They say democracy tends to tend towards tyranny after a while.
Socrates wasn’t a big fan of it, and this was in the days when everyone (bar women and slaves, natch) could vote on every decision being made. Of course, the smaller city-states were a lot easier to run back then when they housed only a couple hundred thousand people, only 30% of them eligible to cast a ballot and only 6,000 or so bothering to turn up on the Pnyx to do so.
Socrates didn’t like democracy because there were too many idiots in the mix and thought they shouldn’t have equal say. Aside from the idiot factor, there was also the problem of how slow and cumbersome the process became as the city-state grew larger. By the time everyone had cast their vote about how to defend themselves against an enemy whose soldiers just did what they were told, Athens was crushed under the heel of the Spartan sandal.
Not that military occupation is a bed of roses either. Eventually the natives get uppity and start throwing stones. Then a bigger and better-organised bunch (usually led by an Alexander-the-Great type) sticks their flag in your mountain and a sword through your chest and pretty soon you’ve got a monarch.
This works for a while (longer if you can convince people that God had something to do with it) because the king’s army protects you from the armies of other kings. But when things settle down and there’s peace for a time, the king’s subjects work out they’re not getting much in return for their fealty and start throwing stones again.
It’s not long until a Cromwell turns up and puts an end to the monarchy — and himself in charge. This is okay for a couple of years, but when the people wise up that things are becoming a monarchy again, they figure they may as well bring back the old king (or, if they’ve cut off his head, one of his relatives) providing he runs most of what’s happening past the people first.
This isn’t practical, of course, because now there are way too many people to run things past, so the idea of representative democracy takes hold. Instead of an aristocracy who get to be in charge by birthright, they’re voted in instead.
Unfortunately, much of the population is still comprised of idiots, and some tyrant gets elected because they’ve flimflammed the electorate. Once the tyrant is ensconced, he rides roughshod over the checks and balances, then the freedoms and ultimately the will of the people. Alexander the Great is back, only this time he’s wearing a suit and tie.
The boom-and-bust cycle of democracy is now being peddled (and indeed pedalled) so quickly it barely has time to rebuild itself before it falls apart again. Forty-nine per cent of the population aren’t represented by those they hoped would represent them (either because they lost outright or there aren’t enough of them) and the rest realise they’ve been played for fools as the short-game rewards they were promised don’t materialise.
Despite that, many will cling to the hem of the tyrant’s raiment, unable to admit they’ve been sold a pup or fearful the pup is rabid and will turn on them at any moment. Before they know it, they’re smashing their neighbours’ windows and informing on their family.
Divine intervention seems the only way out: a great flood to drain the swamp or perhaps a second or third coming; someone to make it right by blowing it all up so we can start anew; a vengeful disruptor; someone or something to deliver us from the tyrant’s de facto plutocracy. But that way surely leads to madness, or worse, theocracy.
All things considered, I’d much rather Mr Smith had gone to Washington instead of Mr Trump, but America didn’t have the luxury of voting for a fictional film character. They were stuck with a flesh-and-blood cartoon who stood before them, eyes fixed and jaw set firm as if posing for a coin; a cypher onto which all the disaffected could project the things they craved: success, power, impunity, their unfair share of the Great American Dream, the right to spend what remained of their lives atop the floating-eye pyramid scheme on the US one-dollar bill.
Hitching your wagon to a black hole is never a good idea, but the theory is right if the time is right. I’m no quantum mechanic, but apparently place-holder theories are used as scaffolding in that particular branch of physics so experts can climb from known, proven things over some grey area to other known, proven things.
Trump 2.0 is a theory, as yet unproven, but something like him might be what democracy needs to make us realise just how precious it once was — and how we all need to wind back our idiocy if there’s ever going to be a chance of making it work again.
When I say “someone like him”, I don’t mean some lame sketch-comedy impression of him (which would rule out me on Mad as Hell or Senator Ralph Babet in real life). I mean someone not prepared to betray their principles or vision, regardless of how indefensible or impaired they might be, someone who can help us understand human behaviour so that we may bend it to our will before it’s too late.
Let us not yield to despair. Let us raise our glass of hemlock to Mr Smith, whoever he or she may be. Salut.
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