The Guardian starting the year as it means to go on, or just the latest appearance in its pages of the queen of tendentiousness, Priyamvada Gopal? Gopal wants you to know that electoral democracy has its shortcomings. Fair enough - what doesn't? But it's a damn sight better than the non-democratic alternatives to it, and in view of this it's no bad thing to state its shortcomings in a proportionate way, as Gopal here doesn't. The rational kernel of her case is that serious inequalities skew the results of the democratic process, so that 'eliminating inequality is fundamental to real democracy'. Inequalities do have that effect, but the claim that democracy isn't real unless and until inequalities are eliminated is a typical meshuggeneh-left claim, which conflates political democracy with the substantive social and economic programme that our meshuggeneh-leftist spokesperson favours. The result is that you don't really have democracy unless it does what you want (even if what you want may be a want on behalf of others), and so the formal properties and advantages of democracy, such as, centrally, that it's a set of procedures for arriving at outcomes where interests and opinions are divided, are lost. Or, to put it differently, behind the aforesaid claim is the thought 'democracy will only prevail when we do' - a failure, if ever there was one, to understand the core idea.
Amongst Gopal's 'disproportions': (1) 'in Britain a coalition no one voted for...' This is nonsense. The coalition was a legitimate outcome of the general election, and in that sense was as voted-for as any other outcome that has been built on the given distribution of voter preferences. (2) 'When real democratic expression from below does emerge...' She means people taking to the streets in protest against the cuts. Another meshuggeneh-leftist trope: as if parliamentary representation is not a real expression of democracy; as if decision-making should be done purely by mass demonstration, as in 'We marched (over Iraq), but you didn't listen, sob'. (3) 'current attempts to contain democracy and empty it of its real content - the interests of ordinary people'. The interests even of ordinary people are never completely unified, and so the claim that democracy has one 'real content' (which Gopal knows better than others) is a piece of political arrogance.
However, what is worst here is something captured not by any single quotation, but by a kind of miasmic subtext. This is that there exists somewhere underneath the deficiencies of 'electoral democracy' an already formed will of the people, a will in support of what Gopal and other meshuggeneh-leftist spokespeople want, but which is blocked by the distorting mechanisms of the non-real democracy they lament. This extraordinary assumption, supported by no empirical evidence, never seems sufficiently to agitate those who hold it into trying to explain why no party or movement standing on the kind of political programme Gopal and co would want to see has been able to come even half way close to winning an electoral majority.
So, though I too am all for the 'claims of we, the people, to the commons' - except that for me they are the 'claims of us, the people' - it's high time to base the struggle for such claims on realistic analysis, respect for actual democratic processes and the setting aside of meshuggeneh-leftist hot air.