“Politicians shouldn’t decide.”
“The people should.”
Really?
If those words are meant literally, then what exactly do these people imagine representative democracy is for?
In theory, the people already decide.
They elect governments.
They replace governments.
They reward success and punish failure.
At least, that is the constitutional theory.
Reality is considerably more complicated.
Because elections come and go, but the political machine never sleeps.
Governments change.
The bureaucracy remains.
The institutions remain.
The advisory bodies remain.
The lobbyists remain.
The funding networks remain.
The permanent apparatus of politics has an extraordinary ability to absorb newcomers, reshape them and continue much as before.
Even parties that arrive promising to dismantle the system often discover that the system has already begun dismantling them.
We have watched this happen repeatedly.
A party campaigns as the outsider.
It promises to return power to ordinary citizens.
It speaks the language of reform.
Then it wins.
Months later it behaves remarkably like the people it replaced.
The slogans disappear.
The compromises multiply.
The excuses begin.
The public wonders what happened.
Nothing mysterious happened.
The machine simply did what it has always done.
It absorbed another opponent.
History offers no shortage of examples.
Boris Johnson arrived with promises to upend established politics. Governing proved considerably more complicated than campaigning.
Syriza entered office in Greece promising to confront the European establishment. Once in power, reality imposed constraints that campaign speeches had largely ignored.
Different countries.
Different ideologies.
Remarkably similar outcomes.
Which brings us back to the activists who increasingly insist that politicians should be bypassed altogether.
If democracy already rests upon the consent of the governed, why the desire to circumvent the very mechanisms designed to express that consent?
That question deserves an answer.
Especially when opinion polls increasingly suggest that scepticism toward prevailing climate policies is growing in many countries.
If public opinion is moving in the opposite direction from the one activists would prefer, then demanding “more direct democracy” suddenly becomes a curious strategy.
Unless, of course, what is really being proposed is not direct democracy at all.
Perhaps the idea is something else entirely.
Citizens’ assemblies.
Expert panels.
Popular committees.
Advisory councils.
Bodies presented as speaking for “the people” while being carefully structured to produce a preferred conclusion.
History has encountered this temptation before.
Again and again.
The language is always similar.
The institutions are always described as more authentic, more enlightened or more representative than existing democratic structures.
The result is often the same.
A small group acquires the authority to define what the people supposedly want.
From there it is only a short step to claiming that anyone who disagrees is standing against the people themselves.
That has never ended particularly well.
One of the clearest historical examples is the French Revolution.
It began with lofty language about liberty, equality and popular sovereignty.
Before long, committees emerged claiming to embody the will of the people.
Those who questioned that claim increasingly found themselves accused of opposing the Revolution itself.
The result was not greater freedom.
It was the Reign of Terror.
History does not repeat itself with mechanical precision.
But it often rhymes.
Whenever someone proposes bypassing representative institutions in favour of bodies that supposedly express a purer version of popular will, alarm bells should begin ringing.
Because democracy is not merely about invoking “the people.”
It is about accepting the inconvenient possibility that the people may choose something you profoundly dislike.
The real test of democratic conviction is not whether you support popular decision-making when it favours your cause.
It is whether you still support it when the voters choose the other side.
That is where genuine democrats and would-be revolutionaries begin to part company.