Democracy Is Not Broken

For several months now, everywhere I’ve looked, there have been articles attacking the idea of Democracy (e.g. “What’s gone wrong with democracy”). These have come largely from the leftist MSM trying to come to terms with why people aren’t satisfied with their policies. Their conclusion is that something is “wrong” with Democracy. Let’s talk about this.

Before we start, let’s understand why the MSM is waxing philosophical on this. Whenever leftist regimes fail, the MSM always ponders if the “real” problem isn’t that the world is broken. This is why at the end of the Carter years, you saw all these articles about the US being ungovernable and “too large to be run by one man.” This is a leftist self-defense mechanism to help them avoid the fact that they failed, and it’s no different this time.

This time, the left has concluded that there is something wrong with Democracy itself because supposedly (1) it can’t solve problems and (2) it doesn’t lead to content citizens. The left bases this on the struggles it has had fixing the world economy, getting credit for making our lives better with Obamacare, passing their agenda like getting the public to agree to tax hikes or sacrificing to stop global warming climate change, their inability to solve any of the wars they’ve started (see e.g. Syria), and the near collapse of Democracies in places like Argentina and Russia and the growing unrest and chaos in Brazil, etc. Moreover, despite their best efforts to “help us,” the public just keeps getting angrier and angrier with them. Hence, there must be something wrong with Democracy!

But is there really? Well, no.

The first thing to note is that Democracy isn’t an instant process. In other words, it is wrong to assume that Democracy works like a machine which spits out a solution when you turn it on. Democracy is a process that can take years to find a solution and can take many twists and turns getting there. In that regard, it’s like the stock market. The market doesn’t zero in on the right price and stay there, it gets there little by little, often overshooting in either direction, but generally getting it right over time. Democracy is the same thing... it can be very wrong in the short term, but generally finds the right solution over the long term.

So anyone expecting a simple, instantly correct solution from Democracy will always be disappointed. Yet, this is what the left premises these arguments upon. Even worse, the left has wrongly defined its own desires as right. Basically, its argument is that “we are offering the right things... the public is resisting... hence, the public is wrong... and since the public can stop us in a Democracy, Democracy doesn’t work.”

This kind of thinking is how you end up supporting Hitlers and the such. If you believe this chain of logic, then dictators offer the promise of cutting to the chase and imposing “the right” solutions immediately. By comparison to these kinds of thinkers, Democracy seems slow and offers a high risk of never getting to the right place. But this chain of logic is wrong. Just because you think something is good for everyone doesn’t mean that you are right. And that is the key difference between Democracy and every other system. In a Democracy, you need to convince the public that you are right, i.e. you need to win them over to get your way. The result is a forced intellectual rigor that is much more likely to make you (1) find a genuine solution to a real problem, (2) work out all the flaws and defects in your idea, (3) obtain broad public support, which will help implement the idea, and (4) consider the benefits and harms to a wide swath of the public, which means you are more like to keep making society better rather than cause negative distortions.

A centralized government is never forced to go through this. A centralized government simply does what the handful of leaders think is right. The result is that they don’t consider the effects on most people, they are never presented with a need to work through any of the problems their ideas raise, and they lack public support, which means they will face public resistance.

As a result of this, Democracies are more stable because they do require broad public support. They are more likely to work for the benefit of the majority of the public. They are more likely to implement effective ideas as well because there is a competition of ideas, and as we all know, there is no better way to find the best solution than competition because it focuses people on what matters, it makes them put forward their best ideas and best arguments, and it creates an adversarial system that gives the opponents a chance to point out all the flaws which can then be fixed. And they are more likely to have broad public support, which means they will face limited resistance.

You don’t get any of that in any non-Democratic system.

It is no surprise that the American public is most upset about four things: (1) Obamacare, because it was steamrolled over them without any public input, (2) financial reform (all the way back to TARP), because it was done in secret and forced on them, (3) the Federal Reserve’s QE programs, because they were done in secret, and (4) the lack of jobs, because no genuine solutions have been offered. It’s also no surprise that the biggest hot button issues of the past 40 years have been foisted on the public by the courts. Unless you let the public work the problem out amongst themselves, you will never reach a long-term solution.

Finally, the idea that people aren’t content is wrong thinking as well. The lack of contentment is not a sign that Democracy is a failure, it is a clear sign that the current course is the wrong one. It is a sign that the public is rejecting the current solutions being offered and feels that the current leadership isn’t capable of offering solutions they will like. Said differently, it is a repudiation of the leadership, not an indictment of the style of government.

Thoughts?