For those persuaded by populism that democracy = elections, 2024 is an orgy of democratic delights. So…

For those persuaded by populism that democracy = elections, 2024 is an orgy of democratic delights. So democracy must be flourishing, hey. Let’s see. /1 https://t.co/sNI98hJP3n https://t.co/Rnzu2pY4Z9

Oops. In steady and quite spectacular decline. Everywhere. It’s almost like all of those elections are making democracy worse. Because they are. Democracy is a couple of thousand years old. Mass elections are only a century old. /2 https://t.co/0Mo5TQdhuf

And despite all the guff about that being ‘people power’, it’s a bit of a democratic train wreck. Because our *ideas* about democracy don’t match the *realities* of how groups of people think, feel and behave. /3 https://t.co/8D8KAtSkGf

Most importantly, no group, of ANY size, thinks or acts. How would that even work? Everybody in the group just spontaneously decides, at the same exact moment, to think and do the same things? There is no such thing as ‘the people’. It’s a counting term, not an agency. /4

We’ve all been in groups, we know how it works in reality. It works socially. People in the group, of whatever size, ‘follow the leader’. A small number (up to about 5%) of the group lead, the other 95% follow. That’s true in a soccer club as much as in a nation. /5

The 95% imitate or emulate the 5%. That creates a team (the group), which then works together, for the team. The same applies in animal herds. They look like all of the animals spontaneously doing the same thing. But there’s always a leader in the herd. /6

Which is why when the herd wants to move anywhere, they use a rough single-file, behind those leaders. In a human society, there are lots of herds, or groups. Each with their own leaders. Or ‘influencers’ today. /7 https://t.co/Lz8wRfR8Lx

A society looks like the diagram on the right. Not like the picture on the left. Lumpy. Full of groups/hubs. Networked. /8 https://t.co/l3mGSdVsLL

So back to elections, and the spectacular decline of ‘democracy’ everywhere. Elections pretend societies look like the crowd picture, rather than the network picture. Thinking that giving us all an individual say leads to optimum democratic outcomes. /9

Except people just continue to act socially, in their teams, and co-opt the electoral process to the imitative rivalry of those teams. We KNOW this. That’s what political ‘parties’ are. And then we say societies are ‘polarised’, rather than ‘the people’ acting in unison. /10

Of course they’re polarised. It’s the same team sports humans *always* create. What did we expect creating a process where competing teams battle for power would produce? It would be funny if it wasn’t tragic. /11

Democracy isn’t in decline. Our idiot ideas about it are. They don’t match the (social) realities of our lives. The ‘shift to authoritarianism’ is just our usual social status hierarchy games taking over electoral processes. /12

Dave Graeber, Marshall Sahlins and Dennis Altman all see it. Have a read of these books, great thinkers recognising our democratic ideas are bunkum. Because they’re idealisms, totally divorced from how humans think, feel and act. /13 https://t.co/22pxSFK6wz

This isn’t to say democracy can’t be a thing. A governance focus on the collective good of all. But that will never, ever, be ‘the people’ running a country. As I say, that’s like asking passengers to fly the plane. /14

Gabriel Tarde called democracy (as we understand it) a holding pattern between two aristocracies. And that’s exactly what it is. A pause between two hierarchies, where the new hierarchies are being formed. That’s what this graph is showing. /15 https://t.co/6MDuOPx8ae

Not a battle between democracy and authoritarianism. Humans always act the same way, in social hierarchies. In history we’re just at different points along a continuum, towards one hierarchy or the next. /end