Mihail Pojarsky/About Democracy

Time after time, when faced with American political realities, the domestic public is extremely surprised. From the contradictions between how democracy should be organized in a vulgar way and how stable democratic institutions really work. How is it that some kind of Supreme Court, where life-long party appointees sit, takes and decides key issues for the whole country? Why not a referendum? But the electoral college is especially misunderstood. Like, how can it be that the president lost by the majority of votes, but won thanks to some strange electors?

The fact is that direct democracy, where issues are decided by a majority of votes (namely, this corresponds to the vulgar notions of democracy) was not the dream of the founding fathers, but their main nightmare. The founding fathers proceeded from the liberal maxim of John Locke - that every person is free to dispose of his person and property. And, accordingly, they wanted to design a society where this maxim would be realized. But a direct democracy society is not a society where you own yourself. This is a system in which your identity belongs to a joint-stock company, where approximately 0.001% is yours, and the rest is divided among the entire population of the country. Solving issues by majority vote is not only immoral, but also inefficient. There is nothing in the world that people approach more irresponsibly than a universal vote on some issue. Not because people are stupid, but vice versa - because it is irrational to waste time and effort on studying the issue, where your vote is one of millions. Plus, the temptation to privatize profits by nationalizing losses is too great. Therefore, at best, it turns out like in Switzerland, where GMOs are banned in referendums and a huge minimum wage is set (in Geneva), at worst, like in Africa - "two tribes democratically decided to arrange genocide for the third." And why do people, on the contrary, relate to the maximum responsibility? That's right, to those decisions that affect themselves and their property, where the responsibility also falls on them, and not on the whole country. At the same time, the very concept of "the will of the people" is still a fiction. a people consists of many people, each of whom has his own will, and complete agreement on all issues is impossible. The real will of the people is "that everyone may follow their own will without interfering with others."

Therefore, the founding fathers feared the establishment of a "tyranny of the majority" no less than the tyranny of the British crown. And the main goal of the system they designed was to ensure the freedom of the individual and property. Behind this, a complex system of checks and balances is needed - between the courts, parliament and the president, between the states and the federal government. As long as the centers of power restrain each other, the individual can breathe freely. That's what the Electoral College is for. To strike a balance between densely populated and less populated states, between urban and rural populations. So that the inhabitants of several large and homogeneous urban agglomerations could not twist the eggs of the rest.

Referendums are held on some issues in the US (I recently wrote about them), but a real working democracy (or, as they say, a republic) is more about "containment" than about a non-existent "will of the people."

Mihail Pojarsky 2020-11-23