Will democracy hit the wall?

In the wake of Barack Obama’s victory in the US election, there has been a fair amount of knee-jerk analysis of the demographics of the vote and the possible implications for future campaigns. Many commentators have stated that the Republicans simply have to change (that is, move closer to the so-called centre ground) in order to have any chance of ever winning the presidency again. But, for a party that was perceived by many to have been too extreme to be electable, to have gathered 48.3% of the popular vote doesn’t look like a bad return.

In the rush to suggest what the Republicans should, or shouldn't, do to become 'electable', nobody seems to have considered the possibility that the most important thing in politics might be to have principles and to stick to them. We have become accustomed to the notion that serious (i.e. winning) political parties must be ruthless, focus-group driven, vote-gathering machines, designed to hoover up everyone on the so-called middle ground. It isn’t just that nobody wants to fall out over political ideas anymore, it’s almost as if nobody even wants to have much in the way of political differences. The so-called 'third way’ has become the only way. Given the declining turnout at successive elections, I’d be surprised if that many folk genuinely believed that this arrangement was going well for the liberal democracies.

At any given point in history, there will be certain ideas and philosophies that will be deemed unelectable, but that is not to say that such situations will always prevail. We have no idea of what might happen in the next five minutes or the next five years; we have no way accurately to predict the impact of what Harold McMillan famously called "events, dear boy, events."
It is possible that the middle ground might move. It is possible that conditions may one day prevail in which a political party might be able to stand and win on a set of policies and principles that have not been watered down and hopelessly compromised by focus-group fudging and slavish sensitivity to opinion polls. It would be refreshing to encounter a party with the courage to say: “These are the things we stand for. This is what we plan to do if we get elected. If you don’t like it, don’t vote for us.”

Unfortunately, we appear to be lumbered with a professional political class, ever-willing to adjust its ‘principles’ to appeal to as many pressure groups, minority interests, ethnic factions and voting blocks as possible. It seems that no party can gain power without first bribing the electorate to vote for it. Unless we can break this cycle of electoral sweeteners, the prediction made by the 19th century political writer Alexis de Tocqueville is likely to come true:

“A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship.”

If anyone thinks I am over-egging this particular pudding, I will remind you that there are currently two EU member countries being governed by groups of unelected technocrats. Who would bet against that number increasing at some point in the next eighteen months?

It's going to get worse before it gets worse

It would appear that the tide of opinion on the EU might have taken a significant turn (unless, that is, you work for the BBC). Significant change in public opinion has been rather slow to arrive, perhaps because –up until now- the pro-EU faction had very successfully skewed the debate to the extent that anything 'anti-EU' was seen as anti-European, anti-progress, xenophobic ‘little Englander’ nonsense. That was, at best, an intellectually feeble tactic, because it’s clear that one can be in favour of increased co-operation, trade, labour movement and so on without being in favour of central planning and big, unaccountable government.

Let's be absolutely clear about this: the EU is not Europe. The EU is a concerted attempt to run Europe from a central source. And what’s worse is that this concerted attempt is fuelled by a chilling determination not to allow anything as inconvenient as ‘democracy’ to get in the way. Just ask voters in Denmark, Ireland, France and The Netherlands; how many referenda on the constitution did the EU bigwigs ignore? What was it about the word 'no' that they didn't understand? And don't even bother asking voters in Greece and Italy anymore, because they now have their very own 'appointed' governments.

It has been clear for some time that there is a political and bureaucratic elite that is absolutely determined to establish a United States of Europe. The drift towards fiscal (to be followed, inevitably, by political) union among Eurozone members continues apace, with no indication that the electorate in any of these countries will get to have a say. They won’t get a say because the architects and drivers of this project do not trust us, the great unwashed, to do the right thing. They have, effectively, placed a firewall between themselves and the people they purport to represent. Impervious to anything as vulgar as public opinion, the EU leaders believe themselves to be protected from the ‘virus’ of democratic accountability.

Their disdain is what should alarm us most. History tells us that when people can’t change things via the ballot box, they find other ways to change things. When the mere casting of votes means so very little to the drivers of the EU project, the likelihood increases that they will only be deflected from their purpose by something that might turn out to be altogether less pleasant than the average election.

All previous attempts at 'unifying' Europe have ended in tears; this one will as well.