Direct Democracy Is Also a Weapon in the Struggle Between Regimes

Most of what I write about direct democracy concerns the destination: what a society looks like once it decides its own questions. This post is about the journey, and about a benefit that arrives before anyone reaches the destination.

Forms of government are in a permanent struggle with one another. Monarchies fought republics, republics fought empires, representative regimes fought dictatorships and are fighting them still. The struggle is not a metaphor. It is conducted with armies, embargoes, propaganda, and money, and it has a cost that is rarely put on the ledger.

What the Struggle Has Always Cost

Look at what happens to a free society while it is fighting an unfree one.

Every time the struggle turns serious, the free society regresses. Religion is called back into public life, because a population at war wants consolation and the leadership wants a banner. Nationalism hardens, because an enemy is easier to fight when the border between us and them is bright. Rights are suspended, because rights are inconvenient in an emergency and there is always an emergency. Liberty shrinks and is promised back later, and later comes slowly or not at all.

This is not an occasional accident. It has happened in every serious contest between forms of government I can find. Revolutionary France produced the Terror. The world wars produced censorship, internment, and conscription in the freest countries on earth. The Cold War produced loyalty oaths and blacklists in the country that had written the loudest constitution. The war on terror produced surveillance that would have been unthinkable a decade before it.

The pattern is so regular that it should be treated as a property of the struggle itself, not of the particular people who happened to be in charge.

Why Representative Regimes Regress

The mechanism is not mysterious.

A representative regime concentrates decision-making in a small group. When that group feels threatened, from outside or from within, it does what small groups holding power do: it tightens its grip. It has the means, because the levers are already in its hands. It has the motive, because the threat is a threat to its position, and it experiences the two as the same thing. And it has the excuse, because the population genuinely is frightened and will accept a great deal.

The regression is therefore not a betrayal of the system. It is the system working as built. A structure that puts a few thousand people in charge will, under stress, put them more in charge.

Where Direct Democracy Enters

Now consider a society that decides its own questions, engaged in the same struggle.

The threat is the same. The fear is the same. But there is no small group whose grip can tighten, because there is no small group holding the lever. If the society wants to suspend a right, the society has to vote to suspend it, openly, on that question, with the reasons on the table. That is a very different thing from a cabinet deciding it on a Tuesday and announcing it on a Wednesday.

A direct democracy can conduct the struggle without the regression, because the regression requires a concentration of power that it does not have. Religion cannot be called back into public life by decree; it would have to win a vote. Nationalism cannot be manufactured from above; it would have to be genuinely felt, and genuinely felt nationalism is a smaller and shorter-lived thing than the manufactured kind. Rights cannot be suspended quietly, because there is no quiet.

This does not mean a direct democracy would never restrict anything during a war. It might. But it would do so by the same mechanism it uses for everything else, at the same altitude, with the same visibility, and it would reverse the restriction the same way. The suspension would not outlive the emergency by forty years because nobody in power found it convenient to let it lapse.

The Aid, Stated Plainly

So here is the benefit that arrives before the destination.

Suppose the struggle between free and unfree regimes lasts another century, which is not pessimistic. A representative world fights that century the way it fought the last one, regressing at every crisis and recovering slowly, losing a little liberty at each cycle that it does not fully get back. A world with direct democracies in it fights the same century without that ratchet.

The struggle is the same. What differs is what you look like at the end of it. Direct democracy is not only the prize of the contest between forms of government. It is armour for the contest itself. It lets a free society fight for its freedom without the fight consuming the thing it is fighting for.

I have argued elsewhere that freedom behaves like a conserved quantity, redistributed rather than created. The struggle between regimes is where the largest transfers happen, and they happen upward. A system with no top for them to flow to is the only one I know of that stops the flow.