By Vladimir Kratos is Greek for "rule." Demos is Greek for "people." So is ethnos, or nation. So is laos, ("population"). We have all heard about democracy. There is no such thing, though, as "ethnocracy," or "laocracy."
Democracy, of course, is rule by the people. The term has three basic senses in contemporary usage: (1) a form of government in which the right to make political decisions is exercised directly by the whole body of citizens, acting under procedures of majority rule, usually known as direct democracy; (2) a form of government in which the citizens exercise the same right not in person but through representatives chosen by and responsible to them, known as representative democracy; and (3) a form of government, usually a representative democracy, in which the powers of the majority are exercised within a framework of constitutional restraints designed to guarantee all citizens the enjoyment of certain individual or collective rights, such as freedom of speech and religion, known as liberal, or constitutional, democracy.
This is what democracy is about. But perhaps the more interesting question is: what exactly is demos?
Democracy had its beginnings in certain of the city-states of ancient Greece in which the whole citizen body formed the legislature; such a system was possible because a city-state's population rarely exceeded 10,000 people, and women and slaves had no political rights.
Citizens were eligible for a variety of executive and judicial offices, some of which were filled by elections, while others were assigned by lot. There was no separation of powers, and all officials were fully responsible to the popular assembly, which was qualified to act in executive and judicial as well as legislative matters.
It is also well known that there were significant groups of people with no political rights. Who were they?
Any high-school student will probably tell you that those were slaves. Some would remember women, freedmen and non-Greeks. But almost no one would think of a large group of free-born Greeks who were not part of the demos and had nothing to do with democracy. Those were pariahs - for example, Corinthians who lived outside the city walls of Corinth. Most of them were outcasts, former Corinthians banished from their native cities.
Expulsion from city limits was considered a severe punishment in ancient Greece mostly because it meant the loss of political rights. That also was the case in Europe in the Middle Ages and in pre-Mongol Russia of the 9th-12th centuries.
Symphony or unison?
In ancient Greece, cities ruled by aristocracy often ridiculed monarchies, saying that those must have found only one man worthy of the task of governing. In much the same way, supporters of democracy assumed that democracy is never bestowed from above, but exists only in places where there are enough people worthy of sharing the responsibility of governing. To become a citizen, they said, one had to prove one's worth.
In that respect, the institution of private property acquired special meaning. Aristotle, the first to study different forms of governing, said that participation of the middle classes in decision making was essential, for, he added - somewhat naively - the middle classes, unlike the oligarchy, had to work and did not have much time to indulge in political intrigue.
At the same time, they, unlike the poor, had no designs on other people's property. Isocrates, an ancient Athenian orator and rhetorician, when enumerating in one of his speeches the vices of the rich, such as egotism and greed, said that "the rich are so disgusting that only the poor can be worse."
Closer to home, Russian philosopher Ivan Ilyin, the lone Russian apologist for the institution of private property, demonstrated that every democratic society is based on the middle class.
When only one percent of a country's population is involved in governing, what you get is an oligarchy. Democracy begins with some ten percent participating in ruling the country. It ends when more than 90 percent cast their votes.
Unfortunately, every society creates a class of outcasts, unfit for participation in democracy. Every normal society does its best to reduce the number of these people. Historically, few societies were willing to give them political rights.
Nor did Marx look on lumpenproletariat with too much sympathy. Lumpenproletariat, German for "rabble proletariat", according to Karl Marx in The Communist Manifesto, is the lowest stratum of the industrial working class, also including such undesirables as tramps and criminals. The members of the lumpenproletariat - this "social scum," said Marx - are not only disinclined to participate in revolutionary activities with their "rightful brethren," the proletariat, but also tend to act as the "bribed tools of reactionary intrigue."
Ortega y Gasset saw individual life as the fundamental reality: reason as a function of life is substituted for absolute reason, and for absolute truth he substituted the perspective of each individual ("I am I, and my circumstance").
In La rebeliгn de las masas (1929; The Revolt of the Masses), he characterized the 20th-century society as dominated by masses of mediocre and indistinguishable individuals, who he proposed should surrender social leadership to minorities of cultivated and intellectually independent men.
Historically, even after defeating the aristocracy, the demos preferred to have aristocrats in top government posts. "Simple Athenians," testifies an Athenian writer, "did not want to be elected to those posts that meant national salvation when occupied by aristocrats, and chaos when occupied by commoners."
Similarly, Novgorod was governed by an oligarchy of great trading boyar families who controlled the exploitation of the hinterland. They chose from among themselves a mayor, a military commander, and a council of aldermen, who controlled the affairs of the city and its territories.
The town itself was divided into five "ends," which seem to have corresponded to the "fifths" into which the hinterland was divided. There was, in addition, a veche ("council"), a kind of town meeting of broad but indeterminate composition, whose decisions, it would appear, were most often controlled by the oligarchy.
A major role in politics was played by the archbishop, who after 1156 controlled the lands and incomes previously owned by the Kievan princes and who appears throughout Novgorod's history as a powerful, often independent figure.
In short, citizens seem to have an inborn respect for natural hierarchy. The mob's prime sentiment is: "no one is better than I am." As Clive Lewis once pointed out, when someone says it, he is rarely believed. For if he believed it himself, he would not be saying it. A bull terrier would not bother telling it to a spaniel, a man of learning to an ignoramus. Only those with an inferiority complex clamor for equality. Russian thinker Sergei Levitsky once said that "a society aims at a symphony of citizens; and the masses, at unison."
The revision thing
Nor is American history radically different. American mythology paints the past in rosy pink. The reality is altogether a different hue.
America, it is often said, has a history-sized hole in its imagination. Henry James groaned about his country's "perpetual repudiation of the past" while another Henry (Ford, this time) called history "bunk". A few years ago, Hollywood marketed Alan Bennett's play, "The Madness of George III", as "The Madness of King George" in case audiences got the idea they had missed parts I and II. Nowadays, "you're history" is a handy insult. As a popular columnist, Christopher Hitchens, recently reminded American readers, Communists used to air-brush people out of history rather than consign them to it.
And yet it could just as well be said that America is fascinated by history, or at least a mythologised version of it. In the political and legal debate on impeachment, Americans constantly invoke the country's founders, citing 18th-century writings to support modern views. Whenever they fret about their country, somebody appears to tell them that things were better in a past era, real or (usually) imagined. The rancor over impeachment appears to represent a fall from some former Eden of civility. The cliche is that American politicians are obsessed with the vision thing. In truth, the revision thing is big in Washington too.
One of the most popular kinds of historical revisionism concerns the virtue of the nation's citizens. The earliest Americans, according to the popular imagination, were models of virtue, governing themselves wisely through the fabled town-hall meetings of New England, and through a variety of voluntary associations. In the 1830s Alexis de Tocqueville arrived from France to marvel at the vigor of America's civic society, while another Gallic flatterer, J. Hector St John de Crevecoeur, earlier demanded, "What then is the American, this new man?"
Short of more up-to-date French compliments, Americans seem captivated by these ones. Politicians wax lyrical about voluntary associations, and hold their own town-hall meetings with constituents. Recently, Internet conferences have come to be called "electronic town-hall meetings", as though the old intimacy of New England can be replaced by a new kind of deliberation, face-to-interface.
Actually, those New England town meetings were a far cry from the myth they inspired. As a rule, these meetings were open only to property-owning men, and, in some cases, only to church members. Far from being models of pure democracy, they usually followed the agenda and preferences of the chosen few, who tended to be the richest figures in the town. Far, again, from being models of devoted political participation, the town halls suffered from citizen apathy: in 18th-century Massachusetts, for example, attendance ranged from 20% to 60% of eligible voters.
Finally, the notion that these meetings served the modern ideal of political freedom is pure "bunk." New England town halls were meant to show-case harmony and consensus, not be a forum for free opinions. When contemporaries spoke of liberty, they meant the liberty of a town against outside influence, not the liberty of the individual.
If 18th-century New England has been mythologised, what of the early republic that followed it? The constitution of 1787 did bring into being a polity based on competing interests; deliberation was no longer expected to yield consensus. Hierarchy was also softened. The constitution's opening words, "We the people", summed up the new spirit of the times. And yet, though these changes were remarkable for their era, it is odd that the early republic is so admired two centuries later. At that time, slaves, women and the poor remained excluded from the ballot box.
America's sense of its more recent past seems just as faulty. It is often assumed, for example, that the America of the 1950s exuded civic solidarity; indeed, Bob Dole based his 1996 presidential campaign partly on a promise that he would speak for the pre-baby-boomer certitudes that Americans seemed to crave.
But the 1950s did not appear so perfect to many contemporaries. Robert Dahl, a celebrated sociologist, studied New Haven, Connecticut in the late 1950s, and found people unwilling to bestir themselves for altruistic community life. President Eisenhower was sufficiently worried about the national aimlessness to commission a study of "Goals for Americans". Americans then may have been more trusting of government than people are these days, but this was not necessarily an advantage. Perhaps they should have been less trusting of a government that denied rights to blacks, withheld welfare payments from eligible supplicants, and tested radioactive fall-out on unwitting citizens.
In sum, the past for which Americans pine was far from perfect, and probably not even preferable to the America of today. Of course it is true that prosperity has weakened some community bonds, for instance by encouraging grandparents and adult children to live independently: in 1950 only three in ten unmarried adults lived alone; by 1970 six in ten did. But it is not clear that this is a bad thing. The rise in solo living may increase loneliness, but it also increases privacy and freedom. This must on balance be a benefit, otherwise the extended family would still be thriving now.
All this may seem obvious, but it has not saved Americans from nostalgia yet. On the contrary, America clings to an array of historically derived ideals of citizen participation-18th-century town-hall meetings, 19th-century mass parties, early 20th-century direct democracy-even though it cannot possibly live up to all at once.
These are the "successive coats that laminate our political ideals", as an American scholar put it; and each coat is tattered, so that the earlier ones show through.
