only the government has the kind of money to engineer them en-masse. Giant state owned industries and utilities appear. And whenever you get giant state-owned industries, you usually get unions. Big ones. Big ones which, through union contributions, have big war-chests to support strikes and full-time coordinators. Alone, this wouldn't be so bad, but when they form alliances, and come out in sympathy strikes to support each other, countries grind to a halt. I grew up in 70's England - I remember frequent water-cuts, electricity black-outs and coal-shortages, which meant my family, with coal-fired central-heating, got a bit chilly in Winter.

Unions that big, start dictating government policy, and telling their huge memberships, and their families, who to vote for. A new workers elite for the politicians to get into bed with. Which is bad.

Effects: Out of control wage rises and benefits for workers means more expensive production, which means higher-price goods. Okay if you've no foreign competition, not okay if you do. Exports fall, cheap imports rise and your expensive goods stay on the shelves and in the warehouses and all your money leaves the country. Extravagant pension schemes and golden handshakes are great so long as the average age of the population is low, and the death-rate high, but terrible if everyone's pushing 60+ and fit as a fiddle. Closed shops set everything in cement and rule out competition for jobs, ham-stringing employer recruitment policies. Even if wages stay reasonable, "work to rule" ethics and go-slow policies again make production inefficient. Worked-out, inefficient mines and production facillities that are no longer profitable get kept open, and get subsidized.

Because of the above, a number of things gradually happen.

• People stop building new factories in your country. They outsource as much of everything as they can to cheap-ass sweatshop human-trafficker countries out in the boonies. Good managers and entrepreneurs quietly quit and leave the country. Governments have to start "Buy British/American/[insert country here] campaigns" and impose import tarrifs on goods from other countries which pisses those countries off and provokes tit-for-tat sanctions on your own goods, which screws your exports even worse. Effectively forcing everyone to buy expensive home-grown goods drives up the cost of living, even with the wage rises, and makes everyone poorer. A vicious circle. 
• Investors stop putting their money into things which involve having to give people jobs. Automation in factories increases, because robots don't have unions. Unemployment rises. But then so does the cost to the state for unemployment benefits and subsidized housing. A double-whammy. And of course there are also a lot of poor people with nothing on their hands but time. Which means you need to spend more on police. Triple whammy. Bored people screw more, so either populations rise, or abortion rates do. Condom sales improve perhaps, unless you're a catholic country. This fall-off in the job market and the rising cost of living makes unions even more frenzied. Round and round.
• More kids stay in school by default. Even the thick ones who should really leave and learn a trade, if there were any jobs, which there aren't. These thick kids beat up the smart kids and disrupt the classroom, which means the pace of learning gets slower - which is bad because knowledge in every field keeps on increasing regardless. Teachers get stressed. Thick Mums and Dads get all sad about how their thick children fail their exams and look stupid, so education gets dumbed down by sensitive sociology graduates in the government's education department. University entrance exams also get quietly easier, to lessen the impact of school-leavers on the unemployment figures. University stops being free, and grants turn into loans, which prohibits very-clever people from poor famillies who might have had a chance of flying high from doing so. University diplomas, now more common, and from universities of dubious quality, lose their value as levers into employment anyway, not to mention the 3-4 "I could have been working maybe" years lost to their owners.
• If employment laws allow it, smart employers recruit immigrants who can be threatened into not forming unions, and accepting lower pay. This boosts racial hatred in the host populace. "Those Pakis/Wogs/Chinks stole our jobs".
• I suspect that quietly Stock-market investment starts to balloon, because money also doesn't have a union. I also suspect this quickens the cycle of boom-bust economics as too much money sloshes around the system. Global economic links increase and diversify because the people with the money want to invest it in ventures outside the country.

In short, while an unchecked Worker's Elite doesn't ruin a country as badly as the Rural elite, it does end up hobbling it on the world stage, economy-wise.

Removal: Two words. Margret Thatcher. Less specifically, reforms to employment and picketing laws along with the massive privatisation of state-run assets and industries. This means the state suddenly has a lot more money than it had before - hopefully to do good, wholesome things with - and that the buyers' money is tied to the country. Privatisation has the effect of divide and conquer - instead of large homogenous unions, you get lots and lots of little ones, which you can do deals with and set against each other. Then you hold your breath for 20 years and hope everything gets back to normal.

A final interlude, though not so pink and fluffy this time.

So, the state has dismantled the extended family, has most of its population safely settled in big sprawling cities watching TV and sucking back big-macs. The trade unions have been smashed and the headaches of running much of the infrastructure of the country have been off-loaded onto private companies. The middlemen between the state and the populace it serves have been to a great extent removed. In the meantime technology's given everyone new toys and distractions; public health has improved, populations are booming; nukes have made world-wars extinct and have also failed to turn everyone into radioactive slag. Everything should be hunky-dory.

But it isn't. This is because the price to pay for isolating people from each other, reliquishing control over large sectors of employment into private hands and dumbing down the education system is the loss of means with which to easily appeal to the voting public.

The state can't appeal to family values the way it once could, because families ain't what they used to be. Neither can it simply give people jobs, because it hasn't got as many as it used to have to give away. Neither can it use compelling rhetoric, stirring the masses with speeches like, I dunno, the Gettysburg Address or something, because on average people aren't - pan-demographic-wise - as smart/impressed by fancy words as they used to be either.

Religion, or what's left of it, cancels out like it always has - and cannot be used to stand out from the crowd, unless you're a total raving fanatic or a complete atheist. You might manage to swing a nationalist vote - appealing to the heightened racial tension over employment depending on the ethnic mix in your country, but that would be a wee-bit evil and you'd have trouble booting out all the "foreigners" who were actually born on your soil, have passports and are possibly married to one of everyone's cousins.

And finally, you can't go round and press the flesh in person like you used to either, because there are just too many damn people.

What to do..?

Here we run out of history and begin to speculate a little. Before we start, let's examine the qualities of the naked politician.

 Physical Appearance: Even now, with cosmetic surgery techniques developing every year, your average Joe politician is pretty much stuck with whatever his or her genes gave them. However, as long as they correspond to enough of the concurrent "leader" tropes rattling round the collective psyche, the rest can be taken in hand by careful wardrobing, and maybe a touch of stage make-up and careful studio lighting upon occaison.

Don't underestimate appearance. eg. The Warren Harding Error.

          Warren Harding was – most historians agree – one of the worst presidents in American history. He served for 2 years before dying unexpectedly of a stroke. But how he came to become a presidential candidate holds some crucial lessons and warnings for us: “Why do we fall for tall, dark, handsome men?”
          When Harry Daugherty first met Harding – as they both had their shoes shined one morning in 1899 – Daugherty sized him up and thought: “Wouldn’t that man make a great President?” Or a great-looking President. At the time Daugherty was the Machiavelli of Ohio politics, the classic behind-the-scenes fixer, and shrewd judge of character, or at least political opportunity.
          Harding was worth looking at. At about 35 years old, his features, size and proportion attracted attention. The term ‘Roman’ was occasionally used in descriptions of him. He was classically tall, dark and handsome and appeared courteous, virile, generous, genuine and good-natured. However, Harding wasn’t a particularly intelligent man.
          He liked to drink, play poker and golf, and – most of all – chase women. He was vague and ambivalent on matters of policy. His speeches were once described as “an army of pompous phrases moving over the landscape in search of an idea”. In 1914 he was absent for the debates on the biggest political issues of his time – women’s suffrage and prohibition.

          How did this man become President? He looked the part.

Of these four basic attributes, appearance is the most innocent - a makeup artist, hair-stylist or wardrobe assistant would find it hard to get much leverage on the politician they were tending to, much less dictate policy.

  Oration: Voice, body-language, speeches. Here a lot of tweaking can be done. Voice coaching, acting lessons, and a good speech-writer have been the politician's friends for a very long time. (Though a certain base-level skill in communication for all those times when spontaneity is called for sorts the wannabes from the actually will-bees). A politician's speech-writer does put words into a candidate's mouth, but unless the politician is dumb to the point of being illiterate, he still has control over events.

 

  Life History: Okay, so ideally a politician will be a paragon of the times with zero blooper reel content. In real life, there are usually skeletons ranging, from slightly embarrasing to career-ending, lurking in the closet. Here tweaking in the form of spin, concealment and outright fabrication can be applied. Jeffrey Archer's academic credentials spring to mind. This is a minefield, because - if the politician does need something big hiding - it automatically makes him or her the puppet of the ones doing the spinning, or the burying. His or her only hope is to become powerful and popular enough to expose past faux-pas and laugh them off without too much damage being done. There's obviously a limit - reasonably harmless sexual indiscretions, a bit of drunken college tom-foolery are okay but anything bigger...

Wesley Higgins (33) attempted to extort €5,000 from Liam Kelly [Irish Republican party] by threatening to give the pictures to a newspaper. [...] The message continued that Higgins was acting as a "middleman" and the woman wanted €5,000 for the photos. Higgins added that he needed to be "looked after" as well. A later message stated that Higgins was having difficulty stopping the woman going to the newspapers with the photographs. A final message added that the pictures showed the councillor snorting cocaine.  Full story

...and you are going to have big problems.

Personal Wealth:  Ideally - of the people, for the people - anyone should be able to stand for election. However, it's an expensive business. Off the top of my head:

• Support: Can't easily work and campaign, unless you live in a really small place. So you need to support yourself without working for a while.
• Media: At the very least some nice flyers and campaign buttons, maybe a web-page. At the top, national TV slots, polls and market research, and huge rallies/fundraisers.
• Legal: At some point, someone's going to think about saying something nasty about you in public, hopefully false. To deter them, they have to know you've got the money to take them to court, with some serious lawyers behind you, not cheap ones.

For a more detailed example, click here for an expenditure breakdown for Barack Obama 2008. To cut to the chase, a little over 650 million Dollars on media, and about 203 million on campaign expenses.

Of this list of attributes the first three are fairly doable by average Joe/Jane Independent. As long as they are reasonably presentable, don't talk like Donald Duck and have led reasonably decent lives, sans prostitutes and cocaine belly-buttons, they are in with a chance. The real bottleneck these days is how to get yourself noticed by the public. The realy huge, and mainly ambivalent public. ie. The money.

So, assuming average Joe Politician and his party aren't stupidly rich, where does all the money come from..?

Well, donations for a start, which are usually required to be declared - for example:

Note: for the big candidates - donations from large donors, ie. the super-rich - approach 50% plus.

But also the slightly shadier world of loans - which may or may not be declared. How's your credit-rating Joe..?

An article in the Guardian on 21 April 2005 reported:
The Electoral Commission is to investigate political parties receiving secret monies in the form of private loans rather than donations, evading the need to declare them publicly. The Times newspaper today revealed that the Conservatives [England] had received "a number" of £1m loans from wealthy supporters, which were not disclosed as donations. Electoral law states that all donations over £5,000 have to be made public. But the situation with loans is more opaque.

As you may have guessed by now, the identity of the Third Elite is the moneymen - the super-rich - the banks - the media-moguls.

Origins: I think I've covered the creation of the rich in another blog-post - here - so here's some news clippings which testify to their global presence:

in the political process in the UK, according to one watchdog organization.

“When donors are making contributions exceeding £20,000 ($31,000) -- and some are making donations well over £250,000 ($390,000) -- it's perfectly understandable you don't give away that kind of money without expecting something in return,” Chandu Krishnan, executive director of TI UK. In November 2011, a UK advisory body recommended increased public funding as one way to avoid future scandals and limit the influence of big donors in elections, but the three main political parties rejected the proposal.

The Center for Responsive Politics estimates $6 billion will be spent in the U.S. elections by campaigns, political parties and corporations hoping to propel their candidates into the White House. The projected price tag of the 2012 US election dwarfs that of other nations, but corruption monitors from Transparency International (TI) say it's not just how much will be spent but where the money is coming from that threatens the integrity of politics around the world.

For the full article, listing other countries, see here:

Effects: Here, I run out of imagnation, or at least any form of reliable evidence. Off the top of my head, and purely personal opinion:

• Bipolar states, with only two giant parties - the minimum to preserve the illusion of democracy. The money is backing both of them anyway, so to an extent some of the money wins either way.
• De-radicalization of politics, producing parties which are largely homogenous in policy, harder to choose between, which in turn will only increase the amount of media dog-and-pony show required during campaign periods to influence the electorate either way, whihc in turn again will increase the amount of money required to campaign, thus increasing the hold the money will have over the participating candidates and parties. Round and round.
• Supression of paradigm shift technology - electric cars for example and alternative fuels. Money is notoriously conservative with respect to real change - because it costs a lot to switch, and the forerunners, who shoulder most of the R&D costs, make it strategic for others to sit on their hands wringing out the last petro-dollars before eventually adopting a finished product which they won't have to pay to develop, only tweak enough to apply for basic patents.
• Short-term show-off politics. Who remembers the guy who made it a law to have seat-belts in cars..? Even though that single act has saved more lives traffic-wise than any other. But I'll bet everyone knows the guy who pulled them out of the burning wreck of their car, and the doc. who put their face back together. Shock and awe baby.
• Increased surveillence of the electorate, for market research and other purposes - more penetrative advertizing/media probably individually biased by Amazon-like recommendation programs.
• Even greater emphasis on the 'sustained growth' economic paradigm, rather than the simply sustainable.
• Money has no country, I'd expect countries backed by the global Third Elites to act increasingly in unison in the future. New economic crusades, back by state of the art weaponry.

Please feel free to add your own ideas, and you've probably noticed that all of these trends are already happening.

Removal: A toughie. Beyond a Fight-Club-esque destruction of everyone's credit records, a Zeitgeistian collapse of the monetary system, or just general mass-mayhem - The Third Elite are here to stay. I do hava a rather wacky back-door idea though.

If you remember that after the reduction of the older elites - the rural, the worker - the destruction of the extended families and the unions, that the politic parties are faced with the problem of reaching a large and sometimes disinterested public, and that it is the size of the population they need to influence that involves enormous amounts of money. Money which forces them into the arms of the Thrid Elite if they are to have any real chance of running the state.

Well, what if we reduced that population..?  Rendering the money question null-and-void..?   

Okay, before you call me a monster, I'm not talking about killing 90% of the population - though that would sure ease the the whole climate-change-death-and-destruction situation - no, I mean simply how about reducing the number of people eligible to vote in any given election..? If, instead of trying to convince the entire populations of democratic countries:

Why not pre-select a representative few..? And give them the power to elect the next state..?

First selection: Drawn from the last census. Everyone not in jail and/or involved in politics or mentally ill is eligible. A completely random lottery - run by a publicly funded and oversighted institution - chooses (on national TV) 10,000 people. Participation is compulsary. No whining. Each of these people is seriously background-checked for any signs of having been influenced/paid-off/threatened or whatever. Those that fail are kicked off under transparent criteria.

Second selection. For the country concerned an ethnic, economic, religious, and age distribution table is constructed, and a final thousand - randomly chosen from the remaining pool of participants - selected to represent the concerns of each demographic.

These thousand are guarrenteed a continuation of their current income plus whatever benefits they receive, and guarrenteed their current job will be held open for them in the interim they are away. Compensation will be paid to their dependents/family for their relative's temporary absence. The final thousand are taken together into media isolation, though the process itself - reality-TV style - will be comprehensively monitored and televised 24/7.  For X amount of time, the political figures and parties of the time will campaign to this small select few.

And at the end of that time, that thousand will vote, finally and in complete anonymity, and the votes tallied, in front of the nation.

This way, this very cheap way, would cut out the money's influence on politics, opening up politics to all those who are of the people and for the people. And possibly, depending on the reality-TV show's success, maybe educate people about real politics, rather than just the flim-flam.

Thanks for reading.