There is a huge number of arguments against democracy, however, I will address only one here. The fact is that at the moment there are no tools that would allow “society” to influence the state. That is, even if we believe that such influence is necessary and productive, we lack the necessary means to achieve it.
This is not because “the electoral law is bad,” nor because “the electoral threshold is too high,” and so on. These circumstances are themselves a consequence of more important and fundamental reasons, about which I want to speak.
These reasons are studied by the “public choice school” — a branch of economics founded by Buchanan. The problem can be illustrated with a simple example. Let there be four voters, each professing some set of values. These values are arranged in order of preference; for example, for Petrenko the most important value is “a,” the second most important is “b,” and the third is “c.” That is, seeing “a” in someone’s platform, Petrenko will vote for them without hesitation. If no one offers “a,” he will vote for “b,” and so on.
So let the voters have these value sets
1st voter: a, b, c
2nd voter: b, d, c
3rd voter: d, c, e
4th voter: b, e, c
If two-candidate elections are held by majority vote, it is obvious that the candidate who offers “c” wins — and crucially, “c” is not the top priority for any voter. Of course, this is just a model. But in reality, the consequences are only worse. In our model, ideal voters act, clearly understanding their values and being able to recognize them, and ideal politicians offer what voters expect from them — yet even in this case, the election result reflects only some random configuration. Let us add here that in reality parties never offer just one value (about which we will talk below), and we arrive at a simple conclusion: ideal voters and ideal politicians under any electoral system produce an output that never satisfies the voters.
This mechanism in our country is well illustrated by the problem of the Russian language. Sociological surveys show that “the problem is not the main one,” yet those who promise to protect it or fight it always make it into parliament. Yes, this problem is not the main one, but it worries many people at the second-, third-, or fourth-priority level. And so it wins.
The task of the party machine is to win elections. Parties act like enterprises in the market — they are always interested in selling their goods to the greatest number of buyers. Therefore, the party machine will always be busy searching for its coveted “c,” which yields votes in elections, and this “c,” most often, is indeed not a priority for voters. By the way, in most cases this begins even before the party is created. I call this phenomenon “grandmotherization,” from the sacral phrase “grandmothers won’t understand.” I have observed it many times in the most diverse parties.
For this same reason, there are no “purely ideological” parties, and if such a party manages to achieve success due to certain circumstances, it is never long-lasting. Perhaps the best example here is the Democrats and Republicans in the USA. Both parties, in ideological terms, represent a jumble of, hypothetically speaking, “right” and “left” ideas. Republicans, let us say, are traditionally more aggressive on the world stage and support the military-industrial complex, while they usually advocate for greater economic freedoms. Democrats are supposedly more peace-loving, but favor government regulation, political correctness, and other privileges. Ideologically pure parties would look like “etatist” and “libertarian” — that is, peacefulness, economic and political freedom should reside within one party, while aggressiveness, government regulation, and prohibition of everything should belong to another. But in such a combination the goods simply do not sell.
Here it is necessary to note another point. When discussing that you need to create a party, you are thinking from the perspective of a voter who has his own “a, b, c.” It seems to you that you simply need to find a few more such people, and the job is done. It seems to you that your “a, b, c” could quite serve as a party platform. But this is not the case at all. Once more: platforms (real ones, of course, not the written ones) are the result of searching for the best combination that allows one to obtain votes. Out of 150 points in your platform, the voter extracts those that are important to him, not to you — as a result, your real platform (the one for which they voted) always differs from the written one. If, let us say, from your platform “a, b, c for everyone!” the voter predominantly voted for “c,” then the party machine will do everything to eliminate “a” and “b” by the next elections, minimize them, reduce them to ritual, or simply cross them out. These conclusions hold true for any electoral system. Even if you need to gather “as little as” 1% of the vote for your party to enter parliament, and you think that the relatively small number of voters you need to persuade will allow you to preserve the purity of your “a, b, c,” after some time you will discover that the letters have somehow imperceptibly changed themselves into those that “the people” prefer. And yes, when I talk about “searching for the best combination that allows one to obtain votes,” I mean not brainstorming by staff members, but the market process of buying and selling. This search is driven not by the headquarters, but by the voter; the headquarters merely tries to understand it and use it for victory.
That is, we are dealing with a typical marketing task, where the main place is occupied by “studying demand,” as well as intuition and shamanism. In any case, elections and parties have very little relation to politics as the public imagines it. This means that even if the existence of a “correct” platform is possible in theory, you still will not be able to sell it in elections, and if such a miracle does happen, after some time you will see intrigue being woven against you and honest, sincere fighters for the people’s cause giving way to dubious murky figures. By the way, we have all seen this in the evolution of Ukrainian parties, because at the beginning of the 1990s we had exactly “ideological” parties. They survived exactly until the moment when a demand appeared for parties as a tool for gaining power. Since then, “ideological parties” have disappeared, giving way to “political projects.”
And once more I want to emphasize that I am talking about an ideal situation. Our Ukrainian reality differs by many aggravating circumstances. In order to “cleanse” it to the level at which the model described in this chapter exists, one would need to make titanic efforts. And all this just to see that the system still does not work.
We talked about why a “coherent and consistent platform” cannot win. Now a few words about why parties and elections are not a “feedback mechanism” between society and the state. There are many circumstances here; I will focus on the simplest one. In the market, the same principle operates — the buyer chooses from available alternatives the product of the highest value under the given circumstances. The difference is that the consequences of his choice concern only himself. If they satisfy him, he sticks with the choice; if not, he changes it. As a result, “society as a whole” (that is, the aggregate of “each” buyer) has feedback with “producers as a whole,” because the behavior and existence of producers depend on the choices and subsequent evaluations of each individual consumer. Such an arrangement, applied to parties, would mean that party policy would extend only to those who voted for it. Only in this case (though with many other assumptions made) could one speak of elections providing feedback between society and the state.
Instead, we have a random assortment of policies, because the results of political elections, unlike choices in the market, are “averaged out” by the existence of a pseudo-subject in the form of the state, which undertakes to perform a whole set of functions at once — moreover, monopolized functions — on the basis of some generalized opinion expressed in elections. This is as if you bought one thing but they gave you another, and moreover, you would experience the consequences of decisions made by a mass of unfamiliar people. For example, you don’t like shanson, but they would play shanson for you, because someone bought it (people voted for it!) and so on. As a result, even those whose party comes to power today are dissatisfied — and this is characteristic not only of Ukraine.
By the way, if one can speak of ultimate goals, then the goal of “Plan B” is precisely the situation when this circus finally goes away and everyone pays for those services that he wants to receive.
We examined objective patterns that explain why elections and the party system are not “bridges between society and the state.” Let us consider a few more obvious and well-known reasons that should make one set parties aside.
In order to implement their intentions, bold reformers must create and register a party. They must somehow deceive voters and obtain a majority of seats in the Verkhovna Rada. Moreover, the party and, especially the parliamentary faction, must not succumb to the temptation to conduct business for their own benefit. Then the reformers must obtain control not only over the president and the Cabinet of Ministers, but also over civil servants — and not only in Kyiv, but also in the regions where they intend to conduct reforms. They must also overcome or co-opt the bearers of other salvation programs. After all this, we must pray to God that their plan turns out to be “working” and useful. And finally, one must somehow ensure that subsequent governments do not reverse everything. Is this not too many efforts and fortunate coincidences that must align for this plan to succeed?