Elections essential

Winters admits that democracy exists only within the space provided for it by the oligarchs. Fortunately that space is much greater in the modern world than it was for the Greeks and Romans, or in the Italian city-states. The fact remains, though, that democracy exists only insofar as the oligarchs allow it, and provided that the democracy protect the oligarchs’ wealth from threats, both external and internal. If democratic decision making itself threatens the oligarchs, it gives preference to the oligarchs, in the name of the rule of law and the sanctity of property rights. Politics is the continual struggle of the oligarchs to protect their wealth from threats from other oligarchs primarily, and only secondarily from the people.

If we quite cynically stipulate that all government decision makers have been put into their positions by the oligarchs, the problem for the people is one of how nevertheless to ensure that the decision makers are at least minimally responsive to the will of the people. The use of some form of selection of decision makers by lot does not suffice because it leaves those selected open to the manipulation by the oligarchs that already is endemic. Remember, the decision makers in the democracy are there only at the sufferance of the oligarchs to begin with, and the influence of the oligarchs is not going to disappear just because the decision makers have been chosen in some random way.

The only really effective way to force the decision makers, even though they have been chosen by the oligarchs, to be responsive to the people, is to force them to go through an election process, where they need to persuade the people that they are going to take the will of the people into account in their decision making. This is not a perfect requirement, and it is not sufficient, but it is necessary to the goal of the democracy, of making government responsive to the will of the people.