Plato famously insisted that the ideal society should be run by philosophers. Just as the master of a ship must be an expert in the craft of navigation, so too the master of the good society must be an expert in the craft of good governance. And just as you shouldn’t allow any old Tom, Dick or Harry to become the master of a ship, so you shouldn’t give them mastery over a society either. That is Plato’s case against democracy. Governance requires experts. Philosophers.
Step forward AC Grayling – philosopher. In his new book, Democracy and Its Crisis, he tells us that the Brexit result was the consequence of giving too much power to the wrong sort of people. The reason we have representative democracy rather than direct democracy, he says, is so that the various institutions of government are able to ameliorate the fickleness and ignorance of the ordinary voter. “Sometimes he drinks heavily while listening to the flute,” sneered Plato at this ordinary voter. Asking the opinions of such people is bound to cause trouble. They are not bright enough to know when they are being manipulated; not expert enough to know what’s best for them. Thus, disappointed remainers like AC Grayling have revived the ancient idea that “clever” people should have more of a say than others in how this country is run.
John Stuart Mill was another philosopher who believed something similar. In 1859 he published his Thoughts on Parliamentary Reform, in which he proposed a voting system heavily weighted towards the better educated. “If every ordinary unskilled labourer had one vote … a member of any profession requiring a long, accurate and systematic mental cultivation – a lawyer, a physician or surgeon, a clergyman of any denomination, a literary man, an artist, a public functionary … ought to have six,” he wrote. When stated this baldly, it is surely obvious that the desire to maintain so-called political expertise is actually a thinly disguised attempt to entrench the interests of an educated middle class.
When Michael Gove famously denigrated experts, he was cleverly – and quite rightly – having a go at a powerful strain of elitist thought in which ordinary people are not considered to be intelligent or educated enough to have an equal say in government. It wasn’t an attack upon the need for, say, an expert in heart surgery to be the right person to perform heart operations. Of course we want those kind of experts. Rather, it was an attack upon the very idea that what makes for a good society is a matter on which the educated middle classes know best. It was an attack upon the whole tradition of the philosopher king.
AC Grayling believes there is a crisis in democracy because the majority of those who voted on 23 June 2016 disagreed with him about the UK being a part of the European Union. It really does take some pretty monumental ego to think that not being agreed with constitutes a crisis for the whole of democracy. But aside from Grayling’s little intellectual tantrum at the temerity of being contradicted by thickos, what is dangerous about this book is that it proposes that democracy must look for subtle ways to protect itself against the wishes of ordinary voters. For, like Plato, Grayling taps into a deeper, older version of project fear: that of the irrationality of the mob.
Don’t get me wrong. I am not arguing that representative democracy be replaced with continual referendums. That doesn’t make for stable government. But direct democracy does what it says on the tin: directly expresses the will of the electorate. And when an election does this, the elite cannot be allowed to set it aside because it doesn’t accord with their higher understanding of what is best for the rest of us.
AC Grayling’s take on the crisis of democracy is not a great book and ordinarily would not deserve much comment. But it is unfortunately symptomatic of the revival of a particular species of highbrow sneering at the politics of ordinary people, at those who do not have a university degree, for instance. And if this is what Grayling’s precious liberalism has become, then he can expect the ordinary people he disparages not to vote for it. No one likes a patronising smartarse. And no one wants a philosopher king.
