Democracy—It Doesn’t Mean What You Think It Means

Control of words is control of a whole lot more—thought, communication, and often action as well.

 

"How strangely will the Tools of a Tyrant pervert the plain Meaning of Words!"

~ Samuel Adams

 

There are plenty of examples of the tyrants among us controlling us with words. One technique is to change the meaning of words while allowing the masses of us to keep the old definition in our heads, because that is to the tyrants’ advantage. A recent example is the word vaccine. [Don’t worry; that’s not today’s topic, just this paragraph’s example.] Originally, it was a preparation, a medical intervention, that would create immunity by exposing the body to a milder form of the pathogen. It was intended to be a “safe” way of experiencing the disease with the intent that the person receiving the intervention would develop antibodies without having to suffer the actual disease, and this would also prevent contracting the disease in the future—typically for many years. What was imposed upon us in late 2020 did not prevent contracting the disease. It’s hard to say those who got it suffered a milder version than they would have—because it’s not possible to compare current life to a hypothetical alternate life. Additionally, it turned out that it was neither safe, effective, nor in actuality a vaccine. But they used the word vaccine so that you would respond as if it were the traditional definition.

OK, that’s an example of the change-the-definition-without-telling-anyone technique. Now, the word being controlled by the tyrants that I’d like to look at today is democracy.

It comes from Greek. Demos means municipality, or the populous. The -cracy part of the word means government. So, it’s government by the people.

The online dictionary translates the Greek for democracy as republic. In other words, the idea of a democracy is a state or entity ruled by the people, either directly or through elected representatives, according to my 1982 dictionary.

from Webster's New World Dictionary, Second College Edition, (c) 1982

 During most of my life, I personally thought of the words republic and democracy as essentially interchangeable, although the Republican and Democrat Parties were always clearly different. But historians, particularly conservative ones, are more vocal today in pointing out the differences between the two types of government. A democracy, meaning direct vote of the people and the majority rules, is quite different from a republic, in which the people vote for representatives, who theoretically do the necessary deep dive into issues to determine how to vote on behalf of their constituents.

The thing that sets a republic apart is the rule of law. Particularly in the United States, neither representatives nor people directly can vote for government to do something that has not been granted as a power to the government. The law is a limit.

In a pure democracy, whatever the majority decides is what government does. There are various metaphors to explain the folly of this. One is that democracy is when you have two wolves and a sheep voting on what’s for lunch.

image found here

Here’s a quote from my files: 

“Democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover they can vote themselves largesse out of the public treasure. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidate promising the most benefit from the public treasury, with the result that democracy always collapses over a loose fiscal policy, always to be followed by a dictatorship, and then a monarchy.”—Alexander Fraser Tytler

 So, there’s a difference between a republic—particularly a constitutional republic—and a democracy.

However, here is what has been happening to the word democracy.

1.      The public has the idea that democracy is interchangeable with republic; it just means the power comes from the people, who express their views by voting, mainly, and also by contacting their representatives.

2.      The ruling elites—who happen to be associated with the Democrat Party, mostly, but not fully limited to them—use the term to mean our system of government, or our country as we know it.

3.      The ruling elites separate our system of government from the Constitution and the rule of law, and have it mean the way things are done by us. But they do not yet explicitly change the definition for the people.

4.      The ruling elites start using the term our democracy to mean our regime. They are counting on the public retaining the definition as our system of government, but they do not mean that.

It would be concerning enough if this is where they stopped. But the way we—and everybody else in the world, practically speaking—have a people voice their will to government is through voting. This has always been to the advantage of the democracy advocates. Think of them as the wolves, rather than the sheep in the metaphor. If they can control the message that gets to the voters, then they control the outcome. That is why controlling the message has been so important to them—through censorship and the other many ways we’ve seen, particularly in the last half decade.

But the ruling elites have been facing difficulty in totally controlling the message they want the voters to hear—because of pesky alternative platforms and means of communicating with one another. They censor more vigorously. And they deride all those alternative voices as “extremists” and “conspiracy theorists.” But still, they can’t control the message well enough to determine the outcome of an election. Voters who have found their way to alternative opinions are not controllable in the way “sheeple” are.

And let’s just add here that the ruling elites have tried controlling the outcome of elections by disregarding the actual will of the people—through fraud in varied forms and myriad locations. That’s a topic for another day.

But they cannot count on a people who would not vote them out of their positions of power—no matter how often they cry out that any disturbance to their power means “the end of our democracy.”

So the next step is to discount voting as the means to maintaining “our democracy.”

Coincidentally (and there are likely no coincidences in these things) two major publications had opinion pieces on the same day, August 21, saying that voting isn’t all it’s cracked up to be; maybe we ought to find another way. [In case you’re blocked by paywalls, both pieces are summarized here.] 

The New York Times piece, by Adam Grant, was originally titled, “Elections Are Bad for Democracy.”  After much online scorn, it was changed to “The Worst People Run for Office. It’s Time for a Better Way.” But the first title is really what was intended, especially if democracy means our regime. He suggests that choosing random leaders would give us better results than choosing from among the multiple bad choices of those who run for office. So let’s come up with a better way. He suggests maybe a lottery.

There are times, I admit, when I’ve thought selecting out of the phonebook (assuming there still is such a thing somewhere) would yield better leaders than we get through elections. But the solution isn’t less voting; it’s more informed voting. We need less censorship and more open debate.

There’s a clue in the wording of the end of the piece:

"As we prepare for America to turn 250 years old, it may be time to rethink and renew our approach to choosing officials. The lifeblood of a democracy is the active participation of the people. There is nothing more democratic than offering each and every citizen an equal opportunity to lead."

Our way of doing things is archaic, he implies. But offering every citizen an equal opportunity to lead is democracy; not everyone having an equal vote. Hmm.

illustration found with The Atlantic piece

The other piece, “Americans Vote Too Much,” by Jerusalem Demsas, for The Atlantic, tells us that all those pesky local jurisdiction elections are low turnout anyway. People just can’t be bothered. In fact, our form of government expects too much of us. It’s a full-time job to stay informed, and most people do the sensible thing and tune out.

I do agree that there are too many separate elections. Sometimes the ruling elites (even the local ones) insist on off years and odd dates—so that they can control the outcome more easily, because fewer people are paying attention. But I think putting the elections on normal voting days makes sense. We already have a long ballot here in Harris County—the biggest in the country, I think. But we do tune in and try to get information, fill out our sample ballot and all, before we go to vote. Many people just don’t notice when there’s some special early May election at some odd place.

Demsas ends his piece with this:

"Giving power to the people is sometimes conflated with giving people more access to government decision making through, say, community meetings or ballot measures. But if only a small, unrepresentative group of people are willing to be full-time democrats, then that extra ballot measure, election, or public meeting isn’t more democracy; it’s less."

Ok, so his assertion is that more is less, and less is more. “Giving power to the people” isn’t something government has the right to do; the people inherently have the power, which they delegate in limited ways to government. In that phrase, who is giving the power? Democracy—or the ruling elite, as we would do well to define it? I don’t see that as a better option.

I don’t have a solution. I try to do my part, educating myself, and then sharing what I’ve learned so others will be better informed after reading my research. I guess that makes me part of “a small, unrepresentative group of people willing to be full-time democrats/republicans.”

When Demsas argues that more participation by people willing to be vigilant “isn’t more democracy; it’s less,” what does he mean there by democracy? It’s not really the will of the people. He may want you to think that, but what I think he means is the ruling elite. I think there’s a subtext saying, “You plebians ought to get out of the way of the ruling elite. It’s too much for you. Let us make all your decisions for you.”

It's not your grandmother’s democracy anymore.

Watch the words. That’s the tyrants’ means of attack.