Democracy Needs a Buffer

By MIDN 3/C Ionatan A. Soule, USN

Churchill once said, “Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others.”  I would agree and add that what makes it the worst is its inherent messiness.  By allowing the populace to participate in the arduous task of legislating, one can immediately see the difficulty that will arise come the time to agree on what a law should include, agree on how the law should be worded, and agree on how the law should be implemented and interpreted.  When it’s hard for a group of five friends to make plans to go see a movie, then how can anyone expect democracy, where the voice of every single person can be heard on every single topic, to be efficiently implemented?  Though potential problems are evident, democracy is still so much better than other forms of government—dictatorship, monarchy, oligarchy—because it does allow for the will of the people to be heard.  The question then is how it should be implemented.  The two major options are a direct democracy and a representative democracy.  Of these two, a representative democracy is much better than a direct democracy because it still allows for the voice of the people to be heard, while providing a buffer from mob rule through its indirect nature.

Athenians pioneered democracy in the form of a direct democracy.  On paper, this form was the best because it allowed each individual to have a voice.  Unfortunately, when put into practice it quickly ran into issues.  The primary issue was mob rule—whatever the people wanted they got.  One example is when people began demanding compensation to attend to their civic duty of participating and voting in government.  Of course, the voter would agree to that proposition.  Unfortunately, this created a slippery slope and before long, Athenians were getting paid to go to their own festivals.  This ruined Athens’s economy and left no money for other governmental functions such as self-defense and public works.

The Founding Fathers of the United States solved the issue of mob rule through the creation of a representative democracy.  The people would vote for representatives who would then go make the decisions in government.  Not only did this solution inhibit mob rule while still giving the people a voice, but it also guaranteed that the people making the decisions would be educated to perform their civic duties.  All of this helps guarantee the most populous participation in the most efficient manner.  One pitfall to a representative democracy is that the representative ignores his constituents because he is, after all, independent of them once voted into office.  Though this could allow a representative to go “rogue” and do whatever he/she wants, it also could be beneficial to the government.  If the US mob wanted to get paid to vote, then the representative could refuse to heed their wishes knowing that it could potentially ruin the economy and thus serve as a buffer.  As long as the representative puts the good of the whole at the forefront of his objectives, then representative democracy is the best form of government there is.

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