Democracy in Name Only
By: The Hannah Arendt Center
Tags: Politics, Rational Ignorance, James Fishkin, Democracy, Donald Trump

by Madeleine Rosen, Bard High School Early College student and winner of our student essay contest, as part of our 2017 Fall Conference, “Crises of Democracy: Thinking in Dark Times,” addressing the question, “Has representative democracy failed?”

On November 8th, 2016, President Donald J. Trump was chosen by the American people. I stayed up into the early hours of the morning watching the results come in. Like the cable news anchors I was watching, I was completely dumbfounded. How could we have elected him?

In the coming days and weeks that was the question that everyone was trying to answer. Every morning since the election CNN has had a new expert on to give their take, an expert who supposedly has the answers. Despite the preponderance of attempts to explain what has happened, we will continue to ponder and answer this question for generations to come. Why? Because for most of us, it epitomizes the failure of representative democracy. And not just any representative democracy, the world’s quintessential representative democracy, toward which all others strive and seek to emulate.

To me, the election of Donald Trump is the perfect illustration of a flaw that pervades human society. We are plagued by our inclination to simplify everything to such an extent that a single event becomes the culmination of a movement or transformation that was not only years in the making, but was, more importantly, already occurring. Police brutality did not begin and end with Colin Kaepernick taking a knee during the national anthem in the same way that Occupy Wall Street was not the beginning of socioeconomic inequality in our nation. Yet, it took these events to bring attention to endemic problems that many of us have overlooked for years, quite possibly for our whole lives. Such is the case with the election of Donald Trump.

This is not meant to justify the outcome nor alleviate the burden on those who voted for him by any means whatsoever, but, rather, to say that we as a nation should not have been taken by surprise. Representative democracy did not simply fail on November 8th, 2016. As James F. Fishkin noted at the 2017 Arendt Center’s annual conference, for years, we have been watching our society become a nation where “intense minorities rule and determine the result over one issue.” We have become allergic to compromise and have instead created a climate in which partisanship, divisiveness, and gridlock thrive. The failure of representative democracy is not finite, and we shouldn’t think of it as such.

In the words of Alexis de Tocqueville,

“A new science of politics is needed for a new world. This, however, is what we think of least; launched in the middle of a rapid stream, we obstinately fix our eyes on the ruins which may still be descried upon the shore we have left, while the current sweeps us along, and drives us backward toward the gulf.”

Although in this case, the “ruins” pertain to representative democracy, rather than the aftermath of France’s authoritarian regime as a result of democratization, the message nevertheless holds true. There is no use in attempting to fight the current, as it will just push us further from where we once were. In other words, it is not impossible to restore our representative democracy to what it once was, but in order to do so, “a new science of politics” must be employed.

As Teju Cole put it, “we need to snap out of the ‘what if things get really bad for us?’” mentality and realize that things have already gotten really bad. Yet, as Tocqueville describes, this is much more difficult than one might think. Ever since the democratic ideal emerged on the world stage, we have been warned that violations of it will result in the ‘destruction’ or ‘demise’ of democracy. We anxiously await the day this failure will arrive and destroy the whole of democratic society. Which is why so many are eager to equate the election of Donald Trump with the failure of representative democracy, instead of recognizing it as an extreme form of partisan politics.