4 January

It was Abraham Lincoln who said democracy is government ‘of the people, by the people, for the people’. That’s pretty much the majority view of what democracy is and how it works even today. It’s complete rubbish. And I write about that a lot because the more we believe it, the more confusing the world will seem to us. How do I know it’s rubbish? Because it’s been tested. The political scientist Martin Gilens gathered a large data set of nearly two thousand policy issues between 1981 and 2002, cataloguing the opinions of different parts of society about those decisions. What did he find? Statistical analysis showed that in every case the preferred decision of every voter and voting group had ZERO impact on the outcome. Except for one group. The current social elites of the time, those with the highest social status. Their views won and became the decision made, in every case. This isn’t a corruption of democracy. Social elites, those with the highest social status, *always* determine everything that happens. And when our democracies seem broken, like today, it’s not ‘authoritarians’ oppressing ‘the people’. Its rival elite groups fighting, and co-opting various parts of the population to their different crusades. Societies then go into crisis when there are too many elite rivals. And that in turn generates populism, because all of those rivals evoke ‘the people’ as their reason for trying to take control, and say ‘the system’ is screwing those same people. But there is no system, it’s spin. There’s just elites fighting. I encourage everybody who believes democracy is some magical emergent process where the ‘will’ of millions automatically becomes decisions and actions, to go and volunteer to run a local sporting club. Get your hands dirty with the reality of how human groups actually work. A tiny handful of people in that club will lead and do all the work.