- The Guardian
- Issue #2127
Democracy
On reading A Carruthers piece on democracy (‘Democracy, more than a sausage,’ Guardian #2126, 25 November 2024) I felt obliged to think more deeply about this word and the concept it misleadingly conveys. What is ‘democracy’? What are we expecting to have from living in a ‘democracy’? A parliamentary democracy is described as “a system of government by the whole population or all the eligible members of a state, typically through elected representatives.” The word itself derives from the Greek dēmokratia, coined from ‘dēmos’ (‘people’) and ‘kratos’ (‘rule’) in the middle of the 5th century, BCE. In Athens where this was practised men attended a forum where ideas about governance and justice, etc. were thrashed out in the open: notably, with women absent from any decision-making. So not very democratic really.
Today, we no longer meet in the forum and thrash out ideas with representatives, but sit at home on our backsides hoping they will represent our wishes: such as everyone having a roof over their head and enough to put food on the table, which gets us to the present-day where the word ‘democracy’ has become a cipher. Modern democracy – like other modern political ideologies – has delivered us to brute power and technological tyranny. These modern political ideologues look down on the masses as something to be subdued by a greater organising power. Democracy is no defence against dictatorship, it has changed into totalitarianism, no doubt because of the greed of the populace encouraged by imperial capitalism.
Freedom is attained from the truth of love for our fellow man; instead, with the cult of the individual, it’s been subverted into the truth of choice. Which begs the question: ‘whose choice’? Twenty-first century democracy has withered under siege of renewed autocracy and gross wealth inequality. The elite continue to ignore the undemocratic inequality facing the majority at their peril, but while we keep leaving our welfare to politicians in the pockets of the elite, we deserve all we get.
The obscenity of the US presidential election is proof of the vacuous wasteland we’re living in, aided and abetted by continuous wall-to-wall news coverage and the gang warfare of social media. Simone Weil warned half a century ago that new ideas of freedom and democracy were needed “for the purpose of exposing and abolishing everything in contemporary life which buries the soul under injustice, lies, and ugliness.”
Eileen Whitehead
