First published, 9th May 2015
Democracy is like all systems for power distribution in social groups in that it is a means that seeks to justify or, more importantly, legitimise the status of dominance in social hierarchy. Given that we are a social animal biologically hard-wired to behave always and ever like chickens, whenever two or more individuals interact there must be established a pecking order or what social psychologists call a power dynamic.
Democracy is not a state of society but the management of the social state. To live in a democracy means to live in a social hierarchy determined by voting. It’s not the casting of votes that is as important as the regularity of elections and the finite term of government, representation and leadership. If democracy is successful, the success lies not in its ability to choose good leaders but in its ability to get rid of bad ones. Like all religions, it has been a fairly successful delusion: it pacifies the masses by giving the individual the illusion of having political power without having to do very much at all other than believe and behave.
What happens when democracies age and reach the end of their life cycles is that they increasingly represent only the social and economic elite. Power fossilises and governments, like the Catholic Church, find it increasingly difficult to maintain the pretence of egalitarian representation without recourse to threat and fear, the manipulation of information and knowledge.
It is a mistake to think that democracy is, in some magical way, more egalitarian, that it will bring about a fairer distribution of resources, that it will dismantle the pyramid of social hierarchy. It was never intended to smooth out social inequalities or make the distribution of resources just. It was only ever intended to provide societies with a more controlled means for the legitimisation of power.
However hard presidents and prime ministers try to trick the disempowered masses, by rolling up their sleeves, removing ties and supporting this football team or that, they are still just princes, popes and potentates. Ministers and the elected are all eupatridae vying for power and personal gain.
There was some sense in Russell Brand’s don’t vote ‘campaign’ that got drowned out, then turned into a bizarre moment of conversion and contrition at the messiah’s kitchen sink. Ed Miliband all but baptised Brand with his own dish hose.
Whatever, democracy, it would seem, is alive and kicking and in good health because people did stand up to a little celeb anarchic apostasy and went out to vote. Voted for a bastard.
The Brand point should have been this: how do you vote when none of the political candidates represents you? Brand’s don’t vote ‘campaign’ wasn’t a call for anti democracy anarchy, it was inspired by a reasonable concern over political party policies and, frankly, appalling – truly appalling – displays of fumbling leadership. The onus to do something urgent about this should never have been placed by Murdoch the King Maker on the voting public but on those in society seeking the legitimisation of their right to rule. Resignations should have been tendered before the polling stations opened.
Talking of resignations, the anti-immigration voice in British politics is now silenced. But before we all raise our pints of warm flat beer to the end of UKIP, the fact that population and demographic policy issues were handed to raving loonies to champion doesn’t mean immigration is not centrally important.
The British pride themselves on their moral indignation and outrage over soap operas, talent show results, animal cruelty, celebrity weight gain and hair dos, royal babies, talking dogs and health and safety. Such trivialities serve to feed the myopia over rising homelessness, poverty, social inequalities, falling wages, food banks, rising deficits, falling standards of living, public service cuts and … the list goes on and all will now continue to grow, over the course of the next several years.
Never underestimate the power of denial (and the media, of course).
Immigration is not an uncontrolled accident that the ruling elite cannot control, like a natural disaster, an Atlantic storm or something. Successive British governments that are there to represent the ruling classes have known perfectly well that their personal wealth and spurious national economic growth depend on rising working populations. It’s simple Keynesian economics: supply and demand. By flooding the labour market, labour supply rises above demand thereby forcing wages down. There is a demand side to rising populations too. Demand for housing increases above supply thereby driving up rents and house prices. Incomes of the wealthy go up, labour costs fall, and profits continue to be maximised for the Forbes fortunate few.
Quite apart from being a loony side issue, the rise in population through deliberate and cynical manipulation of immigration is the single most dangerous thing facing the UK (and no, Nigel Farage, it never had anything to do with how long it takes to drive down the M4 because all the lanes are crammed with Bulgarians and Poles). The impending disaster has been cleverly turned into an irrelevant issue about racism by spin doctors and Murdoch controlled media.
The English masses – those, at least, who did vote – will moan and winge over the Bullingdon Club bastards’ right to rule. They will forget their part in the legitimisation of that right, of course. There are dangerous times ahead for equality, unity and the Union. Wandering through the growing slums and grey streets littered with food banks, instant loan shops, drunks in cardboard boxes and closed clinics will emerge an odd preponderance of men sporting high vis jackets, hard hats and protective goggles.
If Lincoln was right and democracy simply means government of the people, by the people, for the people, then all forms of social power hierarchy are essentially democracies. The leading and the led are all people after all and the structure is always a pyramid. Replacing leaders and public representatives by voting, regicide, primogeniture, military coup or civil war amounts to the same thing: hierarchy. All dogs are obeyed in office.
There will be riots.