Democracy: The Rise.... and Fall?
(Thanks to the surfeit of images in this post, it is too long for email. Please open it on the website)
Why do we live in democracies? For millennia the only political systems that approximated modern democracies were tiny city states like Athens and Republican Rome. Even as Rome expanded, democracy remained confined to the city. In order to vote citizens had to appear in the city, travelling from their estates in the countryside if necessary. Yet today most of the countries in the world are democracies and they’re all pretty big.
Poland provides an interesting example of an early democracy of sorts. The szlachta were a hereditary group who claimed descent from the ancient Sarmatians and formed a group much like the English gentry. Because membership of the szlachta worked by descent they were not all rich oligarchs - many were from families that had fallen into poverty. They made up about 7% of the population, about the same proportion as were able to vote in Britain after the Great Reform Act of 1832 - but the szlachta exercised their privileges long before this electing their first king in 1573. The szlachta could elect a king upon the death of the old one, they were also allowed to appear in the Sejm, a body with immense power which could make or break a king’s foreign and domestic policy.
Despite this, Poland did not develop along the path of a modern democracy. Its ideology remained distinctly medieval in its conception of rights and liberties and such. We should not be too harsh on the Poles, they were conquered in the late eighteenth-century. Nevertheless, these conquests were partly possible because Poland lacked a nationalist conception of itself. The szlachta looked mostly to their own interests, willingly collaborating with foreign powers and the liberum veto allowed each member of the Sejm to veto any proposal. These were not incidental features of Polish ‘democracy’ they were fundamentally bound up with the ideological underpinnings of the system which rested on the privileges and rights of the individuals who made up the szlachta.
Modern democracies do not work like this. Although their members are usually considered to have rights, and these rights can act as a veto against sovereign authority, we can consider this element to be the liberal half of liberal democracy. The democratic half rests on a 50% +1 standard for making decisions. Ideologically, this prevents any understanding of democracy as resting on the rights of individuals (they may be used to temper it, but they are not part of it). Instead, modern democracies function by taking the despotic absolute power of the king and leaving it for the people to pick up in whatever way they can. Sovereignty exists as something apart from the individuals who make up the electorate, they do not possess it as the szlachta did, but they can direct it if they can form a majority.
Modern democracy is therefore a system that deindividualises its voters. There’s little room for the stalwart minority standing against the masses - where this happens, for example in the American system, it is an explicitly non-democratic element of the system. But why did this develop in the West and not in Poland? No doubt there are many reasons, but I think a big one can be found in the aesthetics of the electorates.
As we have seen, the szlachta claimed descent from the Sarmatians, and we can see how their clothing reflected this:
The szlachta leaned pretty heavily into this vibe. They build massive castles to show off their wealth, they hired as many servants as they could afford some even built cities which survive to this day to show off their wealth. Contrast this with the British electorate of the nineteenth century, when modern democracy truly began to take root.
Notice that even among the elite of British democracy, everyone is wearing an almost identical uniform. The Great Renunciation is the label often used to describe this development - men stopped showing off by wearing colourful exciting outfits and started to wear standardised suits. Now showing off was not a matter of spending obscene amounts of money on ever fancier fabrics and ever showier jewels, but of understanding the etiquette of clothing to a greater degree than other people. A positive feedback loop was replaced with a negative one: increased prestige was achieved by getting closer to an ideal rather than by getting ever further from the sorts of clothes that normal people wore. Rich and poor began to wear recognisably similar outfits, even if the rich were better able to afford to pay attention to the details of style.
Consider what this does to the Great Man. In the past, mighty kings wore ridiculous outfits which demonstrated just how rich and powerful they were. In modern democracies, no one would vote for someone who campaigned dressed as Louis XIV instead we seek politicians who dress smartly in suits. Even Hitler could not get away with dressing like a king, he had to dress down in order to give his dictatorship a democratic feel. When Donald Trump attended a white tie dinner as part of his state visit to the UK, his failure to adhere to the dress code was seen as an embarrassment. If he had been King of America in 1610, he would have shown up dressed in gold and jewels and everyone would have worshipped him.
Yet today I sense that these norms are eroding and I am troubled for the future of democracy in the West. The G7 have abandoned their ties, perhaps a trial balloon for an end to our leaders dressing in a democratic manner?
Elsewhere we see suits abandoned among the rich as a new class of tech billionaires takes over. So far they have contended themselves with dressing like slobs, but the lack of standardisation in this dress code means there is a risk that they will begin to gradually dress in more ostentatious ways. At the Met gala in Washington DC (or New York? Idk) we see sights too troubling for me to share with you today, ridiculous outfits far beyond imitability for the normal people of the world. Are these the seeds of a mighty World-Empire? Are we witnessing the erosion of democratic norms before our very eyes? Only time will tell.