Democracy is a muscle that must be exercised, or it will be lost

It’s hard to be hopeful sometimes. Well, most of the time. Ok, pretty much all the time.

As South Africans, we’ve usually managed to stay chipper through the storms, but optimists are getting a bit thin on the ground. Only 28% of Gautengers think democracy is preferable to other political systems.

That’s a serious sense of humour failure. And who can blame us?

Johannesburg collapses, criminal capture of our institutions seems universal, inequality is getting worse, children starve, and nearly half of South Africans “feel politically homeless”. That last point alone should tell us that we need to ask some difficult questions about the state of our democracy.

Questions like: “What even is a democracy?”

I know, I know, there are no stupid questions, but that one sounds kinda dumb. It’s pretty important, though. For instance, you’d be amazed at how many people basically answer that question with something along the lines of “it’s when you have multiple political parties to vote for every few years”.

A menu. Because, of course, capitalism has reduced our idea of political agency to ordering at a drive-through. Yes, agency. That’s the core of democracy, or at least, it should be. Allow me to pontificate.

Democracy more than a vote

The purest form of democracy is direct democracy, where everyone has a say in every collective decision. Great if you prize agency, terrible if you are one of the 99.99% who hate never-ending meetings. It’s impossibly painful and almost equally slow, so no democracy really does it, and has foisted off the dirty work of actually running a country to other people.

So our democracy, like every other one on the planet, falls somewhere on the spectrum between individual agency and the efficiency of a dictator. We defer our agency in the nitty-gritty decision to politicians in a kind of deal: You do what we want, because you govern by our consent. The government governs, but citizens should have a say in how, which is why we draw a cross on a piece of paper once every few years.

This is a woeful feedback system, though. We’re boiling down all the variety of a person’s positions on ideology, economics and governance to a single binary signal. Yes or no. This party or that one.

Under those conditions, as Dan Davies says:

“The only kind of information that such a constrained channel can carry is a scream. Populist politics acts as a signalling system for a population which wants to convey a single bit of information; the message that translates as ‘HELP! THE CURRENT STATE OF AFFAIRS IS INTOLERABLE TO ME’ ”.

This sense of powerlessness is what gave the US Donald Trump. And when the Democrats obliviously campaigned on a platform of business as usual, the world got Trump again. Which is going great for everyone, last time I checked. And it’s not just the US.

All across the world, people are gaining power on the basis of “not sounding like a politician” or promising to undo a game that has obviously been rigged against 95% of people. Over here, we can see it in the appeal of a regressive neo-feudal party like MK, or the hollow leftist noises of the EFF.

People are desperate. People cannot bear the status quo any more. So anything that sounds like a break with that gets amplified, because we’ve turned democracy into a yes/no question that happens every few years. We’re like vegans locked in a KFC: horrified and powerless, selecting bad options from a menu based on what we hate the least.

This is not how it should be. When you put it like that, it doesn’t even really sound like democracy. If the people governed, why do 39% of them believe the system doesn’t even matter?

We’ve been fed an emaciated version of democratic participation. We’ve been told that we just need to sit back and vote, and the politicians should then fix things. We’ve been taught that it’s somehow dirty to “be political”. I know, I was allergic to it for years. This isn’t a bug, though; it’s a feature.

Being political means challenging the system. And the system is working great for the people at the top. They are terrified that the mass of people will make life difficult for them. So maybe we should start showing up and doing just that.

Democracy should be about an engaged populace directing the aims and functioning of the country. We should decide the menu, even if we don’t make the food. But that requires us to first stop accepting what is offered to us. A choice from a set of options doesn’t legitimise the set, or the way it was arrived at.

The political kitchen

And, to stretch the metaphor a bit more, we should probably go into the kitchen and cook our own food now and then, or at least order the ingredients.

But, I hear you say, I’m not a chef! What does that even look like?

It looks like involvement in your local community. Whether it’s painting the rec centre, helping with a community garden, joining a mutual aid organisation, or just attending some ward meetings, we need to reconnect with the people around us and grow networks of expertise and assistance that often last beyond their initial goals.

It looks like workplace democracy. Most workers spend half their waking lives in what Elizabeth Anderson calls Private Government, capitalist dictatorships where speech, clothing, actions and time are controlled by an unaccountable authoritarian system for communal goals that they have no say in formulating.

Worker-owned businesses are generally less likely to fail and less likely to lay off workers. They have less inequality and better working conditions, and are generally more geared towards social goods. If running your business as a co-op is beyond you, you can join a union, or actually get involved if you’re already in one.

It looks like reaching out in little ways and pushing back against the small issues around you in ways that connect you to others. Because in the end, democracy is a collective project where our choices affect one another and where the vast majority’s interests align more than the demagogues will have us believe.

Joining hands

If all that sounds like a lot of effort, I have bad news for you. Democracy is work. Real democracy, that is, not the anaemic agency that we’re told we possess. It will ask you to protest, to push back, to join hands and then get them dirty.

It will tire and frustrate you, but the good news is that it will also make you happier and less distrustful of your neighbour. Cooperation is humanity’s superpower, and only by working together will we become a united citizenry that can move those in power. But that will take practice, learning and a cultural shift towards active participation and engagement.

Because democracy isn’t a destination. It is a muscle that must be exercised, or lost. So let’s get off the couch, because there’s work to be done. DM