Outside In | Blame the iPhone not Donald Trump for making us dumber

I don’t want to be alarmist or anything so immature, but I am beginning to wonder whether the democratic process we have admired and preferred for so many decades is any longer fit for purpose.

When you see so many American voters flirting with the idea of the grossly offensive Donald Trump becoming the most important political leader in the world; when you see the British Labour party delivering up the crumpled and improbable Jeremy Corbyn as shadow Prime Minister; when you see Marine Le Pen winning adulation for rank racism; then for sure, you know something is badly awry.

For so many political generations, a rising majority of communities around the world have agreed that, warts and all, a democracy is the “least worst” of all choices of political systems. Ignore that dictionaries offer dozens of definitions of a democracy, we have agreed that for all the cumbersome inefficiencies embedded in democratic systems, they are preferable to every other political system we have tested. But suddenly the “checks and balances” built into democracies that limit the scope for abuse of power seem to have fused. The process seems to be bringing dangerously close to power people who could deliver catastrophic consequences not just to electorates within political systems, but to us mute spectators living in far corners of the world.

At this point, I think most readers would argue that I am wrong, and am getting a bit over emotional. I hope they are right. There are a lot of good reasons why the present political mood is so sour, and there are equally good reasons why in due course sanity will return and anxieties be dispelled. But there are also some odd and very new forces at work that may be eating at the very foundations of democratic politics. They need to be thought about.

But first, let’s identify one of the most acute challenges for any democracy: if you want a broad majority to play an active role in making decisions, and electing our leaders, then this broad majority needs to be well informed, and ideally, well educated. They need to recognise that few decisions are black and white, and that decision-making is often tough because it involves making choices between valid, competing objectives. And they have to share a commitment to making compromises based on making – and listening to – reasonable arguments.

Even at the best of times, this is a very real challenge. It is tough and time consuming to endow a community with sufficient education, and enough free time, to deliberate on the important decisions that shape our lives. Hardly surprising then that so many still hanker for the benevolent and intelligent dictatorship of people like Lee Kwan Yew in Singapore, in the belief that if you leave the decision-making to a small and focused team of smart and well-informed technocrats, and all will be well.

But a successful democracy needs more than just well educated and well informed people. We have shockingly realised since the “great recession” engulfed us eight years ago that politicians need growth to get elected. No politician ever got elected promising “less bad” than his rival. Growth in an economy allows politicians to promise new and exciting goodies. It generates the wealth needed to invest in communities and to improve the amenities we value. Growth fundamentally underpins a mood of optimism that encourages cooperation and compromise.