Democracy and Its Crisis, by A.C. Grayling Oneworld Publications.
Asked about democracy, one invariably reaches for the Churchhillian truism that it is the worst form of governance until it is compared with all others.
The British wartime leader is also responsible for saying the strongest argument against democracy is a two-minute conversation with any voter.
Jokes aside, being dubious, let alone critical, of democracy one risks being dismissed as fascist or a flat earther.
Much as a Eurosceptic might have felt before being transformed by Brexit.
Yet it wasn not always so.
Plato referred to an ochtocracy, which is tantamount to mob rule, and held that ordinary people were too ill-informed, short term, self-interested and prejudiced to government themselves.
He was so scathing about democracy that it took 2 000 years for political thinkers to dare suggesting government by ordinary people.
Oliver Cromwell in Britain and the French Revolution eventually gave it the legs to make it the civilized choice, albeit with variations that made East Berlin’s democracy unrecognizable from Beijing’s while both were totally at odds with the so-called original version in Athens.
H.L Menken called it collective wisdom and individual ignorance.
Adli Stevenson, contesting the US presidency with Dwight Eisenhower was assured that every thinking man would vote for him.
But I need a majority, he protested.
A new skeptic has emerged. A.C. Grayling leads the band of modern political philosophers.
He argues, in effect, that democracy is in ruins.
What one expects of a public representative in the democracy we think we know is the ability to garner information, make judgments and to act on those.
Democracy should mean that if the citizens don’t like the way their representatives are performing this function, they should be able vote them out.
Grayling maintains that the system has been so subverted by dark money, corporate power, big data, social media and archaic party political systems that it does not work like this.
Democracy, he says, has been taken over by special interests and demagogues that it has become the ochlocracy Plato warned us about.
He uses the Donald Trump US presidential victory and Britons voting to quit the European Union to illustrate his argument that democratic principles have been ploughed under on both sides of the North Atlantic.
Far right European MP Nigel Farage, speaking to Mark Zuckerberg in the European Parliament on May 22 said that without social media Trump and Brexit would not have happened.
Grayling might have said: my point exactly.
As a heavyweight in his field, Grayling
proffers some answers.
These entail reducing the voting age and obliging young people to take extensive civic lessons to understand governance.
In fact, they are solutions for the next generation.
Sadly it seems those of around around currently have to survive a first past past the post system that can exclude nine out of ten voters from any say in governance, or a party whip system that makes liars of political candidates – if indeed we ever believed them in the first place.
This is a very sobering but quite essential read.