I have a new column this week on OnlySky. It’s about the deferred dream of democracy and the stark reality that human beings have always been ruled by the few.
The early 21st century has seen a global turn toward authoritarianism. Nations that have always had oligarchical tendencies, like Russia, are growing more so, and formerly democratic countries like the United States are backsliding.
However, this isn’t a new threat. Almost every society, in almost every era of history, has been an oligarchy where a tiny elite class held enormous wealth and power. If anything, it’s democracy – true democracy, where everyone has an equal say, as opposed to democracy-in-name-only where the wealthy few still rule – that’s always been the exception. For all the reformers who’ve worked and fought for it, it remains a utopian ideal rather than a reality.
This raises the question: Is oligarchy natural for humans, in the sense that it’s an inherent part of our mindset and cultural makeup that can’t be overcome? Or is real democracy an ideal we might still one day hope to achieve?
Read the excerpt below, then click through to see the full piece. This column is free to read, but paid members of OnlySky get some extra perks, like a subscriber-only newsletter:
The hunter-gatherer tribes of our past led an egalitarian lifestyle. But almost every society since then has been marked by extreme inequality. Whether in the form of pharaohs, kings, feudal aristocrats, colonizing imperialists, or corporations run by mega-wealthy investors, oligarchy—rule by the few, usually the wealthy—has been a consistent pattern across history.
To be sure, the oligarchs have never gone unopposed. In every era, people have dreamed of some version of democracy, of shared prosperity. There have always been radicals who proclaimed that we shouldn’t bow to crowns or thrones, that everyone deserves to have a say in their own future.
It must be noted that we now do lots of things that we never did over most of the history of our species, not to mention our ancestors’ history. Like wear lots of clothes — we typically wear much more clothing than our ancestors did, even in warm weather. Written language was invented only a few times, but it has been adapted to numerous languages, and it is second nature to many of us. Large-scale societies are another such invention.
So I’m skeptical about claims of “human nature” about what is the most sustainable kind of society, and similar sorts of questions.
There’s a kind of government that was essentially universal over all the recorded history of humanity until recent centuries: monarchy, a system with a single top leader whose succession is associated with him (only rarely her), usually succession by a family member. Yet in recent centuries, monarchy has gone into precipitous decline, with about half of the surviving monarchs being monarques fainéants, like that of Britain.
Why Has Monarchy Been So Successful? by Brian Singleton-Green :: SSRN
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3747057
A big reason is the difficulty of coordinating action over long distances before modern communications technology. That made collective forms of government over such distances – republics and especially democracies – impractical for anything larger than a city-state.
But as this technology was developed, it enabled efficient long-distance governance, and monarchy went into a steep decline. This was not always a victory for democracy, because also emerging was one-party dictatorship: Communism and Fascism. It must be noted that monarchy has emerged in a few places, like North Korea with its reinvention of god-kings.
Why Monarchy? The Rise and Demise of a Regime Type – John Gerring, Tore Wig, Wouter Veenendaal, Daniel Weitzel, Jan Teorell, Kyosuke Kikuta, 2021
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0010414020938090
Quantifying the decline of monarchy in the last few centuries.
I’ve found some research on how to strengthen democracy: strengthen legislatures. This research is about post-Communist countries and it was done back in 2006:
Stronger Legislatures, Stronger Democracies | Journal of Democracy
https://journalofdemocracy.org/articles/stronger-legislatures-stronger-democracies
Here in the US, that means strengthening and improving Congress, like electing the House by state-by-state proportional representation, and perhaps having Congress directly run some executive departments.
Parliamentary Powers Index Scores by Country, in Alphabetical Order
Please cite M. Steven Fish and Matthew Kroenig, The Handbook of National
Legislatures: A Global Survey (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009)
https://polisci.berkeley.edu/sites/default/files/people/u3833/PPIScores.pdf
I’ve compared that document’s numbers with quality-of-democracy scores like The Economist’s Democracy Index, Freedom House’s Freedom in the World, the Fund for Peace’s Fragile States Index, and the Democracy Matrix’s numbers. I found that there is a strong positive correlation.
I’ve also looked at quality of democracy by government type, and parliamentary systems have the highest scores, with US-style strong-president systems and France-style hybrid systems scoring well behind. The US isn’t even the best at a strong-president system (29: 2023 EDI), being beaten by Uruguay (15), Costa Rica (17), and Chile (25), It is also beaten by some countries with hybrid systems: Taiwan (10), South Korea (22), and France (24).
Proportional representation is another feature of high scorers, with only some of them using other systems: first-past-the-post, like the US: Canada (13) and UK (18), IRV for lower house, STV for upper house: Australia (14), and Ireland: STV (7). IRV = instant runoff voting, STV = single transferable vote, a proportional extension of IRV.