Democracy? Picture to yourself a little town somewhere in the United States ruled by its inhabitants. In other words imagine that they practice democracy. Surely, they delegate the administrative work to a few representatives: others need to go about their everyday business. From time to time the inhabitants of the town hold a meeting, a rally. Some of them put forward a proposal. We need to have a school; we need to build a hospital; we need to repair some roads; we need this, we need that. Once they agree on a project, they need to chip in some of the money from every family. Will the people consent? Of course, they will. They will have a difference of opinion whether it is better to first put up a school or a hospital; they may have differing opinions about how large a school building ought to be; they may differ as to the amount of money they want to spend, they may agree to demand more money from the richer inhabitants, and the like.
Now picture to yourself someone puts forward a proposal to invite a significant number of foreigners, perfect strangers with a different religion and a different language, with a different culture to settle in the town and puts forward a proposal that the inhabitants of the town pay for everything the arrivals will need for months or maybe years. Imagine such a proposal is put to the vote. What results do you expect? Obviously, no one is going to pay month after month after another month for the upkeep of a Venezuelan or Somalian family. Picture to yourself that someone proposes to send a few youngsters from this town – someone’s sons, someone’s brothers. Someone’s husbands – to fight a bunch of Russians or Iraqis thousands of miles away in order to protect Ukrainians or to bring democracy to a town in Iraq. How many inhabitants of this theoretical town do you think would consent to the idea?
That’s genuine democracy, that is to say: the expression of the will of the people, the expression of the collective will of the people and its implementation. A summary of such towns and villages ought to act in a similar manner. As it is, thousands of such towns and villages collectively known as a state – a nation – a democratic republic act in ways that are entirely opposite to what we have described above. A few people – relatively very few people – entrusted with power make policies of which citizens – i.e. inhabitants of those thousands of towns and villages – would never ever approve. Worse, those millions of citizens are forced to pay for the projects that are totally beyond their scope of interest.
Barely anyone (not to say no one) is ready to accommodate perfect strangers from Africa or Asia with their families for years in their homes and provide for them. Yet, a state, a democratic state – supposedly a collection of millions of such families that make up the theoretical town from our thought experiment – accommodates millions of foreigners and pays for their living. How does that come about in… a democracy?
