A Touchstone for Democracy

Extract

The term ‘democracy’ as used to-day requires a definition. Originally it was applied to a form of government controlled by the people’s voice in a popular Assembly; but with the growth of States and the impossibility of direct expression of the popular will it came to mean representative government; that is to say, government by a parliament consisting of representatives nominally chosen by the people. But for the same reason that ordinary citizens of a modern State were unable to intervene in the processes of legislation and the actions of the executive, it was found to be impossible (or at all events inadvisable) for them to select the men who were to represent them. This was done by the Party caucuses, and all that was left to the citizen was permission to vote for one or other of the caucus nominees. During the last decade or so the term has been so loosely used that its positive content is almost nil, and its main characteristic has come to be a purely negative abhorrence of traditionalism and of certain forms of authoritarian government (though by no means all) confused under the general term ‘Fascist.’ To make confusion worse confounded a social connotation of the adjective ‘democratic ‘has persisted through all these changes. Because in the democracies of the original City States free men were politically equal, the word ‘democratic ‘is now used as a synonym for ‘egalitarian’ in a social as well as a political sense, and this extension of meaning is further extended to cover societies in which there is no true egalitarian spirit, but only an aversion to certain kinds of privilege.