charlie's Journal: Decaying Democracies

Patrick Nielsen Hayden had some interesting comments in his weblog, Electrolite about my earlier article explaining why I'm unlikely to want to visit the US until the business of applying military tribunals to non-citizens is settled. In it, he pointed out how there's a slight case of motes, beams and eyes at work here.

To be fair, he's quite right. I'm going to start by denying personal responsibility: I didn't vote the New Labour control freaks into office, and I don't like what they're doing. It seems to be basically Thatcherism with better PR, and I disliked it enough the first time round. Having said that, however, basically I agree with him. And I'm beginning to think there's a more insidious, and threatening, tendency at work. One we should all be screaming about.

In the past couple of decades, democracy has made great strides -- in fact, more than half the countries represented at the UN have democratic forms of government. We're told that this is a good thing, but every time I open a newspaper or look at a website I see evidence of democratically elected representatives in one country or another passing insanely repressive laws. The US gets a lot of stick over this partly because the American media are widely syndicated worldwide, but it happens elsewhere. Australia's net-nannying law (that will ban all internet content that isn't suitable for children). The English police force's registers of delinquent children. Moves to maintain public registers of sex offenders that don't distinguish between serial rapists and young couples who were caught having sex at 15. (According to recent figures, about 30% of British children -- of both sexes -- start having sex before the age of consent, which is 16.)

It looks to me as if democracy isn't what's under attack -- it's civil rights, and a surfeit of democracy, applied in inappropriate ways, is the means of attack. Once a law is passed it is hard to get it struck down or reviewed. Improved communications have made it easier to get a lobbying group rolling, or start a grass roots campaign, and panic legislators (who need to be seen to be doing something, anything) into acting thoughtlessly.

Legislators today can't do much about the economy; in this thoroughly globalised era they can't impose tarriff barriers, mess with interest rates, or impose policy through taxation or fiscal means. So in an attempt to justify their posts, they're hunting for new causes. And the control freak tendency -- people who basically believe that other people can't be trusted to do the right thing -- is everywhere, and appealing for action.

What I fear is a future in which 100% of the seats at the UN are occupied by representatives of elected democracies -- and everywhere citizens are oppressed by insane violations of their civil rights, passed into law by elected legislatures held to ransom by special interest lobbies.

Someone, please tell me I'm barking at shadows?