Democracy / Liberty
Is direct democracy desirable and/or possible today?
Is direct democracy desirable and/or possible today? The question is addressed first theoretically, with reference to Montesquieu's Spirit of the Laws, which actually categorizes direct democracy as one of the corruptions into which a democratic system can descend, by an insistence on too much egalitarianism. Direct democracy is considered as an ideal, which is desirable insofar as it offers a critique of contemporary politics, but whose possibility is limited by whether or not it can be feasibly implemented. Two contemporary case studies are brought in to examine the question further: the experiment with internet-organized direct democracy in Estonia, and the experiment with social-media-inspired direct democracy in the Occupy Wall Street movement. The Estonian model is critiqued for its heavy reliance on a highly vulnerable technological infrastructure, suggesting that direct democracy in Estonia is only possible for as long as Vladimir Putin refrains from cyberattacks to cripple Estonia's political infrastructure. Meanwhile Occupy Wall Street is critiqued for its lack of actual governmental goals, where in essence the public practice of direct democracy was intended as a rebuke to the existing system, but where it did not legitimately show that direct democracy was capable of governing a country or achieving legitimate political or policy goals. Paper concludes that technology has rendered direct democracy more possible than ever at the present moment, but that its desirability is mainly as a corrective critique of corruptions of present representative systems of democracy.
Direct democracy has, arguably, never been practiced in reality. Proponents usually point to ancient Athens in the 5th century BCE as an example of direct democracy, but any number of contemporary Athenian sources (such as the dramatist Aristophanes) can be adduced to demonstrate that the actual Athenians viewed their own democracy as hopelessly corrupt and unable to live up to the high ideals set for it. In some sense direct democracy is, in itself, an ideal -- and by understanding it in this way, we can realize that the concept of direct democracy is desirable even if it may not be entirely possible to realize.
It is worth noting at the outset that Montesquieu, one of the earliest Enlightenment theorists of democracy, viewed democratic systems as very easily corruptible. However many proponents of the idealized form of direct democracy fail to note that, in some sense, Montesquieu considered the ideals of direct democracy to be one of the corruptions that a democratic system could take. In The Spirit of the Laws, Montesquieu writes that
The principle of democracy is corrupted not only when the spirit of equality is extinct, but likewise when they fall into a spirit of extreme equality, and when each citizen would fain be upon a level with those whom he has chosen to command him. Then the people, incapable of bearing the very power they have delegated, want to manage everything themselves, to debate for the senate, to execute for the magistrate, and to decide for the judges. (Montesquieu VIII.2)
We can view the concept of direct democracy as being intimately related to what Montesquieu identifies as the "spirit of extreme equality" which corrupts the "principle of democracy." His argument is that direct democracy -- wherein the people essentially insist on usurping a function that ought to be delegated to representatives -- is in itself a corruption of the workable form of a democratic system. Now obviously Montesquieu must be taken with a grain of salt -- notoriously he also thought that democracy of any form (even representative democracy) was impossible in Russia and China for reasons of climate and geography. And more to the point, as Melvin Richter notes, "Montesquieu was not a democrat. He did not mince words when he discussed what he called the basest class of the people. He accepted the view of his English friends that the votes of the unpropertied cold easily be purchased. Hence it was right to exclude them from the suffrage." (Richter 336).
Yet it is worth noting that the ideal of direct democracy is desirable because it keeps at bay the first and primary corruption that Montesquieu sees in democratic governments: the tendency to reach a point where "the spirit of equality is extinct." If we look at contemporary American politics, for example, we can see Montesquieu's competing "corruptions" of the democratic system at work. The United States is not a direct democracy, and it has definitely reached a point where many believe that "the spirit of equality," if not quite extinct, is at the very least fatally compromised by inegalitarian tendencies....
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