After
Trump, I'm losing faith in democracy
It’s
not just that it has produced results I profoundly dislike. It’s to
do with the merging of crowd and mob
Matthew Parris
The election of
Donald Trump as president of the United States may have signalled the
death of the closest thing we have to a religion in politics. On both
sides of the Atlantic, democracy risks being knocked from the high
altar as an unmitigated and unquestioned good.
The man’s
obviously a fool and a nasty fool too. The contest should have been a
walkover for Hillary Clinton. But it wasn’t. What happened? Can we
be sure any longer that democracy works? Is it really the reliable
bulwark against political madness that we always supposed?
Without hesitation I
plead guilty to the obvious charge: Trump supporters could level it
at me, enthusiasts for Brexit do. Spanish enthusiasts for the
left-wing populist party of protest, Podemos, and French supporters
of Marine Le Pen would tell me the same and they’d be right. The
reason I am beginning to question democracy is that it is producing
results I profoundly dislike.
So in that sense —
yes — I’m a bad loser. All of us with a now faltering faith in
the will of the people as the lodestar of a civilised nation’s
political journey are bad losers. The lemming who halts before the
cliff’s edge, defying the vote to jump, is a bad loser too.
But why now? When
Richard Nixon was re-elected, did we who had preferred George
McGovern despair of democracy? When British Conservative governments
fell and socialist governments were elected, did Liberal or Tory
democrats develop doubts about democracy itself? Why did we trust the
people then, even though they had given the ‘wrong’ answer —
but not now? What was it that people like me did believe, when we
said we believed in democracy?
I believed in the
wisdom of crowds but not mobs. Democracy was of course about inviting
the considered view of the crowd but it was just as much about
keeping the mob from the gates. I knew public sentiment sloshes
around, sometimes quite violently, and I knew huge numbers of voters
could be horribly if temporarily misled by false prospectuses, by
lies, by unreasonable hopes and by sudden fears and hatreds. But
against that I balanced a quiet faith that after consideration, in
the light of experience and in the long run, most people as a
collective would always see sense. That is what I meant by the
‘crowd’.
Socialism wouldn’t
work so we’d give it a go, see as much, and vote the Conservatives
back. In time we’d see through Gordon Brown. Nixon was an unsavoury
character and in due course America would rumble him. An imposter
like Trump would never get the Republican nomination, but, if per
impossibile, he did, the election campaign would show him in his true
colours and he’d fast implode.
Besides, it did
occur to me that I’m sometimes wrong — in which case, thanks to
the wisdom of the electorate, a better way than I recommended would
be identified, tried and proved right. Thus, and falteringly, with
many false starts and wrong turnings, after many decisions taken in
haste and repented of at leisure, and infuriatingly slowly, a
democratic nation would find its way through history as a half-blind
bat, her radar squeaks bouncing off solid obstacles, finds her way
through a winding cavern to the light.
The crowd — ‘true
democracy’ — could be wise where a mob might be foolish, because
we weren’t governed by the mob, real or virtual. There was no
internet, no Facebook, no Twitter, no social media. The closest you
got to the mob was radio phone-ins. Opinion polling was in its
infancy, and the remark that election day offered ‘the only vote
that counts’ dignified the act of voting and distinguished it from
a pollster’s clipboard. The phrase ‘the privacy of the polling
booth’ meant more than plywood and curtain: it meant quiet
reflection, away from the noise of others’ opinions. ‘The crowd’
was a collective noun for millions of individuals, often conferring
but finally thinking alone. That was what elections — general,
presidential — were for.
But as I watched the
American presidential election gather steam, and endured the vile
time we called the European referendum campaign — as I recoiled
from the mass media reaction to the judges’ ruling on Brexit last
week — it has seemed that the crowd and the mob have begun to merge
into each other. Now we can so easily discover what a ‘majority’
think they want at any one moment, and — worse — ignorant
hooligans can discover with a click on a keyboard that there are
millions like them out there — our faith in democracy, our faith in
the ‘government by the people’ part of the trio, is being tested
to its logical limit.
In this magazine’s
edition of 19 January 1867 we quoted a letter from Tom Macaulay
railing against the idea of universal suffrage. This would (Macaulay
wrote) ‘in no long time reduce us to a depth of misery and
degradation of which it is not easy to form an idea’ making ‘Great
Britain in three generations as barbarous as Madagascar’.
The Spectator chided
Macaulay for exaggeration. ‘All he meant to say was, we presume,
that universal suffrage was unfavourable to civilisation, which is
probably, though not certainly, true.’
As so often, The
Spectator came early to Conservative doubt. But I am catching up.
Unless we find a way to fold the popular will into many other and
sometimes opposing considerations that make for good government, and
unless we find procedures for distinguishing between the evanescent
and the more considered manifestations of public opinion, the Trumps
and Farages of our age will kill our faith in democracy.
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