Which democracy is really such Let’s explain ourselves well

Even in this electoral round, voter turnout is the figure that stands out the most, if we exclude the celebrations and talk show chatter of politicians and professionals. Yet another negative record with a turnout of 49.69% for the European elections and just over 60% of voters for the local elections. Politicians seem not to care about these data, but above all about these moods, and hurl insults at the electorate of indifference and indifference, not fully addressing the problem of why the people are so disaffected by the representative system of democracy. If democracy literally means “power to the people”, and therefore to the decision of the majority of them, it seems to me that this definition is completely contradictory. Election after election, the concept of “democracy” seems to be increasingly overturned, understood as a condition in which a representative minority is, in fact, voted for, making decisions that conform to guaranteeing the rights of the majority. Therefore we can define our political class as a “democratic aristocracy”, as it is a minority with respect to the concept of popular sovereignty. This would not be demonised, if the word aristocracy were understood etymologically as “the government of the best”, but given the CVs of our politicians, it is very difficult to consider this meaning. In the future, how might scholars of political history describe this state of affairs? Governed by a party oligarchy, or by a democratic aristocracy or by a polyarchy, as Robert Alan Dahl defines it? How can a truly democratic state be created? In my opinion, the answer remains the only one not yet tested by modern states and which can be supported with the progress of technology: direct democracy. Here we open a new chapter and new paradigms of politics. It’s time to talk about it.

Michele Todisco

Dear Michele,

the themes it poses open a thousand fronts and we imagine that nine out of ten readers, already at the eighth or ninth line, have snorted, moving on, probably taking a look at the other letters or going directly to sport or the obituaries, to understand if someone who they knew he passed away.

We don’t say this by blaming her, nor the nine out of ten who have the right to snoop wherever they please.

In fact, politics, especially that which is not reduced to stadium cheering or the tweets of parliamentarians or ministers on duty, is a matter so serious that it sometimes borders on the boring.

For those who have reached this far, for those brave (adjective, lowercase) who have not yet looked away, a couple of considerations, as a corollary to your writing.

First: we have no answers to the questions you ask. We do not know what the current state can be called, whether “party oligarchy or democratic aristocracy or polyarchy”, but it is certainly not out of place to define it as “democracy”, one of the most changing words in the vocabularies of any language, including in the same name completely different phenomena , some even in antithesis to each other.

Second: “direct democracy, made possible by the progress of technology”, seems to us to be an illusion equal to the many that preceded it in recent decades. In concrete terms, at a certain point in the decision-making process we always need someone who synthesizes, who transforms the horizontal into a vertical (“bubble up”, as our colleague and expert on the subject, Carlo Muzzi, explains to us in the passionate discussions between a title front page and the correction of the draft of an insert on the Mille Miglia).

The realization of democracy does not in fact lie in the instrument, in the technology precisely, but in the culture that favors and promotes participation, interest, discussion, the translation of a will into actions, into laws, into practice.

In conclusion, again for that handful of heroes who reached this penultimate line, we agree with you perfectly on the closing: “The time has come to talk about it.” An hour which, moreover, has lasted for three thousand years and continues happily.

PS For workaholics, one last note: when discussing “democracy” it is already difficult to agree on what is meant, but for us the true distinctive characteristic is that indicated by Giovanni Sartori, who maintained that its characteristic feature is the impossibility, from part of the majority, to exercise despotic action on the minority. Where there are protected minorities there is and will always be true democracy. (g. bar.)