Democracy, what's that then?

We talk about democracy, like we talk about love, or freedom, as though we know what it is, as though it were soap or a pencil. Then we say that this country is a democracy and that country is not, and having said so we feel we have said something significant. All we have really said is that we approve of this country and disapprove of that one. At the extremes it’s easy: North Korea is evidently not a democracy, and Sweden is, so that even without considering what we mean we can be right sometimes, as a stopped clock is right twice daily. But when we talk about the places closer to the middle of that continuum we very quickly find ourselves saying nothing.

These obvious and largely ignored facts about what we mean by the word are sparked by Tony Blair on Radio 4 saying that Iraq is a democracy, albeit a flawed one. When one has got past the visceral hatred of Blair, and bear in mind that half the world never will, one sees that it’s true. They vote there and those elections decide who will be president: ergo in the world of simple where we increasingly live, it is a democracy. The fact that it is full of US soldiers and religious fundamentalists confirms that it is flawed, but does not negate the point about elections.

 John Stewart tells me daily that US democracy is flawed, that it is a commodity, and he appears to be right. They have elections there too, and they spend vast amounts of money to win them, then they changed the laws of the land so that they could spend even more money and that looks like a massive flaw to me. However, the fact that Mr. Stewart explains this to me on television daily, and has not been arrested yet, rather suggests that some of what we appear to mean by democracy is functioning very well over there.

After Mr. Blair a journalists appears and talks of young Americans in Iraq, politico types rather than soldiers, who were convinced with a kind of religious zeal that democracy could be installed in Iraq and the problems would go away. But it’s hard to install windows 8 when your computer is on fire, and so with democracy.

Obviously this is about Russia too, and right on time a Russian pops up on the radio to explain that democracy cannot be imposed by force. Instinctively I catch myself thinking: “well you would say that wouldn’t you.” He’s one of the United Russians, the ones who celebrate Russian Orthodoxy by stealing money from Russia and extol the Russian path by educating their kids in London. But then he says that democracy cannot be installed if the institutions and traditions are not in place, and the bastard is right.

People have to take responsibility for this stuff to work, and when I write people I mean ordinary working people. They have to do boring things like knowing who their elected representative is, and complaining and writing letters and talking to neighbors about practical ways to make everyday life a little better. A lot of what seems to work in democracy actually looks quite boring and even petty in action, and the Russians, on the whole, don’t do that stuff.

 Moreover a minister I spoke with told me once that the constitution here and many of the laws that are passed are actually perfectly democratic and well planned, having been developed by think tanks with the assistance of Germans and Swedes and so on, and that the problem is that when they are passed they drop into the morass of the civil service Kafka world and go down like a rhino in quicksand. On top of this the public don’t give a damn and so, unless you have Peter the great chopping people’s beards and heads off until stuff gets done, then stuff won’t get done: hence the amount of intelligent and perfectly decent Russians who yearn for a strong leader.

Define terms carefully and agree on what you have defined, then talk about democracy or freedom, or else don’t do that, and instead spend hours saying nothing in an impressively rhetorical manner. As you prefer.