Voting out democracy

By admin-s On Nov 2, 2016

June H.L. Wong, The Star

THe Greeks who invented it called it demokratia or “rule by the people”. It’s a beautiful notion but in reality, democracy, to quote Frank Underwood from House of Cards, is “so overrated”.

This has never been clearer than what’s happening in the United States of America right now.

If the citizens of that great nation that was built on “the rule of the people, by the people, and for the people” can’t vote for a leader they really want, something must be very wrong.

Sure, we have been made to believe voting is an integral part of a practising democracy, but how sad that there is no escape clause for voters facing choices they can’t accept.

Let me put it this way: Imagine a company looking to hire someone to replace its present CEO.

Individuals thinking they have the credentials apply. The company’s HR department, or whoever who owns it, goes through the applications, shortlists the promising candidates and then calls them in for an interview.

In the interviewing process, the candidates are whittled down to two. In subsequent meetings, the two, unfortunately, fall horribly short of expectations. What happens then? Well, neither would get the job, of course. The company either leaves the post empty or, more likely, asks the incumbent, who is actually quite good but had to leave because of factors beyond his control, to stay on while it looks for new candidates. A good company surely will not hire someone to be its CEO simply because there were people applying for the position.

So if a nation is “owned” by its citizens and they don’t find the two candidates vying for the job of president, which is like the ultimate CEO, suitable for a wide variety of reasons, why should they put either one in office? No respectable company will hire someone for such an important job if there is any doubt about his or her character or integrity.

And by now the whole world knows how awfully devious, deceitful and dissembling Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, the most unpopular and controversial presidential candidates in US history, are.

Unfortunately, scandal-free Barack Obama can’t stay on because the 22nd Amendment to the US Constitution does not allow a president more than two terms.

So if democracy is about giving people the right to choose who they want, it isn’t happening in America right now. The only alternative, ironically, is to not vote.

Meanwhile, something has been going on in Spain which I find most interesting as it also relates to democracy.

On a recent work trip to Madrid, one of my hosts casually remarked that the country didn’t have a government but no hay problema.

Since then, I have learned that after two rounds of national elections, no party won enough votes to form the government or forge a coalition, which left the country without a federal government for 10 months.

The politicians had warned of chaos and paralysis but as a New York Times article gleefully observed: “Instead, more than anything, the crisis seems to have offered a glimpse of life if politicians simply stepped out of the way. For many, it has not been all that bad.”

The article quoted Spaniard Rafael Navarro who runs a small pharmacy in Madrid as saying: “Spain would be just fine if we got rid of most of the politicians and three-fourths of government employees.” He added that too little government is better than too much.

High-five to that, I say. This is especially so when Spain defied all the naysayers (a.k.a. the worried politicians) and according to Forbes.com, is one of the fastest-growing Eurozone economies this year, which resulted in the unemployment rate falling.

While a “do nothing” caretaker government was unable to introduce new laws or policies and some development projects were frozen, life in Spain went on just fine: garbage was collected, public transport ran as normal, no ministry or agency closed down and the police maintained law and order.

How far Spain went and did well without a formal government is now moot, since the political impasse was resolved on Saturday when the acting Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy managed to win a simple parliamentary majority.

But as Forbes noted, Belgium had a similar crisis in 2010 and didn’t have a government for one and a half years. The economy “pottered along quite happily without that firm smack of government” during that time.

It added that while governments are needed for things that must be done and decided at “that level”, it opined that direct management of the economy is not one of those things. Spain and Belgium showed that “not having a government might even be beneficial as it reduces the number of things that governments do to prevent the economy tootling along.”

Demokratia which literally means “people power”, introduced by the Athenian leader Cleisthenes in 507BCE, has had a profound influence on the modern world and is touted as what all good nations should subscribe to.

But events in America – its people being forced to choose a leader they don’t want – and what Spain and Belgium went through is proof to me that the practice of voting in leaders and governments is seriously questionable.

The disillusionment and disgust with so-called democratic elections, politicians and governments is almost universal. We have repeatedly seen how instruments of democracy can be bent out of shape or cunningly used to claim legitimacy to rule by the corrupt and power-hungry.

So what we need is a 21st century Cleisthenes for a complete reboot of this thing called democracy. Perhaps not a Greek but a geek, because I really think we should remove humans and politicians from the equation. Instead, we should replace them with incorruptible robot managers with artificial intelligence that can plan and organise, implement policies and run governments without fear or favour. That should remove the necessity of elections by the people and blah blah blah.