The Crisis of Representative Democracy

“..we keep shuffling around the same deck of cards, hoping that this meaningless exercise will somehow make a difference. Hope abounds when the US elects its most progressive President in decades — but even he ends up bailing out Wall Street at the expense of millions of families who lose their homes. Heck, he even keeps a personal kill list and forsakes his #1 election promise to close Guantanamo! In the UK, a Liberal leader pledges never to raise tuition fees — only to abandon this promise the moment he smells power.

Similarly, a sigh of relief resounds across Europe when France elects its first Socialist President in two decades. Surely his victory will hail the end of Merkel’s austerity pact for the eurozone? ‘Lo and behold: only a few months later Hollande is suddenly Merkel’s closest ally, happily “turning the screws on Greece” and quietly forgetting about his election promise to rip up the eurozone austerity pact. In the end, everybody bows before the power of the market.

Clearly the divorce between politics and power has instilled great fear and confusion in the electorate. Like a flock of panicking sheep, voters head towards the political fringes, desperately clinging on to the idea that it’s the parties and their leaders who are at fault, not the system as such. Unwilling to face the reality of national governments that no longer possess true fiscal or monetary policy autonomy, voters continue to hate the player; not the game.

In the process, national elections are reduced to some meaningless provincial popularity contest. Like “survivors” in some stupid reality TV show, politicians try their very best to avoid being voted off the island. Election campaigns degrade into marketing campaigns as the electorate is bombarded with flashy Google and TV ads, party posters and random party paraphernalia in the streets. An election victory is celebrated like a World Cup win. Somehow everyone seems to believe that this is a completely natural way of organizing society.

Both ordinary citizens (those “too unsophisticated” for the spectacle) and critical thinkers (those “too sophisticated” for the new culture of one-liners) are filtered out of public view in a sort of quasi-natural selection process that systematically favors the technocratic mediocrity of bland career politicians over the great diversity and complexity of opinions that society has to offer. Given enough time, electoral politics automatically descends into some childish blame game that no one really takes seriously anymore.

Cookie-cutter election programs, cheap sloganeering, negative publicity and inauthentic, overly-manufactured interviews riddled with lies, insults and and clichés take all the creativity, joy and weight out of the art of public debate. Instead of talking about issues, we now talk about personalities. Representative democracy has long since ceased to be about competing visions for the future of society. With the owners out of reach, we are relegated to electing managers...”

From Roarmag.