Direct democracy, anyone?

As an EU fanatic, Manny Macron is bound to despise even representative democracy, never mind the direct kind.

But, to paraphrase ever so slightly, Manny proposes and gilets jaunes dispose. A few months of riots, threatening to become a full-blown revolution, thrust some direct democracy down Manny’s throat, constricted as it was by fear.

You don’t like my way of saving the planet from warm weather? he finally asked the rebellious, yellow-clad populace. Fine, do it yourselves, see if I care.

The mission of saving the planet was thus delegated to a panel of 150 members of the public called the Citizens’ Convention for the Climate. Chosen at random, said Citizens were promised that their proposals would be either implemented or at least put to parliamentary vote.

Predictably, the Citizens came up with ideas that, if put into action, would neatly dovetail with coronavirus to put France’s economy six feet under. The carbon emission limits they demanded would effectively ban most cars; all out-of-town hypermarkets, the mainstay of French shopping outside major cities, would be closed; advertising of products with high carbon emissions would be banned.

Even though Manny doesn’t have to drive to hypermarkets, he knows how deleterious such measures would be. But he has painted himself into a corner. He now has to backtrack on his promises and risk another wave of rioting, or else deliver more blows to an economy already knocked down by coronavirus.

This proves yet again, if any further proof is necessary, that direct democracy doesn’t work. Neither does representative democracy. Neither does monarchy. Neither does any political system – in the abstract.

Any system, no matter how sound it looks on paper, is only as good as the people who operate it. Thus democracy lives or dies by the quality of the electorate. A morally and intellectually corrupt electorate will elect a corrupt government or, if encouraged to govern without mediation, make corrupt policies.

The Greeks, to whom we owe both the theory and first experience of democracy, knew this. That’s why voter education was their main concern as a factor of political virtue.

Much is made of Plato’s yearning for philosopher kings, but both he and Aristotle believed that a democracy could only be virtuous if not just the kings but also the voters were philosophers, after a fashion.

No, they didn’t envisage an electorate made up of philosophers who composed long tracts. Plato and Aristotle only made an unassailable point: to take part in affairs of the state by voting responsibly, an elector has to have a sufficient grounding in the disciplines involved, and there are many.

Thus democracy can’t serve common good in the absence of an educational system that can train most of the electorate in political theory, moral philosophy, epistemology, rhetoric, logic, not to mention the specific disciplines in the forefront of current public debate.

Such a system has never existed anywhere in history – and it’s not even remotely approached in any modern country. That stands to reason: people able to absorb and process recondite knowledge can’t possibly constitute a majority, nor even a significant minority.

Even in Athens there were only 30,000 fully enfranchised citizens (out of the population of about a quarter of a million at its peak), with 5,000-6,000 constituting the quorum. In fact, Plato suggested that this wasn’t only the minimum acceptable but also the maximum desirable number of active participants in a democracy. Going over that cut-off point, he warned, would result in mob rule.

Edmund Burke (d. 1797) was even less generous, but then he had to deal with greater numbers. According to him, there were about 400,000 Britons qualified to vote responsibly, out of the contemporaneous population of about 10 million.

A similar proportion today would produce an electorate of about 2.5 million – not the 48 million it actually is. One can’t help thinking that the requirement for responsible voting has been dropped somewhere along the line.

Public education in France is still better than in Britain, but only marginally so. And the gap is closing.

Hence neither country can be governed by its demos because the demos lacks the requisite intellectual and moral qualifications. Even if we were able to improve our education no end (and nothing suggests we are moving in that direction, quite the opposite), it’s unrealistic to expect that tens of millions of people would reach the necessary plateau.

If true democracy isn’t possible, what is? A sham one. That is, effectively an oligarchy made up of a few thousand demagogues who aren’t particularly well-versed in the art of government either, but who are experts at crowd manipulation and bare-knuckled political infighting.

However, as Manny is finding out, sometimes people rebel at being manipulated. They demand direct, if limited, democracy, believing they could do better. Well, they can’t.

All they can do is create mayhem, chaos and anarchy. And of course, given half the chance, an economic disaster.

That closes the vicious political circle of modernity, a point coronavirus is hammering home with devastating effect – while, in France, direct democracy is trying to add some more power to the falling hammer.

P.S. Two epidemics of Asian flu (both, incidentally, originating in China) in 1957 and 1968 killed about three million people worldwide, at a time when the world’s population was half of today’s. Yet nothing like today’s hysteria materialised, and we’ve only seen some 120,000 coronavirus deaths so far. Tempora mutantur… and all that.