Majority Rules
What is politics? I will bet that no-one has ever asked you that before. Twenty years ago my driving instructor asked me if we could not just get the top businessmen in the country to run things and forget about having elections, but I had to tell him that that would not be politics. When I started studying Politics & Government A-Level I did stop at the first line in the syallabus – what is politics?
Politics is the discussion of the kind of society that we want to live in and how we achieve it. Democracy is the process by which everyone has an equal voice in that process through voting. However, recently we have seen a distortion of the definition of democracy and I would argue of politics itself. People now claim that politics is about what the majority wants.
Leave aside the fact that the most vocal of ‘majorities’ are minorities (be they the 62m Trump voters or 17m Leave voters, they are both a minority of people in their respective countries) and ponder for a moment the logical extension of this. I was reading a thread online (where else) yesterday where a woman was defending Trump as representing the will of the majority. If I proposed to her a vote on her street about whether people could go into her house and take her possessions and discovered that most of her neighbours were okay with this idea, would she throw open her front door and say ‘come on in, I’ve just bought some cool gadgets that you would really love’? Obviously not, it is not for nothing that we have laws to protect people from mob rule or, in a not too distant American past, lynching. What are these things but rule by the majority?
There is an important distinction to be made here. What makes things right is not that they are popular. However, this brings us to a troublesome point. Whatever else you think about Donald Trump and there is no doubt that there is a lot of abuse of him from people who did not foresee his election (shame on them for not consulting the North School of Motoring circa 1995), he has been elected. I should congratulate him on showing up just how barmy the Electoral College system is but those are the rules. His supporters say that others should now shut up and let him get on with it.
However, this is not democracy. Remember that democracy is supposed to give you an equal voice to every other citizen in the discussion of how your country is run. Trump supporters say that you can vote again in four years time and, well, what could go wrong?
This takes me back to the fun days of 2001 when George W Bush was President. There were a lot of problems in Afghanistan at the time (understatement). The UK was one of a number of European countries who had been working with the Northern Alliance in their efforts to overthrow the Taliban, who you will recall were still running the country then. The leader of the Northern Alliance came to speak to the European Parliament in Spring of 2001. The Americans ignored him because he was not one of their contacts. He told MEPs that he had reliable evidence that Saudi terrorists were not just planning an attack on the eastern seaboard of the United States but that they were advanced with their plans. That was the usual nonsense from Afghan leaders, of course. Still it did find its way into a Presidential briefing given to George W Bush in August 2001. Dubya went on holiday for a month though and did not read the security briefing until the second week of September 2001.
As you can see, having an incompetent in charge at the White House never actually makes a difference to people’s lives or world politics. All those who criticise Trump should just shut up and wait for another chance to vote in 2020. It is, of course, worth noting that Saudi Arabia does not feature on Donald Trump’s list of countries in his travel ban. Perhaps he has not read the security briefing.
At this point you may be wondering if I am advocating some kind of minority rule. That is clearly not democracy either. However, this is part of the cleverness in the ‘we’re the majority’ argument. No-one is advocating rule by a minority, only that minority concerns should be taken into account. Indeed, one of the defining features of being in a minority is that your experiences are not shared by the majority. If you use the term minority with a slight flexibility, I would go back to the day when a female friend of mine suggested to me that I had missed out on a job despite being in the final two because the other candidate was female. I was outraged at the suggestion – as if anyone would employ someone on the basis of their gender! Before then I am sure that I could talk a good talk about gender equality and support all sorts of related causes, but there was nothing quite like the moment of realising that never before in my life had I considered that I had missed out on a job because I was not the right gender. Yet, that was an everyday experience for others. Being in the majority should not create arrogance but a desire to understand those who are excluded from your group.
The result of all this is that Trump and his supporters attempt to stop people disagreeing with them. This is not the same as challenging the wishes of the majority. For instance, I realise that a majority of people in the UK do not have a problem with using five pound notes that contain animal fat. For me, that is a demonstration of the ongoing human contempt for animal life which among other things is slowly destroying the planet that we all live on. This week the Bank of England announced that in response to protests from vegans, Hindus and other groups it would be doing absolutely nothing about this. Just because I am in the minority here, it does not mean that I am not allowed to express my views on the subject. Indeed, given that the notes carry the bank’s message ‘I promise to pay the bearer the sum of five pounds’ I am thinking about sending each one I receive back to the bank with a request for five pounds in some other acceptable means of payment (gold would be fine). What is important about this is that this comment, this protest is part of a discussion about the kind of society that we should be living in. Claiming that only what the majority votes for can ever be proposed is shutting down that discussion. It is not democratic, it is the antithesis of democracy. At Donald Trump’s inauguration, journalists were arrested for reporting on demonstrations. This is not politics.
In this situation, it would be easy to despair and I realise that this is a temptation for many people. I think that I would probably conclude with part of an address given to the Oswestry Quakers the Sunday after the European Union referendum. Modesty prevents me telling you more about the speaker. It probably tells you all that you need to know about the idea that something which is popular must also be right. It went something like this –
“We are all Quakers. We believed that slavery was wrong when the rest of the world agreed with slavery. We believed that men and women were equal and we were told that we were wrong about that and that women were naturally subservient to men. While we lived in a country where homosexuality was illegal, we published a pamphlet saying that what defined evil in a relationship was exploitation and not the gender of the participants. We were told we were wrong. Three hundred and fifty years ago in Massachusetts, Quakers were being executed for not following the same religious practices as everyone else. Quakers are still being imprisoned for protesting. In all the time there have been Quakers, there have been people telling us that we are wrong. That does not make us wrong. All that has happened this last week is that we have discovered that we must continue to make our arguments with the conviction that we are right, if not popular.”
What is politics? It is not the silencing of debate that you disagree with. Indeed, if you really believe that what you are doing is right then it should mean the engagement of contrary views with the belief that you can change them with rational argument.