Boring is good · 2002-04-01
Everyone likes democracy. In the same way that everyone supports the national football team, we all agree that democracy is a good thing. So why don’t people vote?
Some of the arguments deployed by the ‘apathy’ brigade are deceptively seductive. When someone says ‘it doesn’t affect me’, this might be relatively true: the small tweakings to a country’s laws that happen in parliament need not be of great consequence to many people. Those without a big financial stake in society – young people, the unemployed – could be forgiven for taking a less-than-avid interest in Gordon’s next budget. It could therefore follow that voting is unimportant, too.
But who tries to justify their electoral abstinence with a reasoned analysis like this? Mostly the ‘reasons’ cited for not voting are along the lines of, “it doesn’t matter who wins, they’re all as bad as each other”, “politicians are all lying scum”, and “I’d rather watch the football”.
This sod-‘em-all attitude is more common in some democracies than others. In the USA, for example, a large chunk of the population believes that politics is an irrelevance – notwithstanding the occasional sex scandal, of course. Unfortunately this chunk is the poorest chunk. The result is that American politics is a middle-class leisure activity, and affluent people being as they are, the poor are allowed to stay poor – apparently contentedly, since they didn’t bother voting for anything else. In Italy the people became fed up of their admittedly substandard political servants, and decided to disengage. Knowing of the Italians’ love of mindless television, a rich man called Signor Berlusconi turned his television station into a political party and then sat back and watched as the bored voters elected him Prime Minister.
At least the Italians did vote. But then seventy years previously they had voted for Mussolini. And that is the point: democracy is not inevitable. It didn’t happen by mistake and doesn’t continue to exist by chance. Germany’s first democracy collapsed because – as in Italy – its own people didn’t take it seriously. It is true that there is no menacing fascist party on the electoral menu in modern-day Britain, just as there is no mass unemployment. But equally there is no reason the nasty spiral of the 1930s might not begin again – slowly at first perhaps, but who knows? And where would Britain’s non-voters be then? Idly watching EastEnders as a Berlusconi-style populist authoritarian begins to erode their civil rights, probably. Or perhaps they’d take a newfound interest and vote for him.
The rarely spoken truth is that democracy is boring as well as good, and its boringness should be celebrated. Democracy implies compromise: no one’s opinion is worth less than anyone elses, but neither is it worth more than the small fraction of the electorate that that person represents. The system is beautifully designed to grant an outlet for the popular will in all circumstances. At the centre of this, the principle of a democratic election is to choose a candidate or be a candidate. Democracy therefore transcends ideology: the people can have whatever ideology they choose, if they decide to vote for it. Better still, if they vote for democratic parties they can continue to exercise that choice in the future. But without this constructive participation the whole system breaks down. It has done before and will do so again, somewhere.
There is a place for scepticism. It’s in satire and irony and a wholesome suspicion of anyone in authority. That’s what democracy is about: after all, we can throw them out at the next election, unlike the people of China or Zimbabwe or Iran. Apathy, on the other hand, is just ignorant.
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Really accurate, I’m amazed, and never thought of this like that.
— Bertrand Guérin 2007-01-11 13:37 #Bertrand