by Thomas R. Wells
When people take to the street to protest this is often supposed to be a sign of democracy in action. People who believe that their concerns about the climate change, Covid lockdowns, racism and so on are not being adequately addressed by the political system make a public display of how many of them care a lot about it so that we are all forced to hear about their complaint and our government is put under pressure to address it.
But what about this is democratic?
In a democracy we are supposed to accept the outcome of the democratic process, involving reasoned public debate and free electoral competition for positions of public power. The fact that people protest when they don’t accept the outcome of the democratic process is a rather clear sign that protests are a non-democratic activity at best, and at worst an attempt to override and undermine democracy itself. I have in mind particularly the recent climate change related protests in the UK which seem to be spreading and becoming increasingly aggressive, but also recent events like the farmers blocking roads in the Netherlands, the truck drivers blockading Canadian cities and borders, and so on.
At best public protest is non-democratic. It aims to get attention (primarily from the news media) and thus to get the protestors’ complaint higher up in the political agenda – the things the government is expected to have an answer to. Success depends on the quantity of attention the protestors can attract, and this is proportionate to the amount of drama they can cause rather than the quality of their complaint (i.e. its reasonableness). It is thus a kind of democracy hack, like the search engine optimisation companies engage in to get higher on Google’s search results and so get more attention from potential customers. Read more »