Truisms are rarely true, and easily lead to us accepting poor performance.

Is this first truism true?

A1: Democracy only works if the public is engaged.

This would be clearer as:

A2:  Only if the public is engaged does democracy work.

Logically, this seems true. But it’s misleading for many reasons.

1. It doesn’t say what kind of engagement is needed.
2. It doesn’t say what it means for democracy to work. Is this just elections being free and fair?
3. It doesn’t say who the public is. Everyone? Voters? Most voters? At least 51% of voters?

Ignoring all those ambiguities for a moment, let’s look more at the statement. The “only if” tells me that the (logically equivalent) contrapositive statement is probably clearer. So let’s rewrite it as that:

A3: If the public is not engaged, democracy doesn’t work.

Writing it this way, it seems true, at first. But then it occurs to me that at times, democracy still can work. So the statement is technically false. We could make it true by adding “reliably” or “always”:

A4: If the public is not engaged, democracy doesn’t reliably work.

So the first statement A1 is technically false, but often true. So it’s misleading. Statement A4 seems true, but has a lot of ambiguity.

Is this second truism true?

B1: Democracy works if the public is engaged.

Or clearer:

B2: If the public is engaged, then democracy works.

To me, this is clearly false. The ambiguity of “engagement” makes this false. Even if we assume it means “engaged with politics” or “engaged with governance”, there are many ways of engaging that are not helpful to democracy:

• Broadcasting propaganda, that is, broadcasting lies and using fear tactics
• Engaging in name-calling, sewing division. Name-calling is almost always inaccurate, so this is similar to propaganda, but usually on a smaller scale.
• Rioting, or attacking people or places
• Voting is good, but not sufficient to create democracy
• Sending money to candidates, another strategy proven to be insufficient
• Writing letters-to-the-editor, or letters to one’s representatives. There’s nothing wrong with this, but it’s also insufficient

So the public might be engaged in a way that hurts democracy, or doesn’t help democracy, or helps, but isn’t sufficient.

Like the A statements, “the public” and “works” are ambiguous.

What DOES it mean for Democracy to work?

Is a representative democracy just one that has free and fair elections?

If so, are America’s elections free and fair? Gerrymandering makes many unfair. So do the many forms of disenfranchisement, whether due to “cleaning” voter rolls without first making an effort to contact people, not having vote-by-mail and making few polling places so people must travel far or wait in long lines, or not making election day be a week or at least a holiday.

Plus America mostly uses its ancient plurality (winner-take-all) voting system which only works reliably when there are two candidates. And a huge unfairness is our 2-party system. Actually, ANY system with parties tends to be unfair, but the fewer the parties, the less fair it is.

Besides free and fair elections, what else could it mean for a democracy to work? Perhaps: “Passes laws that most voters approve of.”  Is that enough? How about, “Passes laws that most well-informed voters approve of”? If you recall, the 2014 Princeton study found that popular support was lacking for most legislation passed by Congress since 1980.

Truisms are Rarely True

Truisms are rarely true. Yet we traffic in them. We use them as shortcuts to feel good while we avoid thinking. We think that if we vote, or if we stay somewhat informed and vote, that we’re being upstanding citizens, that we’re doing enough to support democracy. Sure, it means we’re trying.  But maybe we’re not actually being effective. Maybe we’re buying into our own cultural mythology.  Maybe, even, we’re helping our myths weaken America.

American democracy seemed to have worked at times. And it seems to have failed at times. Why did we never analyzed why? Or if someone did, why didn’t it make it into public consciousness?

At PeopleCount, we’ve done a new analysis of American politics. What’s needed is for politicians to be accountable to voters. What’s accountability? A relationship that can actually be rigorously defined. This is how voters need to be engaged, holding up their end of the accountability relationship. PeopleCount will make that possible.

Life is much more complex than the simple truisms that rattle around our brains. Please support PeopleCount creating a political communication system designed to make democracy work.