Direct Democracy and Liberty in Contemporary Politics

Introduction: Direct Democracy as Ideal and Reality

Direct democracy has, arguably, never been practiced in reality. Proponents usually point to ancient Athens in the fifth century BCE as an example of direct democracy, but any number of contemporary Athenian sources — such as the dramatist Aristophanes — can be cited to demonstrate that the actual Athenians viewed their own democracy as hopelessly corrupt and unable to live up to the high ideals set for it. In some sense direct democracy is, in itself, an ideal. By understanding it in this way, we can appreciate that the concept remains desirable even if it may not be entirely possible to realize.

It is worth noting at the outset that Montesquieu, one of the earliest Enlightenment theorists of democracy, viewed democratic systems as very easily corruptible. However, many proponents of the idealized form of direct democracy fail to note that Montesquieu considered the ideals of direct democracy to be one of the corruptions that a democratic system could take. In The Spirit of the Laws, Montesquieu writes:

Montesquieu and the Corruption of Democratic Equality

"The principle of democracy is corrupted not only when the spirit of equality is extinct, but likewise when they fall into a spirit of extreme equality, and when each citizen would fain be upon a level with those whom he has chosen to command him. Then the people, incapable of bearing the very power they have delegated, want to manage everything themselves, to debate for the senate, to execute for the magistrate, and to decide for the judges." (Montesquieu VIII.2)

We can view the concept of direct democracy as being intimately related to what Montesquieu identifies as the "spirit of extreme equality" which corrupts the "principle of democracy." His argument is that direct democracy — wherein the people essentially insist on usurping a function that ought to be delegated to representatives — is itself a corruption of the workable form of a democratic system. Montesquieu must, of course, be taken with a grain of salt. He notoriously thought that democracy of any form, even representative democracy, was impossible in Russia and China for reasons of climate and geography. More to the point, as Melvin Richter notes, "Montesquieu was not a democrat. He did not mince words when he discussed what he called the basest class of the people. He accepted the view of his English friends that the votes of the unpropertied could easily be purchased. Hence it was right to exclude them from the suffrage" (Richter 336).

Yet it is worth noting that the ideal of direct democracy is desirable because it keeps at bay the first and primary corruption that Montesquieu sees in democratic governments: the tendency to reach a point where "the spirit of equality is extinct." If we look at contemporary American politics, for example, we can see Montesquieu's competing "corruptions" of the democratic system at work. The United States is not a direct democracy, and it has definitely reached a point where many believe that "the spirit of equality," if not quite extinct, is at the very least fatally compromised by inegalitarian tendencies. The vast inequality of wealth observable in the contemporary United States undeniably plays a role in the corruption of American representative democracy: Montesquieu's vision of the votes of the unpropertied being easily purchased has transformed into a different way in which money corrupts politics.

It is worth noting that the way in which direct democracy represents a challenge to the corrupting influence of money in democratic systems is the chief reason why it is desirable, even if it cannot be implemented perfectly. The most salient recent example of this is the Occupy Wall Street movement. In an interview with The Nation magazine, Nathan Schneider, one of the organizers of the Occupy movement, noted that the idea of direct democracy was central to Occupy's ends and means. When asked what the "demands" of the Occupy protesters were from the government, Schneider indicated that the form the protest took should be viewed implicitly as a demand for direct democracy:

"…the NYC General Assembly seemed to be veering away from the language of 'demands' in the first place, largely because government institutions are already so shot through with corporate money that making specific demands would be pointless until the movement grew stronger politically. Instead, to begin with, they opted to make their demand the occupation itself — and the direct democracy taking place there — which in turn may or may not come up with some specific demand. When you think about it, this act is actually a pretty powerful statement against the corruption that Wall Street has come to represent." (Schneider, 29 Sept 2011)

This is, in some sense, not a new phenomenon. Technological advances can frequently give rise to visionary political thinking. One need only turn to the late eighteenth century, when the Industrial Revolution inspired William Godwin's Political Justice — which goes beyond advocating direct democracy to a straightforward anarchism or libertarianism — and led Godwin to believe that technology would soon make death obsolete. In reality, of course, the advanced engineering of the Industrial Revolution made no lasting contribution to democratic politics. But in the present case we are faced with something different: the form taken by online social media is sufficient to make people think that direct democracy might indeed be implementable.

Estonia: Techno-Optimism and Its Fragility

The most salient example of this is the post-Soviet state of Estonia. Juri Ruus, in a 2011 paper included in Local Direct Democracy in Europe, notes that information technology is being pushed toward the implementation of direct democracy in Estonia:

"A well-developed information society facilitates the work of local authorities and contributes considerably to the development of democracy. In Estonia, which is famous for its rapid development of information technology, local authorities are required to publish any important information about their municipalities on a website. This is set out in the Public Information Act. In recent years, there have been mostly positive developments regarding direct democracy. For instance, the Estonian Civil Society Concept has been worked out by the Representative Council of NGO Roundtable and accepted by the Estonian Parliament in 2002. The concept regulates generally the relations between public authority and civic initiative. In many local councils the representatives of citizen associations are members of the regular council and expert committees… Research shows that 10% of the ideas of citizens, inhabitants of the country, are being acknowledged and put into practice by government, ministries or parliament. In the former case, although public intervention has so far been considerable, many say that there are problems of competence — many of the proposed ideas have often no connection to the actual laws under discussion." (Ruus 284)

The difficulty here is that the kind of techno-optimism that has led to the Estonian experiment is, ultimately, optimism. It is very easy to find objections to the Estonian system, starting with the one that Ruus notes: direct democracy frequently results in problems of "competence" where the political participation of citizens is frequently irrelevant or tangential to the problems at hand. But we do not need to critique the theory behind Estonia's technological attempt to implement direct democracy when we can look at recent history — namely the 2007 Russian-sponsored cyberattacks on Estonia's internet infrastructure. As The Guardian reported on 16 May 2007:

"While Russia and Estonia are embroiled in their worst dispute since the collapse of the Soviet Union, a row that erupted at the end of last month over the Estonians' removal of the Bronze Soldier Soviet war memorial in central Tallinn, the country has been subjected to a barrage of cyber warfare, disabling the websites of government ministries, political parties, newspapers, banks, and companies." (Traynor, 2007)

In short, we can see the limitations of the techno-optimistic approach toward the feasibility of implementing direct democracy. It ultimately depends upon a technological infrastructure that is far more fragile than its more starry-eyed proponents would be prepared to concede.