Not paying attention, I missed my only regular commenter when he finally came round to my position on democracy 1:
But it is highly wasteful. Enormous amounts of money are being extracted from the public to secure the election of someone who does not rule the country, this function being really exercised by his “advisors”.
I would warn my new acolyte, though, against overstating the case. As opponents of democracy, we have to recognise and explain the fact that the most successful societies in human history have had this democractic form of government, (even while the actual elected politicians were senile or powerless) or else we have no right to be taken seriously.
Yes, democracy is certainly expensive. But to conclude that it is wasteful you have to show that the same end can be achieved more peacefully.
The useful purpose of democracy is to persuade the population that their rulers are legitimate. There are other ways of doing this, but they aren’t obviously more efficient. I quite like the era of divine right, myself, but that required the state to run a religion that would proclaim the legitimacy of the monarch. Brute force has a long track record, but the policing bill gets pretty expensive. Running government as a sideline of the entertainment industry is probably significantly cheaper than running it as a sideline of either religion or the military.
I do think that this crude comparison is in essence the basis of democracy’s strength and its dominance of the twentieth century. At the same time, it is very obviously missing the point. The cost of political parties, campaigns and voting machinery makes up an insignificant fraction of the real cost of democracy, just as the cost of employing soldiers and secret police is a small fraction of the cost of military dictatorship, and the cost of supporting a priesthood is a small fraction of the cost of theocracy. In each case, the true price paid for maintaining the legitimacy of a regime comes from the incentives it puts on people to behave in destructive ways, inside and outside of the governing institutions.
The impact of democracy is the gross dilution of power and responsibility that comes from giving the population a role in resolving disputes among the rulers. The way for a faction to succeed is to take control of and expand the organs of propaganda — the media and educational institutions — until we get to the situation we are in today where the society’s ideological commitments are to those ideas which succeed in power struggles within those institutions, no matter how destructive they are in both the population at large and the actual government.
We are not talking about simple clean categorisation. In practice every government employs a combination of democratic rhetoric, armed force, and appeal to higher moral authority, to improve its perceived legitimacy. The other obvious price paid for legitimacy — the subsidy of supporters — is huge in democracies but at least comparably large in any of the alternatives.
The most effective road to legitimacy is for the regime to be just accepted as inevitable, or as obviously superior to any available alternative. We do see that in some places, generally after catastrophic civil war or economic collapse, but it tends not to last for more than a generation or two before the next round of rebels or radicals or foreign agents manages to undermine it.
I don’t, then, have any silver bullet to fix government. I fear that the current world-ruling regime is past saving and will collapse, but I am not impatient for that to happen or optimistic about what will follow it2. The principle I stand for is that government just is and it is better to accept and support it, even in its imperfections, than to oppose it and force it to spend even more on self-defence. I would apply that even to the present establishment, but the tragedy of democracy is that by supporting it in fact I am opposing it in theory: my unconditional support is a denial of its very premise of legitimacy — that it is and ought to be subject to the whims of the populace.
If someone is to play Chief at this time of day, it should be the right Thain and no upstart.