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It’s true that democratic governments can bring good policy. This is not, however, their motivating purpose or their philosophical goal. In essence, democracy is self-justifying: taxi drivers and hairdressers deserve the right to have some say in their government not because they’re qualified, but because they’re governed. The governed must have a say in their own governance. Anything else is essentially subjection or slavery. It can be well-meaning subjection – the Prince is trying to do good by his people, the Oligarchy has the best interests of the people at heart, etc. – but subjection it remains. A golden cage is still a cage; a favoured pet is still nothing but a pet.

Also, democracy isn’t “one” thing. In essence, it means “demos + kratia” – power in the hands of the people, not some elite. Sure, this is the root. The system that most closely approaches this would be Switzerland’s various governments. In most societies they closely approach this when they operate in referendum mode. However, the questions and systems can be gamed, so occasional referendums are like crude democracy-hammers, and can have perverse effects. It would certainly be better to integrate kind-of ongoing referendum style decision-making into the overall system. Some countries have gone further down that road than others.

Also, democracy today comes with a host of other ideas, modifications that render it practical. They also limit it. There are reasons for this.

Liberal democracy requires three things, in this order:

1. Rule of law. This is not just “order”, but also the ability to force everyone to obey the law, including those with power. Even the Great Leader will be deposed and go to jail for breaking the law. While some have more power than others, in the end, we’re all naked before the law.
   
   This goes back to an even older concept : Isonomia. It means “One name” in ancient Greek. What it means is that everyone is the same: No name is better than any other, before the law. If a king breaks the law, he must be punished the same way as a commoner. This is more or less the root source of what allowed democracy to even exist as an idea, at all.
2. Civil rights. This is a modern invention, but a key invention. This is a strict limitation on the scope of government, a means of preventing Democracy from becoming Ochlocracy – the rule of the mob. No matter what happens, even a most hated person has the same rights before the law as everyone else, and the mob, no matter how democratic, has limits on the scope of its actions.
   
   The State has limits. Power is not absolute. Even under democratic rule, there’s only so much a democracy can do to an individual.
3. Democratic rule. This is third, because without 1, democracy is meaningless, and without 2, democracy can descend into mob tyranny.
   
   Democracy can be direct democracy. A society run entirely by “referendum” would be, in effect, a direct democracy.
   
   A weaker form of democracy can be representative democracy. This is clearly a one-step-removed idea, but it was invented for two reasons: direct democracy was impractical, logistically speaking; and it was thought that the mob could be fickle, so having a local representative think about ideas and make them more coherent and more consistent, as well as more fair, would be a good idea. Then you bring these representatives together and they do the same thing, on a larger scale.
   
   In some systems, a great leader is elected by mass franchise; a Presidential system works like this. In others, the leaders are chosen by the representatives. In the case of parliamentary democracy, the “ruler” (who has no power to actually rule) chooses a leader of the Parliament who has majority representative support.
   
   All of these things are different interpretations of democracy.

These principles work together, in tandem, to focus and restrain democracy.

We may come up with other ideas. For example, a fourth concept could be something like “if you have too much economic power, or too much wealth, we vote that you must donate it to a charitable cause (or some other, even more basic thing), outside of your power, so that you don’t become more powerful.” This would act as a humbling action to prevent “greatness” and the accumulation of enough power to damage democratic rule.

There’s a precedent for this. The ancient Athenians did this, in some ways, using the concept of exile. If voted on by using letters marked on Ostraka (pottery shards), someone could be “Ostracized” – the person has too much influence, so no matter how well-loved he was, he was forced to leave Athens for 10 years.

The Romans had another method, which was informal but worked for some time as a partial restraint, putting obligations on the powerful, but it was just a cultural convention most of the time. A rich, wealthy patron was required to expend his own family’s money providing some sort of public works. They acquired social prestige from having done this, and it became like a civic competition for the most honour. Alternatively, among the Tlingkit and the Haida on Canada’s west coast, wealth was ritually handed away at Potlatches, ceremonies where important people from all around would gather. This “gift-giving” wasn’t altruistic, but was designed to increase the power and prestige of the giver. Giving was a kind of competition. Both of these cultural conventions were kind-of limits, or at least a focus for power, redistributing goods and social status to some degree.

Some system of formalizing this sort of practice could be very useful, because social conventions are often unstable. Of course, the Roman and West Coast native practices weren’t in fact democratic, in that they institutionalize the gift-giver’s power and social influence, and they’re not themselves social organizations. But they do demonstrate that interesting added bits, including cultural practices, can flesh out an otherwise minimal political system. For example, self-bankrupting gift giving is not the kind of thing you expect from an oligarchy, but in these cases, that’s often what happened – by design. The oligarch would lose his wealth but then gain social prestige, so he would have to go out and rebuild that wealth again. At the very least, it functions as a kind of very large voluntary tax, for which the taxpayer collects social status.

Democratic ideas can include extra bits from here and there, and are thus always in a state of evolution. We add new core concepts after some experimentation. This is how we got civil rights added to democratic principles.

At the moment, we just have 1, 2 and 3 (above), but some have suggested a way to improve this collection of good ideas. It’s interesting that we’re not the first to have thought of this: the ancient Athenians were already there. Even though the socialist revolutions in the 19th and 20th centuries failed and produced immense misery, maybe the result will be the invigoration of democratic thought, and the ultimate re-introduction of a core idea – preventing runaway wealth and power accumulating in a class of people – to help reduce the power of oligarchy. We don’t need to use ostracism, but perhaps a combination of a large voluntary tax, a formalized social recognition of the contributions to society of a rich person donating their wealth, and some social status compensation for having done it would work. Of course, it would be much better if it were structural, and not an informal cultural convention, because informal systems tend to bend and reinforce any existing oligarchy, as with public works in ancient Rome. So they represent a modification to oligarchy without actually challenging it in a democratic way. But formal systems that actually work, and are tested by history, could later evolve into core principles, and then, if they’re suitable, be incorporated into democratic thought. Adding them together, the dynamic principles within the system become self-reinforcing. So to Principles 1, 2, and 3 above, we’d have Principle #4, and Principle 4 would seem as natural to people in 200 years as Principles 1, 2 and 3 seem to us now.

There may be other, better ideas out there, as well.

Democracy relies on political power being ultimately in the hands of the actual people – not some self-selected elite. But beyond this, the description above demonstrates that democratic ideas are not “one thing and just one thing”, but that they rely on many different principles to enact democratic will in a way that works.

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Finally, democracy is not a guarantee of good government.

Government outcomes are both systemic and policy specific. A democratic chaos is useless, and any well-intentioned government can still produce terrible policy. The socialist governments of the 20th century may have been meant to be revolutionary and productive and democratic, but they weren’t, and they produced awful economic results, which included terrible human-engineered famines. This is all the more shocking because these systems were meant to produce the opposite – immense prosperity and true freedom. Instead, they impoverished the people suffering under these policies and essentially imprisoned and oppressed them. East Germany had to build a literal wall around itself, turning the country into an actual open-air prison, and it executed those leaving – by shooting them. Welcome to Paradise, it claimed, and if you try to leave, we’ll kill you. Other countries built different kinds of walls, social and legal and informational and physical, like China, North Korea, and the Soviet Union.

Democratic governments have often created bad policies, too. Despite being a democracy, Italy has had a hard time integrating regions and resisting corruption. India is a democracy, but its social problems are just now being addressed, in real terms. An Indian dictatorship would no doubt have been worse, but this fact doesn’t automatically make democratic India’s policies perfect.

So it must be said: Policies matter.

Democracy isn’t a guarantee of good policies. All forms of government can have bad policies. On balance, democracies might do better than most governments – a comparison of an average democracy to an average dictatorship shows this – but a specific government chosen by the people could, of course, be awful, and a specific dictatorship might (for a time) have a few good policies.

Most of the time, democracy prevents what many authoritarians like: “Greatness!”, which usually comes at some brutal cost to some people while it provides benefits to others. That quest for “Greatness!” is undermined by democracy, because democracy tends to seek compromise and the middle ground more often than autocracy does. Ambitious “Great Men” and their admirers often hate democracy because they feel it breeds mediocrity. And this is true.

But as much as democracy prevents “Greatness!”, it also does two other vital things that, more often than not, provide for good government.

First, it smooths out the edges of bad policy. A dictator may do something super efficient and seemingly good, but the same dictatorship can do something stupid and awful. Democracy prevents radical moves in either direction.

Second, democracy frees the people. People are now free to act in their own interests, within the scope of basic rights, so that they can advance personally and do what they want. Collectively, this frees up the genius of independent human action. In the 130 years from the founding of the Athenian Republic, even considering its very limited franchise and its relatively crudely assembled democratic ideas, Athens produced more human genius than the rest of Greece combined. We owe so much to those 130 years, it’s hard to calculate. This came from the freeing of the people to do what they do best.

This isn’t an accident. When Solon was archon, he “broke the chains” of debt. This freed people from debt peonage. There was an immense liberating of the people’s energy from the shackles of landlord-ism and parasitic rent-seeking oligarchic control. An oligarchy that is primarily rent-seeking will tend to depress creativity, rigidly embrace a stagnant status-quo, and punish those who seek to change or push the system in different directions. Rent-seeking is the most common and one of the most socially stultifying economic activities. It takes on many forms.

The second thing Solon did was to tell Athenians to stop farming so much and take to the sea. A tyrant can take your farm, where you’ve invested much in infrastructure and olive groves and whatnot. The land can’t move, and you need to defend it against the oligarch’s thugs. It’s easy to tax and to seize, and farmers can be easily enslaved to a powerful interest. But if you’re a fisherman, …. you can just go fish somewhere else. If one port denies you access, another will let you dock. By making them fishermen and merchants, Solon took the power from local landlords or tyrants and put it in the hands of the people. This created a free-er people who could demand and use democracy.

Solon did simple and very do-able things, with large long-term effects. However, though they sound interesting, they don’t directly translate to today. But in essence, metaphorically, they can be brought forward and seen as ways of escaping the deadening aspects of non-democratic rule. There are a host of ways we can look at society in this “Solonic” fashion, and also encourage a healthier and more robust democratic political culture, with better outcomes for everyone. We just need to be creative. The object has to be to distribute power as widely as possible, and to limit the power of any central authority.

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If you just want good policy, maybe some tyrant or dictator can deliver it. But I ask you, can you be certain that his successor do the same? What method was arrived at to get that good policy? Can it be replicated? Was it an accident, or a trick? Also, government is often a negotiation between competing interests. So, in these “negotiations” of power, who is paying the costs of that supposedly good policy? That last question is often the most important.

Those who desire just good policies and have narrow views of what those policies are, and don’t care how those policies are arrived at or how they’re enforced, are looking for efficiency or for a champion of their specific program. Technocratic governments that presume omniscience and the right to rule through good policy often lack an ability to arbitrate fairly between cost-payers and losers. Many just write off those people these policies don’t benefit. This has been true with many such governments, including in places like China and Russia, which are often touted as being otherwise quite successful. The costs are foisted off on people the State writes off, or abuses, or even eliminates. One group benefits at the expense of others. Any dissent is brutally crushed, and it’s possible to control information such that those who win can pretend nobody is losing. In the midst of this, an elite seizes power and incidentally ensures that that power can never be taken away, or distributed more widely. In other words, Vote for Caesar, and you’ll get your bread and circuses. Go against Caesar, and there’ll be the knife in the back, when you least expect it. Or the Gulag.

Humanity has a lot of experience with that sort of “government by gangster”, and the governments we have today that operate by these principles aren’t particularly new, despite the labels and the revolutionary claims they make.

And as for technocracy, a society run by engineers would be one that would likely be extremely cruel and dismissive of the interests of many people, in the quest for optimal efficiency. Healthy societies don’t have just one goal (GDP! GDP! GDP!!!!!!!!). For every good policy enacted by an efficient tyrant, I can show you a thousand awful policies that result from tyranny.

Just because a government doesn’t produce the fastest increase in GDP, and just because a government isn’t a perfectly pure, direct, model democracy, doesn’t mean that a dictatorship would be preferable.

The desire for the perfect is the enemy of the good, as they say.

In the end, rule by the people is as much an attitude and a culture as it is a structural thing.

A government and the civic culture of a people develop in tandem, dynamically. A dictatorship of any kind will breed a culture of dependence and fear, and self-silencing. It’s less creative. As was explained abundantly in the ancient world, a king (or any tyrannical ruler) can’t tolerate very much success or genius in his people – great men are brought down by the king as potential rivals. This means that it’s common for rulers from Dionysius to Stalin to cut down the best people in their societies, because they can’t have anyone being better than they are. When crisis comes, these people’s talents are no longer available.

A king wants his people to be somewhat successful, but not too much. This means that dictatorships that have one or two good policies inevitably cut down those who would produce anything worthwhile. For every effective policy will be a dozen that undermine the effective ones.

It also means that a people freed from tyrannical oversight are far more fecund producers of everything, including culture. Look at the brilliant cultural production of South Korea versus North Korea – there’s not even any comparison. The gap is to extreme, it’s possible to say that South Korea is the culturally strongest Korean state that has ever existed. Conversely, North Korea is the culturally weakest Korean state that we know of. It has to do with a lot more than just money, too.

Ultimately, democracy matters because the other options are far worse, over time, and on average.

Democracy doesn’t come in just one flavour. But at its core, it must put power in the hands of the people.

Representative democracy is a compromise with pragmatism for a time when it was impossible to have direct democracy. In retrospect, parliamentary democracy has worked out very well; it’s a watered-down form of democracy that relies on institutions for continuity and creates a kind of tribal council chosen by the people, and it’s not direct democracy, but it has advantages. It’s a hybrid system that evolves relatively quickly.

With technology, there’s more scope for introducing more direct democracy, too.

Because modern democracies are not “pure”, many want democracy done away with and replaced with a kind of technocratic autocracy that provides what they hope will be good policy.

Putin’s Russia, for example, has subverted institutions that could have been democratic, and while they still basically function, they have been bent to support a dictatorship in fact. Putin is managing the terminal decline of the Russian state, as the people watch, trying to find comfortable seats. This is despite real democratic dissent. What the Russian people are getting in exchange for handing power to a dictatorship that runs things in favour of a tiny oligarchy (much like the old Soviet Union) is front-row seats at the demise of their country. It’s not a good trade off. They’re bought off with dreams of Russian Empires past, for which the Soviet Union was just the latest installment, and of “Greatness!!!” that lies just around the corner. And for that “Greatness!!!”, they’re fed a pablum of vacuous nationalism and empty promises.

For a while, the tradeoff in China seemed to be going well, but dictatorships are notoriously unreliable. Who is paying the costs for China’s “successes”? Who is benefiting? What problems are coming, and is this regime going to be perfect at dealing with them? When does the bargain turn sour? When it turns sour, what can the people actually do about it? There’s no mechanism for the people to hire and fire their leaders peacefully. Effectively, they’re political prisoners, trapped. For the moment this may be a pretty cage for some people, but what happens if this cage becomes unbearable? What then? Are we forever doomed to having to rip down tyrants in rivers of blood and confrontation?

The risks of handing power over to a king or oligarchy are very high. Democracy is often not efficient, but one of the reasons for that is that it gives the little people some measure of power, both to influence government and to be free from its most pernicious powers. The fact of the little people having (some) influence is both the virtue of democracy, in a nutshell, and also the source of that inefficiency.

Efficiency should not be an end-goal. It’s a tool to use for specific purposes, in the right context. In the democratic model, efficiency is a good imperative, but it has a lower priority than elements 1, 2, and 3 listed above. It’s a tool – nothing more. YOu pick it up when you need it, and you keep in mind that optimal and perfect efficiency is not your actual goal. Democracy is its own justification. Efficiency must be made to serve that goal.

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This comment of mine is from an answer on another question. It’s about Russia and the supposed uselessness of choosing between A and B political parties in “western” countries. The commenter added that “Western” countries (whatever that is) wanted to see the decline of Russia, and that’s why it’s happening.

As usual, the disinformation and ideology of despair help to denigrate the idea of people power.

I wrote back:

It’s just an assumption that the “West” (whatever that is) wants Russia to decline. My guess is that they want it to succeed, so there’s a bigger market and more general prosperity. Nobody wants to hurt someone else.

Russia is in terminal decline because it’s run by an oligarchy that mostly offshores its wealth – I mean, legendarily so, with most of the oligarch’s money overseas – and the country run for this tiny oligarchy by a political class that has no real interest in helping Russia prosper. It’s basically the same class that ran Russia under the Soviet Union, but now with the option of simply extracting all the wealth and stealing it directly, rather than indirectly, as was done in the old Soviet Union. The SU was a klepto-state, an empire run (inefficiently and poorly) in the interest of the nomenklatura; the current ruling class is simply the current generation of these people, who slightly more efficiently extract the wealth to send it to London, Paris, Rome, Cyprus, Toronto and New York.

Outside of a handful of large cities, Russia is desperately poor. Even here on Quora, you can see hundreds of posts of what Russia is really like outside of the top 3–4 big cities, and it’s pretty grim – and getting worse every year. The more oil and natural gas wealth there is, the poorer Russia gets. It’s because the oligarchy just sucks every ruble away.

This is the classic definition of a parasitic ruling class. And yet, it’s the same ruling class that ran the Soviet Union.

Believe it or not, it’s actually much worse in places like Ukraine or Belarus. There, the original factions are still (or were until recently) in direct control.

Nationalism, and this idea that “The West Is Out to Destroy Russia!!!!!!! We Must Be Great Again!” is basically a great trick to fool Russians into backing the same kleptocrats that are keeping them poor and ruining what should be a wealthy country.

This is why Russia is in decline. In three cities in which I live – in Canada, Korea and Germany – there are tons of Russians. There are rich ones, but then the normal Russians have fled. Emigration and population collapse is endemic, now, and there are parts of Russia that have lost so many people it’s visible from space, at night – the lights have literally gone out in whole regions.

The collapse seems terminal. How Russia can reverse this is a big debate. The. main problem is that this is human-generated – it’s not natural.

Despite this nationalist message, the direct source of the problem is the government. This kind of government is a kind of oligarchy of extraction: it doesn’t exist to build anything, but to feather its own nest, at any cost. Nationalism is the tool to convince people to support their own destruction.

The elite needs a stake in the country’s future. If they benefit from general development and prosperity, then there will be general development and prosperity. In both countries I mainly live in, the elites generally have an interest in maintaining the health of society. The elites of Russia have zero interest in Russia – from Putin, on down. All of their money goes immediately overseas. The scale and scope of the raping of Russia by its kleptocrats is astonishing, breathtaking – almost total. The stratospheric wealth of Russians overseas, with all the money in Russia, is a sight to behold. Some well-connected families have a dozen gargantuan mansions, and that’s their pocket change. They also have bank accounts in the billions. Most of the money is secret, but in Canada, I know of one guy who has quietly bought almost a hundred apartment buildings across the country. He’s a tiny fish in the Russian scene. he barely registers. All of that money is from cash literally extracted, like a mining operation, from Russian society, either through corruption or proxy-corruption or totally parasitic business practices.

The reason this is obscured to many Russians is that this “Make America”, wait, I mean “Make Russia Great Again!” nationalism has them supporting The Great Leader, who just runs the country into the ground in the interest of the oligarchs. So long as he has political power, and his friends get rich, and are protected, it’s all good. It’s like a mafia society, with the general situation collapsing, but if the mafia dons are doing well, they don’t care.

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People get cynical and think: well, this is always the situation. But the most bitter thing is this: it’s not always the situation. It may be basic history for Russia, which has never had anything like a good government, but it’s not the case for lots of other countries. Gangster politics are not the only choices.

As for the US, there’s a clear distinction between the Democrats and the Republicans. The two parties have totally different operating philosophies. When crises hit, they react totally differently. Day to day policies also differ.

Having only the two options is not optimal, but this is a product of game theory. In any system of selection, almost always it boils down to two options. That has less to do with democracy and more to do with the literal mathematics of the situation. This has been deeply studied. Most systems, of politics or anything else, devolve to this sort of thing.

It’s not a great democracy, but the different between a Trump or a Biden government is pretty extreme. Or a Bush government. Without Bush, the US might not have ever gotten involved in Iraq or Afghanistan. That would have been a hugely different history. And that’s just one change. There are lots of others.

Policy actually matters.

But the difference between the Republicans and the Democrats is pretty severe. Also, there are other elements to democracy.

You dismiss free speech, but this is actually more important than democracy. Free speech is a civil right. In fact, it may be the first and most important civil right. Without free speech, it’s impossible to acknowledge problems or solve them; the problems get papered over or ignored, and fester. This is why Russia can fall to pieces so quickly. Any opposition is shut down. Countervailing news is shut down. Media is controlled.

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What you do is a replication of the propaganda methods used to close debate and make it easier for rulers to keep power. You may have internalized this, and it might not be deliberate.

It works like this:

Induce despair. If there are no options, then who cares what you choose? Just get a good chair and sit back and watch. Nothing matters. Just relax and enjoy the ride. It’s your fate.

This, for example, seems to be the general attitude in Russia. If everything is shit, well, it’s 100% impossible to do anything about it, so just get comfortable. You can see how this general attitude makes it easy for gangster kleptocrats and incompetents to control a population.

The second tool is confusion. Okay, so your opponent makes too much sense. You don’t need to go after them directly. Instead, just do the classic KGB thing, now a true Russian art: Distraction and confusion. Throw so much information out there that nobody knows what’s true and what’s not. It doesn’t matter if it’s garbage – the point is volume (amount) and volume (loudness). Overwhelm people.

This renders them incapable of action. The confusion is good for you, because you just maintain that position of power while the people and your enemies are trying to sort through the vast amounts of confusing noise. Hence, the most bizarre conspiracy theories are still useful, because they can confuse people. If you do 75% real news, mix 15% misrepresentations and 10% lies into it. Nobody knows which is which, In the confusion, you get to clean up.

These two tactics are formalized, deeply studied, documented practices of the Russian state. In fact, under the Soviet Union, these two were the primary means of maintaining control: isolate and render docile a population that ends up having no options, because they’re trapped in this mud that they can’t get out of.

In the 1980’s, lots of Soviet experts who left the SU commented on these techniques. They predicted that the SU would fall apart and that any new state would use the same ones. They were correct. What only one guy foresaw was that these would become major tools of the new Russian state, used against the outside world.

Now, there are whole university departments that study these forms of propaganda and tools of mass social control, through mass social confusion and despair.

You’ve shown either the conscious or unconscious effects of these things. Most Russians I’ve met suffer from some version of these attitudes, and the cynicism which totally paralyzes them except in personal survival.

All the State needs to do is convince you to “give up”. Once it’s done that, it doesn’t need to oppress you or use blunt state tools like harassment or imprisonment. You’re now just going to sit back and let whatever happens, happen, because all hope and desire for change has been sucked out of you.

Also, you can now be more easily manipulated by a Great Leader or by ideologies like nationalism. Just find an enemy – Jews, foreigners, Westerners, Chinese, whatever – to use as a scapegoat, and focus all anger on that target. In the meantime, keep raping the people and preventing them from getting out of their situation.

That’s Russia, right now. Nationalism is used as a tool to beat people down, and ironically, they’re enthusiastically participating in their own self-destruction. The three tools of weaponized despair, instrumental confusion and scapegoating of “enemies” make sure your power is never challenged.

This is how a guy like Putin can have dissidents killed with toxic nuclear waste in public, in large cities, openly. He has so much control, yet a subtle and indirect kind of control much of the time, he could eat a live baby on stage with a dull fork and people would still excuse and cheer him on.

The culture of a place like Russia is not just undemocratic, but anti-democratic, but this is by careful design. It’s not naturally like that.

Both North and South Korea have the same root culture, but the countries couldn’t be more different. It has little to do with capitalism or socialism; this is a confusing thing in both countries, with the North being more capitalist in some ways and the south being more socialist. That description makes little sense for either country.

What’s different about both is the system of government and the ethics that backstop these governments. In the north, there’s basically a slave-master elite lording it over a captive slave population. In fact, chattel slavery might be better; at least the people would have some value. In North Korea, development is actually a problem, because this would take away from the power of the elite.

In the South, a relatively free society has evolved into Asia’s second-most impressive liberal democracy (the first would be Taiwan), and this is propped up by totally, completely different civic values, which literally are so important that nobody sees them, they’re so basic and fundamental.

So the cynical view would be that “nothing makes a difference”; in fact, the difference is gargantuan, like night and day, winter and summer.

There may not be “perfect” democracy, but the difference between North and South Korea is utterly profound in every possible sense. At the root of this are the ideas which lay the foundation for liberal democracy.

To a lesser extent, the same contrasts can be seen elsewhere.

So yes, democracy as it exists is weak in its application. But even a weak application of democratic ideas radically improves governance.

MBC.