Direct Democracy Is the Open Wrestling of Groups, and Open Is Better

Here is a description of direct democracy that its advocates rarely offer, because it does not sound flattering: it is the open wrestling of groups, one against the other, with the whole society watching.

I offer it anyway, because I think it is accurate and because the alternative is worse. The alternative is not peace. The alternative is the same wrestling conducted in private, with most of the matches never held at all.

Society Is Made of Groups With Conflicting Interests

Start from the fact nobody disputes. A society contains groups whose interests genuinely conflict. Employers and employees. Landlords and tenants. The religious and the secular. Farmers and consumers. The old and the young. The industry that pollutes and the town downstream.

These conflicts are not misunderstandings to be cleared up by better communication. They are real. What one side gains the other loses, at least in part, and no arrangement satisfies everyone.

A political system does not remove these conflicts. It only decides where and how they are fought. That is the whole of what a political system is, once you strip the ceremony away.

Where Representation Puts the Fight

Under a representative regime the wrestling happens in three places, and none of them is the open floor.

It happens in lobbying, where the group that can afford to be in the room wins by default against the group that cannot. It happens inside party platforms, where the conflict is resolved before anyone votes, by people whose job is to assemble a coalition rather than to settle a question. And it happens in the bureaucracy, where a regulation is written, softened, delayed or quietly not enforced, and the affected public finds out years later if at all.

And a great many matches are simply never held. Consider the fights left unfought.

The tenant and the landlord never meet as groups; rent policy is set by a ministry that hears from one of them. The secular majority in a country with a religious establishment never gets to vote on the arrangement; it was settled in a coalition agreement decades ago and reopening it would cost a governing party its partner. The young, who will pay for a pension system designed for a different demography, never get a match at all, because the old vote and the young do not yet, and by the time they do they are the old.

Every one of these is a real conflict of interest that the system declines to stage.

Why the Unfought Fight Is Worse

The naive view is that an unfought fight is a fight avoided, and that avoiding fights is what civilised politics is for.

It is not avoided. It is deferred, and it accrues interest.

The group that loses by default knows it lost. It did not get to make its case, it did not get to hear the other side's, and it did not get a decision it can point to. What it got was an outcome, arriving from nowhere in particular, that it had no part in. That produces a specific and corrosive kind of resentment: not the resentment of having lost an argument, which people get over, but the resentment of never having been allowed to have one.

Losing openly is survivable. Losing invisibly is not, because there is nothing to have lost to. There is no opponent to respect, no argument to reconsider, no vote to try to reverse next time. There is only a grievance, and grievances that cannot be attached to a decision attach themselves to the system.

That is where a great deal of the anger at politics comes from. Not from the fights people lost, but from the fights they were never allowed to have.

What Open Wrestling Looks Like

Under direct democracy, the tenant and the landlord meet. Not in person, but as arguments put to the same electorate on the same question. Each side says what it wants and why. The society decides. One side loses.

The losing side is not happy. But it has three things the invisible loser never gets. It knows what the question was. It knows what the other side said. And it knows the score, which means it knows what it would need to change to win next time.

That is what I mean by open. Not gentle, and not consensual. Open in the sense that the fight is held on the floor where everyone can see it, and the result is a result rather than a fact of nature.

The Objection

The objection is that open fights are ugly. People say cruel things, campaigns get nasty, and losers are humiliated in public rather than in private.

All true. And I would still take it, because the ugliness is at least honest about what is happening. A society in which groups with conflicting interests never visibly conflict is not a society without conflict. It is a society that has hidden its conflicts inside institutions, where they are settled by whoever has access to the institution, and where the rest of us are told the result and asked to call it consensus.

I have written about how the representative system forces every argument to an altitude at which nothing true can be said. This is the companion complaint. It also forces most arguments off the floor entirely, and the ones it does not stage are the ones that fester.