The marriage between representation and democracy is a product of the 18th century, when the amalgamation of the old Greek ideal of assembly-based democracy – a model which “was direct and participatory to an astonishing degree” – and that of representation seemed the best possible solution for governing large nation-states in both America and Europe. A large suffrage means that democracy can only be enabled by ‘representation’. This particular system of democratic government, however, is far from perfect. Too often, as in the recent past, especially in countries like the US, where lobby groups and money play a fundamental and rather distorting role in politics, the representatives seem to represent not the voters, the people who cast the ballots to elect them, but the interests of the few who bankroll their campaign.
Rising voter apathy, the decline of political parties and the appearance of elected official who cannot be unseated is leading to the emergence in some countries of a form of post-electoral political order that undermines democratic processes. Elections then no longer serve the function of settling political disputes because they no longer alter the pattern of forces that exercise influence over government. Traditional methods of gaining and wielding power in representative government now matter less than the emerging tactics of political warfare. These include: investigative journalism, parliamentary hearings and investigations, and special prosecutors.
For the 70-year period between 1945 and 2016, the political discourse has been framed by a distinction between left vs. right, between more government vs. more market, between more social justice vs. more entrepreneurial initiative. That’s the old world – the one that is decaying, crumbling, and in some cases collapsing. But then came Brexit and Trump. Followed by Bolsonaro, Erdogan, Orban, Salvini, Duterte, Modi, and others who keep reminding us that we are dealing with a much larger pattern that is reconfiguring political coordinates from left vs. right to closed vs. open, or ego vs. eco.
A dangerous self-delusion is associated with the fashion of claiming that modern democracies are hostage to overstimulated, under-informed public opinion. The central issue is not that televisions immediacy creates an atmosphere of crisis and demands for governments to act. Rather it is that industrial democracies only engage in issues beyond their borders when a crisis is reported on television and forces them to become involved.
If the system is rigged, if it is not representative of the voters and unable to properly reform itself from within, why then do the people continue to play the game of bowing to pre-imposed norms?