One Could, One Should

I. The Baby and the Bath

In recent weeks we have described a great deal of bathwater: the single entrance into politics via the long march through the parties, the parliamentary group as a chain of command, the abolished citizens’ assemblies, the blank vote that is counted but changes nothing. Whoever reads all this in a row may conclude that the whole thing is worthless. That is exactly the conclusion drawn by those who do not want to improve democracy but to get rid of it.

That is why one must say what the baby is. Karl Popper defined democracy not as rule by the people but more soberly: it is the order in which the rulers can be removed without bloodshed. The baby includes everything that makes such removal possible: free elections, independent courts, a free press and the protection of the minority that may be the majority tomorrow. Everything else is bathwater and may be changed: the parties’ monopoly on candidacies, the lists, party discipline, the electoral procedure.

This yields a simple test for any reform proposal: does it make it easier or harder to remove the powerful and to keep an eye on them?

II. Three Camps

Listen around and you meet three attitudes. The first wants to hold on to what exists, at any price, bathwater included. The second wants to go back to older, authoritarian forms and would throw out the baby for it. The third wants to change the water and keep the baby, that is, to improve what exists consistently.

The first two camps are large and loud. The third is thinly populated, barely organised and, as we showed in “The Other Entrances”, has achieved little except in a few places such as Australia or East Belgium. Why that is so is the question of this essay.

III. How Preservers and Returners Feed Each Other

The preservers and the returners are opponents, but they need each other. The preservers justify every standstill with the danger from the right: whoever shakes the system helps the extremists. When the Bundestag abolished its citizens’ assemblies this year, its President justified it by saying that the largest citizens’ assembly is the elected parliament. The returners in turn justify their call for a strong man with precisely this standstill: you see, the system cannot be reformed.

Each side supplies the other with its argument. And the returners, too, speak of a better democracy. Viktor Orbán calls his model an “illiberal democracy”. Hugo Chávez ran in 1998 to end a two-party system that really was rotten. In Italy the corruption trials of the early 1990s swept away the old parties, and what followed was not renewal but Silvio Berlusconi. In all three cases the bathwater was dirty. What mattered was what happened to the baby afterwards.

The improvers are caught between the two camps and ground down. To the preservers they are helpers of the radicals, to the returners naive do-gooders.

IV. Why the Improvers Remain Alone: from Outside

The preservers have the apparatus: posts, money, list places. The returners have anger, and anger is easy to rally. The improvers have arguments, and arguments rally poorly. Besides, improvement offers no enemy. People take to the streets against something more easily than for a better electoral procedure.

That leaves those who could spread an argument: journalists, publishers, presenters. Whoever tries to win them over has a recurring experience. Their criticism is often sharp, but it stays with the symptoms: a minister’s clumsiness, the beach chair on the balcony, the quarrel within the coalition. It does not touch the construction of the boat we are all sitting in. That is rarely malice. Whoever lives on access, on interviews, background talks, invitations and advertisers, is bound up with what he is supposed to describe. A publisher who finances his house (boat) with events and advertising partnerships must turn a wheel that keeps growing, and he cannot tell the people who pay for it that the boat we are all sitting in has massive design flaws.

There is a second filter. Whoever says something about the architecture of democracy without a professorship, a publisher or a television appearance lacks the higher ordination. His text is read, perhaps even praised, and then filed away. It is the same long march as in the parties, only in a different uniform.

V. Why the Improvers Remain Alone: from Inside

The second reason is more uncomfortable, because it lies with the improvers themselves. They do exist, the voices crying in the wilderness, and some have been crying for decades. But each cries alone.

One has his own elaborate model of a new democracy and defends it against every deviation. Comrades are welcome as long as they follow his line. Whoever brings a thought of his own is not a partner but a disturbance. Another has himself become an outsider to the establishment through his positions and still does not give up, which one can only admire. But he still has what the nameless voice lacks: title, institute, books. He may answer such a voice kindly once and then file it away. Not out of malice, but because a ranking applies even among outsiders. They go on applying among themselves the standards of the establishment that excludes them.

This produces a picture one recognises once one has seen it. A dozen voices in the wilderness do not make a choir if each accepts only his own melody. One guards his concept, the other his rank. And whoever has neither remains alone.

VI. The Word without a Face

And then there is the large number of those who are neither preservers nor returners nor voices in the wilderness. One meets them everywhere, at the kitchen table, in clubs, among friends. They see the same as the improvers, and they say it too: one could, one really should, one ought to. Then comes a shrug.

The word “one” has no face. Whoever says “one should” has built the sentence so that nobody is meant, not even himself. The shrug that follows looks like powerlessness, but it is a decision: the decision to do nothing, made in such a way that it leaves no trace.

The Australian story from “The Other Entrances” began at exactly this point. In the electorate of Indi a few citizens had stopped saying “one”. They invited each other into their kitchens and asked not what one should do, but what they themselves would do. At the beginning nothing more was needed.

VII. We Too

An essay is itself a form of “one should”. For months we have been writing proposals: a concept for representatives without a party card (German), a mandate without a place (German), a blank vote with consequences. As long as no one takes them up, they are no more than a well-reasoned shrug.

And if we offer them as a line for others to follow, we are no better than the voices we have described. That is why we say it explicitly: our proposals are building blocks. Anyone may use them, change them, combine them with others or discard them. The Australian “Voices” groups showed how. Each adopted the procedure, each found its own candidate, and no one claimed a copyright.

VIII. How This Essay Could Be Refuted

The first objection: the improvers are not as weak as we portray them. There are associations for more direct democracy, initiatives for citizens’ assemblies, lawyers drafting electoral reforms. That is true. But the citizens’ assemblies in particular show how little this helps them when a coalition strikes them from the budget with a stroke of the pen.

The second objection: whoever places preservers and returners side by side trivialises the returners. Holding on to an imperfect democracy is something different from wanting to abolish it. That is right, and we do not equate the two. It becomes dangerous where holding on turns into standstill and the standstill drives voters to the returners.

The essay would be refuted if it could be shown that democracy has so far been renewed mainly by the preservers, and not by people who at some point stopped saying “one”.

IX. Changing the Water

One does not throw out the baby because the water is dirty. But nor does one leave it sitting in dirty water just because one is afraid of dropping it while changing it. Someone has to change it, with their own hands, and not “one”.

If everyone says one should, and no one says I will: who changes the water before the others throw out the baby?