Democracy

by Dorothy Maud Pickles

Paperback

First published April 30, 1972

Reviews

[Tom Schulte · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is an interesting, even enlightening 1970 essay on the definition and future of "democracy"

* defined broadly, "democracy" can include illiberal governments, such as communists.
* Defined broadly, the tyranny of a majority is democratic.
* The ancient, Athenian democracy admitting slaves and excluding women while casting lots to fill offices is not what modern democracy is like or seeks to be.

While dated and lacking in foresight due to the 1970 vintage, I found the pessimistic view of the future of democracy the most interesting:

If the right moment to strike passes unrecognized, then democracy can face a period of real danger, because its greatest vulnerability comes, not from the strength of the attack but from the weakness of the defence. It is the enemy within the gates who is most to be feared, the democrat who has lost faith in the democratic method.

This does seem prophetic: "the capacity of the mass media to distort the focus still more by its choice of news items, and to communicate speedily..."

fashionable claims that 'participation' can provide a cure for the disease. For without superb organisation and enthusiasm, 'participation' becomes merely another series of 'remote' committees that will slow down still further a process of decision making that it is urgent to speed up by democratic rather than by technocratic methods. Participation cannot be imposed. It needs willing and able participators, and it is precisely the lack of them at almost all stages of the governmental process that is one of the symptoms of the disease of political apathy.

The second factor is the changing focus of politics, together with the capacity of the mass media to distort the focus still more by its choice of news items, and to communicate speedily and dramatically (and sometimes inaccurately) to worldwide audiences, news and pictures of events highlighted in different countries. We are living in a world in which the scope for action by individuals, by nations, and indeed by international bodies, is continually narrowing, while, thanks to television, the horizon of individual interest in, and superficial acquaintance with, political events is continually widening. Vietnam and Biafra, demonstrations, strikes, violence-these, from Tokio to San Francisco, are nowadays far more real and immediate to most people than, say, decisions in either their local Council or their national parliament, not to speak of what happens in municipal or parliamentary committee-rooms, where the essential work of democracy is done. This is where participation' is needed, not in marches of protest against the Vietnam war about which the ordinary citizen can do nothing. There is no reason, of course, why such demonstrations should not take place if citizens want to hold them. But to the extent to which they choose the drama of ineffectual protest, the excitement of violence and of symbolic gestures, such as sitting on rugby fields or in Trafalgar Square in order to express feelings of anti racialism, to the exclusion of the drudgery of everyday politics, they are joining the students' make-believe world.