Tidiness and Democracy

     The World Turned Upside Down!  That was the tune the band of the defeated British army played as they marched out to surrender after the Battle of Yorktown that ended the American Revolution.  And that is how I felt as I read the column on the opinion page of the Washington Post this morning by Vladimir Putin, in which he describes his vision of democracy.  His is a tidy vision, complete with a disciplined electorate filled with lack of greed and with trust and mutual respect for each other and for government, and candidates required to be honest, uncorrupt and realistic.  Unfortunately, his tidy vision bears little resemblance to the actual workings of a real democracy and less regard for its actual strengths.
     Winston Churchill famously said that democracy is the worst form of government except for all others.  Its grand premise is that people provided with choices are capable of choosing wisely. By people is meant all the people -  rich, poor, educated, illiterate, ethical, unscrupulous - and by choices is meant all the choices from wonderful to horrible.  And by capable is meant that actual decisions may or may not be wise, but that people learn in the process and somehow eventually  they get it right. Sometimes an extended exposure to "clowns in bumper cars", as some have characterized this year's election scene, can provide the best education of all.   A famous American saying is that observing democracy in action is like visiting a sausage factory - it is not for those with delicate stomachs.  And Mr. Putin's stomach must be delicate indeed.
     A generally unspoken premise of democracy is that large groups of people learn how to choose wisely only through the experience of choosing, sometimes unwisely.  Any individual may possibly never learn from their errors, especially autocrats who face no personal consequences - witness Assad and Syria - but groups containing competing interests will improve their choices together.  That was the view implicit in James Madison's discussion of the role of factions in American democracy. 
     Mr. Putin wants to limit candidates to those shown to be honest, uncorruptible, and responsible.  He is suspicious of the growing number of Russian young people seeking public service, for they may be doing so out of desire to share in the spoils of corruption.  He views the fight against corruption as requiring "repressive measures."  And he wants to provide administrative procedures, by which he seems to mean arbitration rights, between individual citizens and government officials;  that is a process generally seen as restrictive and loaded in favor of the government or corporation in American democracy.  Alexis deToqueville rightly viewed trial by jury as the great signature element of democracy.
     Putin's proposals in the Post are not all without merit:  he favors transparency in government and a system of checks over the executive power.  He also favors evolution of what Americans would call a type of federalism, with varying levels of budgetary and executive autonomy between city, region and national government.  But to a student of democracy, his proposals are too tidy by far.  Perhaps he should visit a sausage factory. Then, real democracy may not seem so bad after all.