Though I am not a Democrat - a believer that policy is legitimate only insofar as the People rule themselves - I am a democrat - a believer that there ought to be elections for our rulers. But if the purpose of elections is not to provide legitimacy for policy, what are they there for?
Hence, in practice, the only option is for decisions to be made by a fairly small subset of the population - an oligarchy.
Now, two key questions arise: what should be the scope of action of the ruling oligarchy; and how should its membership be selected? It would be nice to be able to take them in turn, but the answers to the questions have cross-implications, so we shall not be able to address them completely independently. Because of this, I shall begin by declaring my answers, and then attempt to justify them.
In respect of the scope, my answer is that there should be two kinds of matters: those in which the principles are rarely, if ever, amended, although the application can be regularly expressed, honed, and nuanced; and those in which even the principles can be amended regularly. Into the former category fall the principles circumscribing a state directed towards ordered liberty. Into the latter category fall matters of validly varying taste and opinion. How to determine whether a matter falls more into the former or the latter category will be a key question to which we shall return later.
In respect of membership, my answer is that the oligarchy or oligarchies should be self-sustaining, with their own internally-set mission (e.g. directed towards a religious or philosophical goal) and their own mechanisms for promoting talent within. Elections perform two key functions. First, they allow us to switch rule (or dominant influence) between oligarchies or between parts of an oligarchy without those factions testing their relative strengths through violence. Elections are, in this sense, the friend of order. Next, elections grant the ruling oligarchy new information regarding how taste and opinion in the wider population have evolved, so that, insofar as policy is directed at reflecting or satisfying wider taste and opinion, policymaking is directly improved.
Why do we wish to divide the scope of action of the rulers in this way? We can identify two kinds of reasons. The first is that, although we wish our rulers to have sufficient scope to make important and useful decisions, we need to protect ourselves from them. Perhaps if we were ruled by the gods or by an all-wise and all-benevolent computer, we could trust that our rulers would never do ill. But being imperfect and fallen beings, without constraints, our rulers could do us great injury. So we limit their scope of action to those matters over which, though of course their decisions are of great import, their errors can harm us only so much.
We give them power over small, passing things, over which they have limited control in any event, like the medium of exchange, the rules of commerce and trade, the services provided by the state, and so on. We also grant them scope to make judgement calls over arbitrary matters such as which side of the road we should drive upon or what precise rituals establish a contract or what colours there should be in the national flag, according to evolving taste and custom. The really important things - like protection of life and limb, the right to hold and use property, entitlement to peaceful association, freedom of speech, freedom of marriage between races, freedom of religion, the burden of proof in a trial, whether liberties are created by the state or taken away, freedom from detention without charge, and other matters of ordered liberty - such fundamental questions ought to be beyond the reach of momentary challenge, passing fad or charismatic demagogue.
The other reason for limiting the scope of action of our rulers - a factor which leads to slightly different restrictions (some more limiting, some less) - is the presence of elections. For the involvement of the Mob in decision-making, whilst useful for the reasons I have sketched above, is also dangerous. The opinions of the mob are unstable, ill-informed, and frequently unpleasant. For it to be feasible, at all, to include the opinions of the Mob in decision-making, we need very strong mechanisms that prevent the preferences of the Mob being too closely reflected. This is a lesson that has been well-known since the notorious trial of the Six Admirals in ancient Athens, and has become ever more pertinent as the modern machinery of the state has allowed of ever more rapid dispersal of half-informed opinion and more comprehensive tyrannical consequence. Without restrictions on the Mob, we would pass special laws to convict alleged paedophiles without trial one day, castrate them the next, and the day after that arraign those that accused them, on charges of wrongful allegation. The use of Elections makes tough blockages on the scope of discretion of the rulers absolutely essential.
So, to protect us from malign rulers, incompetent rulers, and from the errors of the Mob, we set aside those matters about which we care most to be beyond normal amendment. Normal policy is restricted so as to apply to smaller things.
But this division is not always sustainable, for a number of reasons. First, there are unforeseen contingencies - things we just didn't think of. Are these to fall within the scope of the matters of ordered liberty, or are they matters of taste and opinion? We could have a general principle, stating either that they will always be one or the other, but that might be unsatisfactory. Similarly, we who set the shackles upon the rulers are no less imperfect than the rulers themselves. We can get it wrong. Later, someone may wish to amend the constraint. How is that to be done? Finally, perhaps the world might move on, and what was an appropriate shackle in one era might be inappropriate in another, and what was not before constrained might need to become constrained.
In all these cases, it would be better to be able to exercise judgement and discretion - perhaps according to some established principle if such is available - than to be enslaved by a blind rule. I prefer to resolve these matters through human agency, specifically a constitutional monarch. But perhaps there are alternatives that are almost as good.
Once we have established these blockages on the rulers, to serve ordered liberty, and put in place plausible mechanisms for varying the blockages later, democracy serves an important role in choosing rulers and guiding their decisions. Any healthy oligarchy will have matters over which its members disagree - differences of values, different weightings to be applied to different objectives, different views on technical questions, even. Much of that should be debated to resolution internally. But not everything. Sometimes the oligarchy will split on a certain question, and need some means by which a side can be chosen to enact its policy. One mechanism for that would be for a single overseer - e.g. a monarch - to choose between factions. We had that system for a while in Britain, and it worked quite well. But a perfectly plausible alternative is to offer such alternatives to the People to choose between. In either case, there will be a healthy process for the oligarchic factions of needing to boil down and simplify their differences of view into a few simply stated propositions that the monarch or the People (or both) can understand.
As well as needing to resolve internal debates, an oligarchy might fail altogether, or it might become obsolete - surpassed by some alternative potential ruling faction. In that case we need some mechanism for replacing the one with the other. One such mechanism would be for each faction to take up arms and recruit followers, with the larger and/or more skilful faction triumphing. We tried that system for a while in Britain, but the experience was not altogether a happy one. Elections, for all their weaknesses, have the enormous merit of providing a means of exchanging rulers without violence. In that sense, elections are the friend of order.
Lastly, elections give us some (albeit very limited) insights into the taste and opinion of the Mob. Given that normal policy is directed at matters of taste and opinion, absorbing some measure of the taste and opinion of the Mob into the more cultured and informed taste and opinions of the oligarchies themselves might provide some marginal improvement in decision-making. There is also the outside possibility - albeit remote - that the Mob might be aware of its regret of too great a loss of ordered liberty in any variation of the shackles of the rulers, and so might resist attempts to loosen those shackles, come election-time. In that way elections could also, theoretically, provide some measure of protection of liberty - though my own view is that that is unlikely to be a material consideration.
Once we understand what the real point is of democracy, we may understand something else of importance. Elections are useful, but only if they relate to matters that actually satisfy the Mob's desire for inclusion. It can be very tempting to replay old, dull arguments about the merits of benign dictatorship. The classic example of this we see today is the argument that experts, of some sort, should be in charge of the economy, instead of politicians. We are supposed to have independent bodies in charge of interest rates, and in charge of the balance of taxes and spending, in charge of trade rules, in charge of financial regulation, in charge of the regulation of the media, and many other matters, through quangoes. We are told that these experts will be much better at managing these things than elected politicians. But of course! - if you can find the best expert, if that expert is well-intentioned, and if she stays the most expert and well-intentioned after she gets the job. 'Twas ever thus, over all policy.
But think of this: if you exclude the electors from influence over unimportant matters such as the management of the economy, trade, and regulation, what do you imagine will happen? I'll tell you: the Mob will insist upon increased influence over something else. Specifically, its influence will increase over those matters of ordered liberty from which you had hoped to exclude it. It is no coincidence, I think, that the era of increasing technocracy concerning economic matters has been an era of reducing liberty and increasing authoritarianism.
Democracy has important value, if it is tamed and well-directed. It is the friend of order, a mechanism of selection, and an expression of taste. But it cannot be let loose over matters of ordered liberty, and therefore it cannot be denied its outlet over matters of economic management, trade, and regulation. Forget this at all our peril.
