A Problem With Democracy in the United States

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I wish to speak of the condition of what I consider to be “unfreedom” in modern societies. There are two broad forms under which a society may be considered “unfree” in the modern world: in the first instance, those governments that are generally authoritarian may be regarded as such. They restrict the freedoms of the press, of speech, of the right to peaceful demonstration and such things, and I do not think that this statement is a very controversial one. The second form of this type of society, however, is far more dangerous because its citizens bring unfreedom upon themselves such that it never even enters their minds that they are among the oppressed — it must be remembered that servitude, even when blindly chosen, nevertheless remains servitude. Moreover, this second form of society has been hiding under so lofty a name that I hesitate and shudder at the thought of attacking it, but it is necessary to persevere and follow one’s convictions in matters such as these. This form of society is called the “democratic.”

The Athenian conception of democracy was inextricable from their notion of the primacy of speech, for which reason their politicians were literally called “speakers” (οἱ ῥήτορες). The state of freedom is fundamentally distinguished from the state of unfreedom in that in the former, the powers of speaking (λόγος) and of persuasion (πειθώ) are thought to constitute the material out of which political activity is constructed, whereas the state of unfreedom is ruled by means of necessity (ἀνάγκη) and force (βία). The fact we have forgotten, however, of which the Athenians were only too keenly aware, is that the faculty of speech and of persuasion could only function if people were actually heard — it was not sufficient simply to grant them a public forum, but it was moreover necessary to ensure that said public forum was to be regularly populated by a sizeable amount of the polis’ (free) population.

In our modern state, we tend to value free speech in abstracto and are content with the mere idea that we are able to voice our opinions, no matter how off center they may seem to be — and, though we are too painfully aware that the right to an opinion does not mean that it must be heard, we reconcile this painful contradiction by finding recourse to the argument that listeners are free to choose who they give ear. Part of this, no doubt, has to do with the fact that our modern culture is, at bottom, a literate one, whereas the Athenians operated in more of an oral culture. For us, it is sufficient to record our opinions in writing, whether we have auditors or not, because the literate culture instills the idea within us that our opinions will be preserved for future generations to read, even if nobody should be around to hear them in the present. But in an oral culture, the only way opinions might at all have held influence (or even if they were at all to be preserved) was if they were heard, and then discussed. The master of the house who, in the private sphere, was free to do anything and say anything to his slaves, lived in a condition of unfreedom, because he engaged with the politically voiceless members of society; in expressing his opinion to them, he was expressing his opinion to nobody at all. But in the public sphere, when the Athenian engaged in spoken discourse amongst equals, he was then able to be free, because he both spoke and was heard.

Of course, such a democracy can exist only as a product of the social-historical time period out of which the Athenian polis flourished, and it would be beyond foolish to suppose that we might ever again recapture the lofty spirit of those ancient Greeks. But the lessons that they imparted to us Americans in respect to their conception of democracy must never be forgotten, and our ears must be well on their guard, lest they permit us to be cheated by means of such doughty terms as “democracy” or “liberty.” Our American democracy is not a democracy in the true sense, in that it grants us merely the right to speak but not the right to be heard.

The root of this problem lies in the fact that our democracy operates within a political framework that has been distorted by virtue of it being constituted in respect of an apparatus of mass politics: a democracy does not and cannot function democratically in a society of masses. In such a society, aggregates of individual people form; they compose special interest groups and political parties, and then some of these parties combine to form coalitions and yet greater and more complex organizations, with the result that, in the end, the individual becomes nothing more than a statistic, lost within the sprawling political machine.

President James Madison’s argument in Federalist No. 10, that the effects of “faction” could be reduced by a number of competing local interests, has proven itself false; in many cases, these local interests have themselves been subsumed under the care and oversight of either the “Democratic” or the “Republican” Party. One need only glance briefly at the political make-up of our federal government, or even at the political make-up of our state governments, to see that this is the case: that ideology has been divided with an almost automated efficiency along the harsh lines of red or blue. It is a cruel joke for the voter: they are able to choose, but only “either/or.” They must remain mute if they wish to be heard, and they must be ignored, if they wish to speak.

Perhaps the best example of this diminishing of the individual voice may be seen in the role of the Green Party in the 2000 U.S. presidential election. In the election, as I am sure many of you are well aware, Ralph Nader is often alleged (and quite correctly) to have been a “spoiler” who drew votes away from Al Gore that would have otherwise been likely to have won him the election. In this particular instance, because Nader decided to reject the institutional demands of our two-party system, which would have demanded his silent support of Gore (on account of their sharing more ideological similarities), and went instead to speak wherever he might have been heard, ironically, President George Bush ended up winning the race for the Oval Office. Members of both the Democratic Party and the Green Party were silenced, because one individual decided to speak, not on behalf of one of the two dominant parties, but for the sake of his own convictions. But under what standard are we disposed to regard a society as democratic, if we are punished in the political sphere by speaking in the civic one?

Too long in America have we attempted to overwhelm the civic with the political; too long have we attempted to subordinate the fluidity of individual conviction under the heading of the aggregate. At present, the individual’s locus of speech is lost in the party and obscured among the rabble, and though he may prophesize the truth at the top of his lungs, even the incessant hum of our quietest political machines have long since learned to overwhelm the present insubstantiality of human elocution.