I think I speak for most of the modern world when I say that I've never had a worse opinion of democracy than I do right now. I once read a book called The Rhetoric of Reaction that tried to find a link between conservatism and conservative thought across different time periods. It surveyed some of the anti-democratic reasoning being put forth in Victorian Europe, especially England, and what struck me was how spot-on a lot of the criticism was. The dumbest people are going to get to vote! Statesmen will turn into boorish demagogues! People have no idea how to govern! Of course, all of it turned out to be true. Alarmist slippery-slope arguments usually do. (The widespread acceptance of racial miscegenation, the possibility of which Lincoln had to downplay in debates with Stephen Douglas, is a prime example.)
I write this four days into the administration of Donald Trump, and things are already hilariously bad. Comically, tragically bad. (It's funny: everything is and has been turning out exactly how we thought it would, with the lone exception of the election's outcome.) It's a low point for democracy, and at the same time, it is a banner moment. The gears of all these institutions we've trusted to be working after all this time, untested, have been proven to still work fluidly. It's encouraging, because it means things can be turned around as easily, if we're all still here in a few years.
What I'm thinking about right now, though, is the rise of Vladimir Putin compared to the rise of Barack Obama. Both men summited the power ladders of their countries, but one was a ruthless will-to-power imperialist and the other was a community organizer with a megawatt smile. In the course of international events, Obama was proven to be nowhere near the tactician Putin was. Then again, Putin had a decade's head start to practice, the outlook of a reasonable lifetime appointment to power, and a totally different moral, social, and ethical compass than Obama did. Had you raised Barack Obama to be a Putin, in the crucible of the KGB, and put him through a Universal Soldier-style upbringing, I'm sure he would have turned out to be a fine Bismarck of his own.
But he didn't have to be any of that in order to become the most powerful person in the world. He only had to speak well on TV and convey, through the medium of our hyper-personalized media, the ease that comes off that really good guy you know. That's the power of democracy, too. Yes, it can elect a Trump, because people have a tendency to be stupid. (Although only 27% of the country voted for Trump, and he lost the popular vote by almost 3 million. Gotta get voter turnout up.)
(Here's an idea: what if we started pitching voting as a public service act? Like you got commended by people for voting, and you could brag that you helped the society out? Turn it into an act of charity: of your time and attention? People seem to like kudos more than they like duty these days. Just a thought.)
Anyway, Putin didn't have these luxuries. Coming up in the dense weeds of connected, post-Soviet Russia, he only got to his local maximum by outwitting everyone else around him. For all intents and purposes, Russia's is not a democratic system. And what kind of person is it who ultimately wins that game and gets to rule? A ruthless psycho. If I saw my erstwhile mentor languishing with a trap I set up to clear the way for my own ascent, I would feel fucking horrible. If you're a Putin, though, you just cross one step off your list. Obama, meanwhile, gets to stay his pure, good, wholesome self the whole time. As a result, we end up putting in power a guy who can maintain what is popularly recognized as pro-social morals, and I like that.
So my point is this: democracy, for all its flaws, also lets someone who is a genuinely good person step into power. That's probably somewhat unique among political systems.
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