THE FALLACY THAT IS DEMOCRACY

Does True Democracy Even Exist And Is It Obtainable?Politics is an all reaching being that touches everything in our society and life. People may not want to admit that but in one way or another there was something political about what has happened in their lives. One political idea that has potentially more discussion, ideas about and historical significance is democracy. The very meaning of democracy is not universally accepted and how democracy is supposed to function and its relationship with the people is not agreed on either.

Democracy is a complicated ideology to grasp not least because it is a rather personal thing, it means different things to different people. As a result of this it has transpired to take many different forms across different nations all over the world. It has even gone beyond having different meanings in different nations but it is common to hear terms such as ‘Liberal Democracy’ and ‘Western Democracy’. Democracy has even reached into specific ideological and geographical positions.

To fully go into the extant the democracy touches a book of many of hundreds of pages would be needed so for the purposes of this article I shall break it down to what is perceived by its core principles and definitions.

Firstly, democracy is whereby you have a system of free and fair elections in which the electorate (or the people) get to vote for people they wish to represent them in a national decision making body. Democracy is also taken to mean that it is a system whereby decision making is based on majority rule. Further definitions include that political equality must be in place and every decision within the political system must take into account the expressed interests of every citizen. In congruence to this is that alongside the political equality aspect there must also be ‘effective participation’, ‘enlightened understanding’ and a ‘control of the agenda’ and all of these aspects together form what is known as ‘Procedural Democracy’.Secondly you have an idea of democracy whereby it is made up of two components; an ideal of an equal distribution of power to make decisions and an equality of participation in collective judgement. These together make what is known as ‘Deliberative Democracy’.

It is clear now that democracy is an abstract idea and the theories of what some see of democracy set out above are but a few of the ideas that exist across the world. People reading this will all have their own interpretations of what they feel democracy to be and how it works and what they feel it should do for them in their individual lives.

When looking at if specific nations are democracies or not it is dependent and what definition of democracy you are taking. For example, the United States cannot be considered a Deliberative Democracy as in contemporary times there is not an equality of participation and certainly there is no equal distribution of power. On the other hand, it is possible to label the US a Representative Democracy as elections take place for the people to elect their representatives and this happens at community, state and federal levels.In attempting to find if ‘true democracy’ exists and if it doesn’t, is it obtainable? For it to be obtainable, a universally accepted definition of democracy will have to be made that can be applied to all nations and political system across the world. Without sounding too pessimistic, this is never going to happen. The only way in which this could be achieved is if there was also a universal system of society, religion and politics across the world.

With such differences across all nations, nationalities, races, religions, ethnicity etc., a universal definition and acceptance is not possible or at best extremely unlikely.

The closest thing that can be achieved to a ‘true democracy’ is by having democracy itself; whatever interpretation and application of it, as being accepted as the true and proper method of all political applications. Having democracy as an ideology universally accepted and the eradication of authoritarianism and autocracy, democracy will take its rightful place as being ‘true’.So, Is democracy really a thing?

Maybe this is what it is like to have a deep crisis of faith. A 3 am thought woke me up the other day and I haven’t been able to get rid of it since. What if democracy is wrong? Not wrong in the sense that it is an ideal that everyone strives towards, but actually wrong-wrong?


A common truism is that young people think adults have it all figured out until they become adults themselves and realise that is fiction, and that with time it just gets easier to plod along dealing with whatever life throws at you.


I always thought of it that way when people — especially idealists like me — would be confronted with the whole “African democracies are not mature yet, that’s why they are so dysfunctional.” I took that to mean that we are in our difficult years and with time things would settle down, then we would buy a house and an ecologically sound car and get a responsible economy.

And then Trump happened, and Brexit and now Boris Johnson and the EU is struggling and I woke up one 3 am and thought: uh-oh. There is the other camp of Africanist political thinkers who say that democracy is not natural for Africans, that we need to find our own way of doing things. I have always dismissed this on the simple premise that democracy just means “rule by the people” and how one packages that can vary according to size, culture, other factors.What would be this third way or alternative they keep talking about? Most of the time it just comes off as patriarchal, monarchistic, ethnocentric and deeply suspicious. It’s not like folk have not experimented. Tanzania itself did, and in the end Nyerere himself had to admit that his experiments had an economic and social cost — and even that opposition would come from within the single party itself. Arguably, we sacrificed the chaos of democracy for the stability of nation-building. And don’t get me started on any of the communist attempts from around the world: Not a single one of them came close to Marx’s vision.


Now that “exemplary” countries that have been practising some form of democracy for centuries are flailing about wildly, doesn’t that put the entire concept into question? I want to believe. I want to cast my vote and through various avenues have a chance to participate in our social lives. The ultimate dream is of a strong and neutral civil service that can withstand the winds of political change, a free and fair and fiercely protective judiciary, an informed and professional parliament and an executive that doesn’t have a head (perhaps a triumvirate?). Oh, and of course some serious devolution of funding and power to local government.

But I am only a creature of my time, flogging our dead donkey. Perhaps if I was born in the past I would have scoffed at anything other than the God-given rule of a king. Perhaps if I was born in the future post-WWIII wastelands with six limbs, anything other than chaotic anarchy would seem unfathomable. But since am a millenial guppy born in the here and now of the world, I choose to accept the undeniable fact that democracy is a fallacy.