Democracy is the worst form of government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.
— Winston Churchill - 11 November 1947
Democracy is messy, unpredictable and subject to constant challenge by inattention, misdirection, ignorance, malice and venal selfishness. Each and all of which make democracy subject to constant questioning and attack. Add in the complexity of representative democracy (with all of the intermediaries introduced thereby) and the challenges multiply dramatically.
Winston Churchill was probably paraphrasing an earlier source when he acknowledged one of the most obvious challenges to democratic governance: it is imperfect and imperfectable. Platonists hate it.
Democracy works on the averages, which leaves plenty of room for options which appear better in a local setting or to specific individuals or interest groups. The averaging works over time as well, which means there are periods when the political body drifts far from the average. That average changes because the context in which democracies operate changes.
Democracy is quintessentially Darwinian in its responsiveness to changing environments, in its unpredictability and in the absence of any guarantee of success. It has no final destination. Success requires ongoing, knowledgeable engagement by the represented. Success requires compromises which offend the true believers.
The viability of representative democracy is tested every hour of every day. Currently, the US (Donald Trump and the Republican Party) and the UK (Brexit) are severely testing the wisdom of popular sovereignty. Yet the problem is not democracy. The problem is the individuals and groups who demand exceptions for their own parochial interests and have the power (brute force of arms and/or money) to create (temporarily we hope) those exceptions. Demagoguery is the handmaiden, the rationalizer, of brute force in nominally self-governing polities.
All Politics is Local.
— Tip O’Neill, 47th Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives
Democracy is organic, its life (or death) is built on its living constituents. Kimberley is a small city bordering the Rocky Mountain Trench in southeastern British Columbia. It was effectively a company town until one of the world’s richest mines closed in 2001. Like many communities in the de-industrializing world, it has had to reinvent itself to survive.
Without intending to, we ended up discussing bottom-up representative democracy and its challenges with the Mayor of Kimberley, Don McCormick.
Representative democracy flows from the local to the global with all the stops in between and it always comes back to us, to what we do and say. At its heart is civil discourse. Democratic dialog. Civility. It starts with our neighbors and it should reduce the noise.