By The People, For The People?

Here’s a thought: how about the governments in our democracies acting on behalf of the people? That would be novel.

We here in America could do worse than listen to Yanis Varoufakis on the notions of what a representative government is supposed to do. Notably represent. That is represent those who elected the representatives. I realize this may seem a bit odd to the great forces of the plutocracy who seem to have decided along the way to pervert democracy, upend it, and turn it into a compliant play space for the fulfillment of their own ends, but to those of us dedicated to democratic ideals, it’s a useful start.

Varoufakis is typically eloquent and makes appeal to more philosophy in one New York Times op-ed than we have seen in years of our own tired discourse. Americans, you see, are trapped in their past. They make appeals only to the so-called Founding Fathers – the small group of landed gentry that, whilst well read and well versed on the current ideas of the late 1700’s, were not able to lift themselves beyond the limitations that their bourgeois status conferred upon them. They despised both democracy and the expansive intervention of government in the economy that healthy democracy necessitates. Their legacy is, thus, a negation of much of modernity and a pretense, belied by the facts, that we ought to keep our government small. The facts in this case being the 20% or so of our economy that is a direct consequence of the government and the unknown, but surely large, knock-on effect of that 20%. So, despite our constant retreat to the ideas of the past and our homilies to the Founding Fathers, the largest single agent operating in our economy is the government.

Which, if we listen to ourselves when we intone the various phrases that represent the basis of our democracy, is us. “We the people”. The government is us. Or at least it is supposed to be. Small government is a lost cause, rightly so, simply because we the people have mobilized it to our advantage. It is a manifestation of our desires precisely because it is us.

Or ought to be.

Which gets us back to Varoufakis.

He and his confreres in the new Greek government are causing quite a fright in the staid halls of European bureaucracy by brazenly referencing the wishes of the people who elected them.

Here’s how he ends his op-ed:

“The major influence here is Immanuel Kant, the German philosopher who taught us that the rational and the free escape the empire of expediency by doing what is right.

How do we know that our modest policy agenda, … , is right in Kant’s terms? We know by looking into the eyes of the hungry in the streets of our cities or contemplating our stressed middle class, or considering the interests of hard-working people in every European village and city within our monetary union. After all, Europe will only regain its soul when it regains the people’s trust by putting their interests center-stage.”

The expediency that we need to escape is actually a drape over the machinations of the plutocracy. It masks the reality that policy is set by, and on behalf of, a small group who managed along the way to insinuate themselves into power and thus size control of the levers of state. In our case it was the drowning of our political system in a flood of money that enabled that seizure of power. That and our antiquated system of representation which bends overly much to protect the rights of minorities against the rights of the majority, and then diffuses what power arises from that process even more across duplicative and self-perpetuating layers of government such that the entire mess operates ineffectively and at cross purposes.

In a modern society with a democratic bent this deliberate befuddlement of government is a haven for plutocratic aspirations.

After all the landed gentry who invented the entire structure designed it to defeat the rise of democracy and to ensure the perpetuation government by good folk like themselves.

Which is not government by us – the people – but by them – the landed, the expert, and the serious few.

Of course when those famous words “we the people” were first uttered they were never meant to denote all the people. It was taken as understood by those in the know that “we the people” meant that special group – the landed, the expert, and the serious few – who could be trusted with the management of the new nation on behalf of that self-same group.

So when Varoufakis suggests that the Greek government can validate its policy agenda, modest though it may be, by simply looking into the eyes of the people, he uttering a radical idea. He is daring to suggest that a democratically elected government ought to govern on behalf of “we the people”. Really. All the people, and that legitimate democracy is government “by the people for the people” where the word people refers to the majority and not to the 1%, big business, and the self-interested bureaucrats who benefit by kowtowing to them.

Who will look into the eyes of the American electorate in 2016? Who will dare to restore democracy here?

Anyone?

Or will “we the people” have to wait a little longer before it is more than a veil over a plutocratic regime?