Democracy Without The People

That there are peoples living in non-democratic countries is well known.

That there were and are democracies without people is also well known.

In 1967, French political scientist Maurice Duverger published the book La démocratie sans les peuples (Democracy without people).

In such democracies the elites actually rule, because they are “smarter” than everyone else.

To quote Lawrence Peter, a Canadian-American educator and writer,

In a democracy, the majority rules and the minority keeps telling the minority where to turn the wheel.

The elites do not believe that the number of citizens who voted the “unintelligent masses” into power is crucial, for such choices have the poor quality of coming from “unintelligent” voters. “Unintelligent” voters do not understand what is best for the good of the state. The quantity of “stupid” voters cannot overcome the quality of elites seeing farthest ahead.

This point of view resembles the position of ancient democracy: ancient Greek democracy expressed the interests of only the elite of society, i.e., free citizens, and left women and unfree citizens without political rights, or in other words, it deprived the absolute majority of society of political rights.

As far back as ancient Greece, the principles of false, imitation democracy were laid down. In the book The Modern Machiavelli, American philosopher and political scientist James Burnham wrote about democratic elitism:

No society is governed by the people, by the majority; all societies, including societies called democratic, are governed by a minority.

The theory of elitist democracy asserts that a small minority consisting of economic elites, policy planning networks, and technocrats hold the most power and that this power is independent of democratic elections. The new political aristocracy seeks to steer the “unreasonable” voters, who constitute the majority after parliamentary elections, in the “right,” “reasonable” direction. Aristocrats may be judges, technocrats, lawyers, retired generals. They regard their country as a land of laws, of which they themselves are the embodiment.

The British philosopher Francis Bacon wrote: 

Judges must remember that their office is jus dicere, not jus dare; to interpret the law, not to make or give law.

In Israel, judges decided that they alone represented law and reason.

A judge must judge according to the law, but he cannot be the law.  In the United States, the people elect the ruling elite. In Israel, the elite chooses the “right” people for themselves, tweaking them to the standard they need. 

Plato favors an aristocratic system, which should be headed by philosopher-rulers. The creation of a ruling elite standing above parliament is a change in the polity. German-Italian sociologist Robert Michels’ in book A Sociological Study of the Oligarchic Tendencies of Modern Democracy offers a theoretical account of the core belief underlying populist politics: the elite (inevitably) seizes democracy from the common people.

The real danger to democracy in Israel comes not from judicial reform, but from the court itself, which asserts the existence of the “right” to remove the incumbent prime minister and nullify the results of legitimate elections with its self-rule.

The protest movement has arisen in defense of the court’s power thanks to the interests of the country’s economic, academic and military elites.

Democracy is exactly what they seek to prevent.

Austrian psychoanalyst Alfred Adler wrote: 

It is always easier to fight for one’s principles than to live in accordance with them.

Democracy, in their view, is the rule of these elites who monopolize the knowledge of what true democracy is. Under the auspices of defending “proper” democracy, the elites express arrogance toward the majority of Israeli citizens who elected the current government, accompanied by veiled references to the ethnicity, religion and class of the masses of voters.

“The battle for democracy,” led by the military, academic and economic elites, is a battle for elitist democracy. No democratic country has a court as powerful as Israel’s. There is no branch of power in any Western state that has so much power over other branches, and over which there is no control. “Reasonableness” is just one of many tools invented by the Israeli Supreme Court to overturn actions and appointments it does not like, not on the basis of laws, but on the basis of the opinion of a “reasonable” judge. The Israeli Supreme Court has treated its “common sense” as law.  The “uprising of the people,” that is, the mass demonstrations in the streets of Israel’s cities in “defense of democracy” is an organized and financed struggle by the country’s established elites for their interpretation of democracy and their privileged position under it. The elites, with the help of the mainstream press, intimidate the people by saying that they will be bad if they do not support them: “security is deteriorating,” “the economic situation is deteriorating,” “education is deteriorating,” “Israel’s international status is deteriorating.”

The mainstream media, unhappy with the victory of the ruling right-wing coalition, describes the atmosphere in Israel as that of “the end of the world,” very similar to that which prevailed in Israel in 1977 after the defeat in the Knesset elections of the Labor Party, which had ruled the country for 29 years since its birth. The rhetoric of the media, elites and demonstrators is reminiscent of the protests of the opposition, which at that time found itself in the uncomfortable and unusual position of being out of power, claiming that the leader of the winning party, Menachem Begin, was a “terrorist,” a “fascist,” a “warmonger” (an accusation made two years before the ruling party made peace with Egypt) and an “anti-democrat.”

One can understand the behavior of the then-elite that lost power, just as one can understand the behavior of the current elite seeking to seize power after failing in the November 2022 Knesset elections.

The struggle of the elites against the government is quite normal in a democratic society. But the key to a correct understanding of what is happening should be sought in a correct reading of the slogans of the protesters. The slogans of the struggle for democracy should be presented in an adequate way: the elites are engaged in a political struggle for elitist democracy.

Image: Avi1111 Dr. Avishai Teicher, via Wikimedia Commons // CC BY-SA 4.0