For representative democracy

Representative democracy is over-sold. I know this because I work in a school part of the ideological state apparatus.

A number of the reasons given by the average modies teacher as to why the little darlings we have seated in front of us should trot out to vote when they are of age don't make a lot of sense.

Like, "You should vote because people died to give you this right."

The latter is true but just because some else thought something was worth dying for does not oblige us to feel the same. Otherwise we'd all be obliged to follow the religions of those who were martyred for their confession of faith.

Or, "You can change things - make your voice heard."

Individually you can't change a damn thing. Not by voting. Unless the situation arises where you're the marginal voter in a marginal constituency that swings the election one way or another. And to say the chances of this happening are slim involves no exaggeration.

Or, "You've no right to complain about what the government does if you don't vote".

As if there were no other grounds on which you could complain about the government presenting a Slaughter of the Firstborn Miscellaneous Provisions Bill before Parliament.

I was reminded of all this whilst reading Chris Dillow's objection to Libby Purves' injunction that it is, "One of the sternest responsibilities in a democracy is to vote..."

We expect too much of representative democracy - we are taught to do so; a lot of the reasons given for our participation are bullshit, so we become cynical about the whole affair.

Let's have a more limited defence that has to do with what we already know.

Historically we know that there have been a few other ways of achieving a change of government, something which surely no sane person can believe is never unnecessary?

You can wait for the monarch to die, and see their firstborn take over in hope they will be better, more benign, more gracious, more competent than the last.

Or if you are impatient, you can wish for - and if it happens, participate - in a revolution.

There can, and have been, coup d'etat as an alternative form of 'regime-change'.

These two can often follow, or pre-empt, defeat in war.

There are one or two others, which essentially involve modifications of the above and which often, although not always, include violence - which brings us to the secret of representative democracy: it is a system that allows for a change of government without the resort to blood-letting that most of the other options have historically entailed. It is a secret perhaps because it is felt this is too modest an ambition for a polity.

But it shouldn't be, at least not for anyone acquainted with human history and the human condition. For it is the glory and wisdom of representative democracy to have turned something once thought of as treason into a legitimate activity - indeed in some sense even our duty. I'm taking, of course, about opposition. Our system pays politicians to oppose whatever government happens to be in power. A facade to some; genius, if you ask me.

I prefer this world to the one I don't know, and can't know. The world of direct democracy and 'demand-revealing referenda'. Would it be a richer place? We have no way of knowing but they aren't selling it to me at all. For one thing it sounds an altogether more puritan place than the one we live in now - and whatever else I might be, I am no puritan. Chris Dillow writes:

"Isn't it irresponsible to legitimize a system which thinks "democracy" consists in no more than a choice between very similar managerialists?"

No - no it isn't. For history teaches us that we are indeed fortune to be confronted with such a choice of grey managerialists in our elections. Apart from anything else we have alternative choices. In Scotland, for example, you could always vote for the Judean People's Front. Or there's always the People's Front of Judea. Neither, of course, has any chance of winning in May, what with the 'peepul', in that enduringly frustrating way to Trots everywhere, generally preferring not to vote for those who shout loudest that they speak on their behalf. But hey, that's democracy. Churchill said it was the worst form of government, except for all the rest. One cliche I feel happy to repeat in the classroom - on account of the fact that it happens to be the truth.

World government

George Monbiot advocates a world parliament. As an idea it's a soft, fuzzy thing - bit like Monbiot himself. Whip out the accountability word and who could disagree? It would like disagreeing with motherhood, or apple pie. Or 'choice'. Which everyone knows is a Good Thing.

But having a world bureaucracy, or army, or executive, or police-force are ideas that are - to me, anyway - ones that sound distinctly less cuddly. And without them, a world parliament would just be like the European one, only bigger, even more remote and even less effectual.

In fact it would probably be like that anyway even with a one world bureaucracy.

Which is why it's a crap idea.

Boris Johnson dies

Oh, it was Boris Yeltsin - easy mistake to make.

This article from the Scotsman reminds us that the best thing a politician can do for their reputation is to snuff it. It describes him as a 'defender of deomocracy'. Suppose you could argue he was - compared to the lot he replaced.

But there was the whole shelling the Russian Parliament thing - generally not the sort of behaviour that is considered normal democratic protocol.

Dodgy historical analogy watch

Not the title of some new blog I'm starting because, as I've said before, if you have 'watch' in the title of your site, you really should give some serious thought to the possibility that you've lost your goddam mind.

Rather, it refers to this piece by Henry Porter. He argues against the infantilizing notion that Muslim countries are incapable of incubating any of their own internal problems, along with the idea of the ultra-reactionary 'resistance' currently operating in Iraq as 'freedom fighters' - two negatives I have no problem positively affirming with him. Not sure about the following, though:

"It is as if Protestant and Catholic groups in the French Resistance used the Nazi occupation to blow up each other's churches and market places and slaughter each other's children. Actually, it is weirder in Iraq because the Sunni extremists of al-Qaeda are killing and torturing more Sunnis than Shia, let alone US soldiers."

Try this instead. It's as if, following the collapse of a secular tyranny, groups from Christianity's largest schism - that between Eastern Orthodoxy and the Roman Church - started killing each other. Something like the former Yugoslavia, in other words. Like all historical analogies it doesn't quite fit but it's better than the one he uses and still makes the point that agency has to be attributed to the insurgents, rather than imputing this exclusively to the occupation.

On liberals, libertines and libertarians

What's a 'libertarian'? I know plenty of liberals, and more than a few libertines, but not anyone who would describe themselves as a 'libertarian', nor indeed anyone who appears to have the accompanying Nozick-esque ideology even if they didn't describe themselves thus. You could retort that this is because I have a narrow circle of friends, which might be fair enough. On the other hand, one of the reasons I haven't come across any libertarians in my community may well be - if what they write is anything to go by - that libertarians don't seem to live in communities of any kind.

Having said that, I suppose the blogosphere is a community of sorts and it's absolutely hoaching with them and I was wondering: how would I recognise one if I saw them in real life? I'm really not sure but if a regular trawl of the Land of Blog is anything to go by, I can guess at a sociological profile: libertarians, as far as one can tell, tend to be male rather than female; more likely to be without dependent children than with; more likely to have studied economics than history (are there any "libertarian historians"? Because history is full of bad news about the human condition); private or grammar educated rather than comp; relatively wealthy rather than relatively poor.

All of this may be a) inaccurate, b) unfair, but I'm afraid without any corporeal contact of my own to counter this, at present my mental image of the average keyboard libertarian is of someone - the gorgeous Chris Dillow excepted - who is essentially a Tory who has extended the Thatcherite logic of free-markets beyond the shop-keeper and is up for an occasional line of coke and some free love, if only they could find themselves someone to have it with.

As well as a) and b) this all might be c) irrelevant since were talking about differences in ideology here - the truth or otherwise of which is not dependent on the sociological profile of those who espouse it. So is a libertarian really just a liberal, only more so; merely a step further along a scale which takes as its starting point the idea that the sphere in which individuals should be able to make decisions without state interference should be as large as possible? Is it really just a difference in tone - or is there something more substantial?

I'm not sure but I've a couple of thoughts. Karl Popper wrote that "the paradox of liberty is that it has to be limited in order to be enjoyed". Implicit in this - in Popper's whole thesis, I think - is a liberalism that accepts the need for the state as given. One, moreover, that extends beyond the narrow Nozickian property-rights preserving state. Liberals like this - like me - think that history shows Hobbes had something more than resembling a point when he talked about man in a "state of nature" - it's just that he failed to extend the logic of a need for restraint on government, as well as the governed.

Libertarians don't come from this starting point, I don't think. Rather, they give the impression - to me, anyway - of people who have surrendered the anarchist position very grudgingly and whose default position with regards to the state is that the validity of its very existence is something that requires continual justification.

Further, the broad church of liberalism has historically allowed for the possibility - indeed the certitude - that there are occasions where we can achieve more collectively than we could as individuals. Libertarians, in contrast, are at their most generous when they treat this idea with extreme scepticism.

This can be seen, I think, in their approach to education - as can be witnessed in this frankly appalling piece about the lessons that can be drawn about compulsory education from the recent university massacre in Virginia. There's something absolutist about all this. It is impossible for the libertarian to concede that the problem may have arisen due to lack of compulsion - i.e. the failure of the American republic to compel its citizens to disarm - so instead the narrative becomes one of the problems of compulsion, in this case with regards to schooling.

School for these is somewhere where you are oppressed, denied your individuality, and indoctrinated. These things, of course, can and do happen in our school system. But their analysis is for me so heart-breakingly monist. Apparently missing for them (maybe not, perhaps they've just forgotten) is the experience of a place where you might have been bored most of the time, you might have resented your teachers and the uniform they made you wear - but it was still a place where you learned stuff, waded through tedious lessons in order to get the qualifications to do what you really wanted to do, had a laugh, made friends you've kept until this day - the sort of people you got drunk with for the first time, maybe took some drugs, maybe even met a future partner - or if not perhaps someone you lost your virginity to? The kind of experiences, in other words, that are the stuff of communities - the sort of communities that the average libertarian gives the impression of having never lived in.

All this may well be either inaccurately or unjustifiably personal, for all I know - but what prompted these thoughts was this: Chris Dillow, in this post, made a reference to an "area where libertarianism meets Marxism." He was talking about education but I went off in a tangent. I'm not sure the area where Marxism meets libertarianism is a particularly large one, or a particularly comfortable one. Marx wrote that it is man's social being that forms his consciousness. It's obviously not what he was talking about but I was wondering: would libertarians who favour, for example, privatizing the health service have a slightly different take - a different consciousness, you could say - if they'd had the experience of someone they loved being saved from disease, disfigurement or death because of the existence of this 'Stalinist' NHS? Perhaps they've had such an experience and confirm that they would not - but I doubt it.