by David Thill

Created on: September 12, 2007

Winston Churchill said that "Democracy is the worst form of government except for all those others that have been tried."

The purpose of government is to ensure that tasks vital to the needs of society are accomplished, when those tasks cannot or would not be performed by other forces in society. In order to establish a government, each individual in society agrees to lend a portion of his or her freedom to the government, thereby granting it sovereignty and legitimacy. Government is clearly an infringement of individual freedom, but it is one to which the individual has agreed.

This contract exists in every nation-state, and with every organization which performs government-like functions. Even in totalitarian regimes, the contract is implied by the fact that the governed do not rise up and overthrow their government. Revolution is a basic human right, one that quite simply cannot be taken from any individual, and is the final resort of every member of society when other avenues of change are denied.

The gamble a totalitarian regime is taking is that they can make revolution so difficult or unlikely that their people will choose not to resort to it. Examples of how effective this can be abound but just as clearly, no regime in history has ever managed to suppress their people indefinitely. Eventually, people find a way to communicate with other like-minded individuals, find a means to obtain weapons, find a way to remove a dictator, obtain help from outside their borders, or simply take to the streets in such overwhelming numbers that the regime can no longer endure.

Democracies play a different game. The goal in a democracy is to convince their people that they are getting reasonable value in return for their lost freedom. Elections give people the impression that they are impacting the decisions the government takes in their name. The actual impact of an election obviously varies widely from nation to nation and one level of government to another. In a nation with only a narrow range of electoral options, a change of government can lead to very little change in policy, but the election is still a success so long as the people feel as though they have at least a small bit of control over the politicians who exercise power.

Democracy is a technique for ensuring people do not exercise their right to overthrow the government. Politicians in a totalitarian regime have the security of knowing they will retain the unfettered power and perquisites of ruling right up until the moment the people knock down the palace gates and set up the guillotine. In a democracy, politicians accept restrictions on their power (term limits, periodic elections which may remove them, oversight by other organizations) in return for freedom from risk of revolution.

Until some theoretical perfect form of government arises, democracy will remain a bad compromise between personal freedom and accomplishing tasks society needs. It is simply the best compromise anyone has been able to discover thus far.

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