Excerpt
The Right of the People
Chapter 1The Meaning of DemocracyWhat is democracy, really? Let’s start with the basics, as most people understand them: A democracy is a form of government in which people come together every so often to decide, usually through elections, what should be done and who should do it. Elected officials—representatives, mayors, governors, presidents, whoever they may be—are then responsible for carrying out the will of the people. If they don’t—or if they do and the people change their minds about what they want—they get voted out and other candidates get voted in. All of this should happen freely and fairly—no one’s vote should be forced, and every vote should be counted equally by impartial authorities. And a framework of basic political freedoms should accompany and support the democratic process—people should have the right to speak openly about politics, to seek out information, and to organize themselves politically without undue interference.
This is an outline of democratic society that has long been intuitive to ordinary Americans and scholars of democracy alike. For instance, Robert Dahl, one of the twentieth century’s preeminent political scientists and democratic theorists, argued that democratic countries have six simple characteristics: empowered elected officials; “free, fair, and frequent” elections; free expression; access to diverse sources of information; the freedom of political association; and “inclusive citizenship,” by which he meant the granting of full political rights to all adult citizens. Today, Freedom House, an American nonprofit that studies and promotes democracy abroad, describes democratic government as a system “based on the will and consent of the governed, institutions that are accountable to all citizens, adherence to the rule of law, and respect for human rights.” Each year, it awards countries “democracy scores” that measure whether they have free and fair elections and how well they protect political rights and civil liberties.
Similarly, the Economist Intelligence Unit, which compiles an annual “Democracy Index,” says that democracy, at a minimum, means “government based on majority rule and the consent of the governed; the existence of free and fair elections; the protection of minority rights; and respect for basic human rights.” The Intelligence Unit ranks countries in its Index based on a slightly more complex set of factors than Freedom House’s—the health of a country’s electoral process and the state of its civil liberties are taken into account, but so are how well its government actually functions, how actively its citizens participate in politics, and the state of “political culture,” by which they mean whether citizens engage in the political process civilly and peaceably.
That’s a longer list of boxes to check off than we began with, but most Americans would probably consider the Index’s metrics reasonable. A government too dysfunctional to implement the policies people voted for wouldn’t be very democratic after all, and a political system in which hardly anyone ever voted—or in which elections could be regularly overturned by violence—would hardly be much of a democracy either. Still, as basic as the Index’s requirements might seem, only around 15 percent of the countries in the world today—containing only about 7 percent of the world’s population—are “full democracies” by its standards. (Congratulations to Canada, Germany, Japan, the United Kingdom, and their peers.) Around 28 percent of countries—with about 38 percent of the world’s population—are what the Index calls “flawed democracies,” a category that has included the United States since 2016. While our report card shows high marks for political participation, civil liberties, and even our electoral process—President Trump’s coup attempt evidently notwithstanding—gridlock, polarization, and new voting restrictions have been dragging us down lately.
The Index’s analysis of our current political situation is hard to argue with. But is it really fair to say American democracy is “flawed” overall? That depends on whether we buy the way the Index, and most of us, have chosen to define democracy in the first place.
Defining DemocracyAs obvious as the norms underpinning electoral democracy might seem to us today, we should remember that the very concept of democracy was forged in societies with norms and political practices we’d find unrecognizable. Anthropologists believe early human bands of hunter-gatherers also made decisions by a kind of group consensus—albeit through processes led, surprise, surprise, by male elders. From there, the historical record suggests isolated pockets of proto-democratic governance sprang up just about everywhere humans settled—from the Middle East to the Americas. But the word
democracy itself comes to us from Ancient Greek—
demos meant
the people, kratos meant
power, and
demokratia described the form of popular rule that probably governed about half of Greek city-states by the third century b.c.
Athens is the most famous of them. Historians believe democracy in Greece began with elections of a kind—there were city-states where leaders were voted in, but they ruled like kings. Then, in the sixth and fifth centuries b.c., political tumult and the reforms of three visionary leaders in particular—Solon, Cleisthenes, and Ephialtes—produced a new system of self-government. There was a democratic Assembly open to all full citizens—a legislature not of elected politicians, but of anyone who happened to show up. There was the Council of 500: a body that met nearly every day to set the Assembly’s agenda and propose legislation, with its members selected annually from the citizenry in lotteries, a process political theorists call
sortition. Then there were juries, also selected in lotteries, that ruled over court cases and reviewed the legality of the Assembly’s decisions—a Supreme Court of sorts, with hundreds and occasionally thousands of ordinary citizens on its bench. Finally, there were officials responsible for implementing the laws—again chosen mostly by sortition, but with a set of top-level positions elected by the Assembly, which also chose the military’s leaders.
Clearly, democratic government meant something different to the Athenians than it means to us now. Today, we elect politicians to act on our behalf—or hope they might, anyway, however dimly. But for the Athenians, democracy meant self-government in the most literal sense—the people participating in governance mostly without elected middlemen. It’s not that the Athenians were unfamiliar with elections as a concept—again, they had them in limited form. But everyday Athenians also took it entirely for granted that they would be the first and final authority on all matters, no matter how complex—from foreign policy and commerce to basic municipal governance.
The structure and nature of Athenian democracy was a point of deep pride for Athenians such as the military hero and political leader Pericles. In his legendary Funeral Oration, delivered early in the intra-Greek Peloponnesian War, he rallied his countrymen with stirring odes to the distinctive character of Athenian government:
Our constitution does not copy the laws of neighboring states; we are rather a pattern to others than imitators ourselves. Its administration favors the many instead of the few; this is why it is called a democracy. If we look to the laws, they afford equal justice to all in their private differences; if to social standing, advancement in public life falls to reputation for capacity, class considerations not being allowed to interfere with merit; nor again does poverty bar the way, if a man is able to serve the state, he is not hindered by the obscurity of his condition.
This is one of the passages that earned the Oration its reputation as one of history’s greatest speeches. It’s mostly nonsense.
“The people” who ruled in Athens were, again, full citizens—women, slaves, and free immigrants called metics were excluded, meaning that “the many” Pericles spoke grandly about were a minority of the population. And Athenian citizenship became only more exclusive over time—in the mid-5th century b.c., a law backed by Pericles restricted that status to males with two fully Athenian parents.
Obviously, Athenian society lacked many of the social and political values we now take for granted—given the status of women, slaves, and immigrants, the “equal justice” Pericles spoke of certainly didn’t mean “equal rights” for all. And even the supposed equality between individual citizens in the Assembly was undermined by the fact that some Athenians could afford to pay for instruction in rhetoric and the making of arguments. Moreover, though Athens lacked real political parties, supporters of the rich, the well-liked, and the well-connected were able to build important and influential political networks that shaped the city’s politics.
