Bolsonaro, Kirchner, Maduro, Trump. Individuals. We are all the time talking about them, referring to them, attributing the democratic crisis to them. As if democracy were not, rather, an architecture within which people function (or not).
Any political result, any election of a Milei or a Bukele, is the joint result of two things, the will expressed at the polls and the institutional designs, formal and informal, that transform said will into institutional results. Change an election rule, for example, or an important condition of public deliberation, and you will change the outcome. If the electoral college did not exist, Clinton and Gore, and not Trump and Bush, would have been presidents of the United States, and if the algorithms were regulated, the incentives would be given for another type of public opinion.
But liberal democracy has developed a scab, a mind-boggling inability to self-reform.
Democratic inaction is the mistaken belief that liberal democratic institutions – parliaments, election systems, the application of majority rules, the constitution of governments, the rules of public deliberation, the interpretation of fundamental rights – have They have to remain the same as they were manufactured two centuries ago.
It wasn't always like this. In the 18th and 19th centuries, people talked about politicians, of course, but no less than about great constitutional arrangements. This is what Bentham and Mill discussed, not to mention the American founders. But now this system that they created flies at cruising altitude, as if nothing affected it.
Today's democrats reject threats from outside – populism, polarization, fake news – from those who do not want democracy, but they forget or underestimate the problems on their side of the court.
They forget that, due to its heavy design, democracy is incapable of providing quick results. With its multiple instances, negotiations, interests, it is slow with injustice. It is recalcitrant and elitist. They omit that sometimes it turns out that freedoms – of expression, of association, of property, of intellectual creation – are also used to oppress.
It is not surprising that they cannot dialogue with those who threaten democracy “from outside.” These are, they say, people who have lost their minds. The disturbing thing is that almost no one has lost their mind. The disturbing thing is that people almost always do things because they have reasons. To a young man today without any real chance in life, democracy has to promise something other than that he will have many freedoms that he will not be able to use anyway. It's just more bearable to think that there is a world – the world of Trump, Milei and Bolsonaro – that has let loose, and that we are safe on the other side.
Democracy needs self-criticism. To overcome democratic inaction, perhaps the important thing is to become aware that democratic institutions can also change. That are not engraved on rock. That they never were. That our most cherished theories may need revision.
The opposite of democratic inaction is democratic innovation. Democratic innovation is a new discipline with its own authors, practitioners and literature. Democratic innovation is a new field of political action that advocates the reform of some aspects, including structural ones, of our contemporary democratic buildings. Question, for example, whether our representatives should always be elected. Why not choose them randomly? He disputes that we should always vote for a candidate or a party. Why not other options that allow us to prioritize our preferences, or graduate them? Criticize the single-person leadership of our current governments. Why not delegate some administrations to plural bodies? It replies that the main rules of our public debate be decided in Silicon Valley. Why not take social media algorithms seriously and regulate them ourselves, like we do any other public service?
The new institutional catalog of deliberative democracy presents good opportunities.
Deliberative democracy is a theory about political legitimacy. What legitimizes politics, he tells us, are the reasons, not the votes or the majorities. In the absence of reasons, and even in the presence of votes and majorities, we do not have legitimate systems. Not even respect for minorities can achieve these claims of legitimacy. Majorities also require and deserve reasons.
The institutional consequence of all this is that we have to improve reasons and, above all, our ability to reason in a democracy. The growing use of political lottery around the world so that randomly chosen groups of citizens can spend time reasoning and listening to each other's reasons is an example. Many good things can be said about the random and deliberative assemblies that were born in British Columbia twenty years ago, have been successfully carried out in European countries such as France, Belgium and Ireland, and are beginning to be formalized in other parts of the world. It can be said that they are representative. It can be said that they dignify citizens by calling them to play a significant political role. It can be said that they reach agreements better than politicians. It can be said that they recover the Athenian ideal that he who can be commanded, can also command.
But today we would like to say that they are a brake on democratic inaction, because they allow us to address issues that politicians do not want to deal with, and to address them better, with better deliberation. We should give them a chance.
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