Democracy In Decline?

If its recent record is any indication, Winston Churchill might have been wrong about democracy.

- Loren Lomasky

There is no more satisfying description of democracy than Winston Churchill’s declaration that it “is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.” Among compliments, backhanded ones are the loveliest, first making a show of retreating and then, like a boomerang, returning to hand. One cannot deny that democratic electorates occasionally lurch into unfortunate decisions, but Churchill consoles us that other systems are prone to worse. (He also thereby consoles himself two years after being turfed out of office by an electorate asking, “Yes, but what have you done for us lately?”) The theoretical case for democracy is not undermined by such wayward episodes because the system’s excellence is comparative, not absolute. Democracy embodies the virtue of moderation in its self-equilibrating disposition to retreat from perils that hurl other political systems off the rails.

I have long thought of myself as a Churchillian democrat. I do not believe in the innate wisdom of the masses or in a Rousseauian “general will” that unerringly directs the affairs of a politically engaged citizenry. Rather, democracy’s chief achievement is that it makes it possible to peaceably throw the old rascals out. Mistakes are not eliminated but more or less rectified. There is nothing heroic about regular alteration of offices among contending parties, but it is better than the various despotisms that would otherwise arise. And perhaps some heroism is to be seen, after all, in the pattern of democracies in times of crisis bringing to the fore noble exemplars, such as Washington in the 18th century, Lincoln in the 19th, Franklin Roosevelt in the 20th—yes, and Winston Churchill up from the wilderness just in time to save Britain.