Is Popular Sovereignty up to the Challenge of Today's Problems?

• 
  

  
  

  A friend asks: In particular, is today's national democracy - which functions in an intense and commercially media-driven environment, against a background of an insufficiently curious and perhaps poorly educated electorate - a suitable system to solving complex, interdependent, long-term global challenges?

  
  

  
  

  I answer: Good question! What did someone once say about democracy as the worst political system -- except for all the others! I do think that the complexity of the challenges we face -- economic, ecological, social -- is such that it exceeds the capacity of the popular sovereign to determine. And yet, I would still argue that the diner, not the cook, let alone the owner of the restaurant, is the best judge of the soup. To me this means that the populace needs to be politically engaged and politically attuned enough to assent or dissent to what the political class proper and the technocratic elites propose. Thus in Greece, for example, I don't think that the idea of a popular referendum on the austerity package was ill-conceived. To say that the bankers and technocrats or the suits in Brussels should decide these things and that the people cannot be trusted to make such decisions is to treat the democratic electorate like children, and is an utterly oligarchic and arrogant attitude. Are the people up to the task? I think that they are up to the task of collectively deliberating on what broad lines of policy should be pursued. However, I think that the widespread apathy owes to the fact that the "alternatives" which have been set before the people do not speak in a meaningful or credible way to popular needs and discontent. I think that the elites who control the agenda offer up a very narrow set of options which serve in one way or another to preserve the status quo which benefits the elites. In the face of this control of the agenda by the elites, the importance of the Occupy and Indignados movements is that they challenge the elite's right to set the agenda, and they agitate to place other items and other more transformative possibilities on the agenda. This is crucial, I think, that political ideas emerge from below, that the technocrats in turn figure out how to give these ideas workable substance, and that the masses in turn be allowed to decide upon which soup to eat. What is entirely dysfunctional is a system where the top 1% sets the agenda, frames the alternatives and uses its control over the large media to ensure that the entire debate is restricted to this narrow menu of possibilities, a debate that is depicted as a boxing match in which the people are spectators placing bets on the outcome rather than contestants in a contest about that upon which their very lives and the lives of their children depend. OWS and the Indignados movements are challenging the right of the economic elite to set the agenda and define the choices because in the current neo-liberal era all of the choices offered by the elites as "responsible" serve to entrench elite control while further immiserating the middle and working classes. And I wholeheartedly support this challenge -- in the interests of genuine democracy, fundamental fairness and ecological sanity.