What's better than democracy?

For democracy to work, we need to practice tolerance.

Americans will choose their next president in 279 days. As the results begin to roll in on election night, many people will fill with pride believing they’re seeing democracy in action. Many others will go to bed further convinced that democracy is dead.

The side of the line they fall on will depend, quite simply, on which candidate they voted for and who is declared the winner (i.e., “My guy won - democracy is great!” vs “The other guy won - America has fallen to tyranny!”).

If you thought the hand wringing over the death of American democracy reached its peak during the 2016 election cycle, you’ll be sad to know a new poll shows things have gotten worse in the ensuing years. American are more unsatisfied with the state of their democracy than at any point in at least 40 years. Gallup pollsters report the country has reached a new low, with only 28% of adults saying they are satisfied with the way democracy currently works.

So, should we just give up on democracy? A good chunk of Americans say yes, we should. We’ve become so divided that a majority of voters on both sides of the aisle believe electing officials from the opposing party in 2024 would create lasting harm in the United States.

It seems like today’s voters mostly agree with author H.G. Wells that some people just aren’t smart enough to be allowed to vote.

Writing just years after the end of one World War and on the cusp of another, Wells, a committed socialist, asked whether democracy was a failure that would soon be cast aside as a “hopelessly bad method in human affairs.”

He believed democracy’s essential weakness “is that the great mass of human beings are not sufficiently intelligent nor sufficiently interested to follow political issues at all. The representative body represents, for nine out of ten of its voters, a vacant mind.”

What he described then still very much holds true: democracy has given us the career politician whose “interest in what [is] good for his country and mankind has been, and is, entirely subordinate to what will gain and what will lose votes.”

But what’s a better option?

Wells’ suggestion was to “hand over the decisive control of things to a body of prominent citizens — whose return would be very largely due to prominence and public confidence won by other than political activities.” This sounds a lot like the technocratic world we’re living in now.

We prefer the Swiss model of direct democracy, where the country is governed under a federal system at three levels: Confederation, cantons, and communes. Citizens vote often and have a direct voice in decisions at all levels.

This demands active civic engagement, political awareness, vigilance against corruption, and — most of all — tolerance rather than contempt for our fellow man.

Tolerance seems a low bar — should we not be aiming higher, perhaps for faith in, or love for, other people? But tolerance is harder than it sounds, so perhaps it is enough. It is the very least we can ask of each other — to simply allow the existence of something or someone you don’t like or agree with.

In 1941, one of the worst years of World War II, writer E.M. Forster cast his thoughts to reconstruction after the war. He wrote that tolerance was the spiritual quality most needed to rebuild civilization out of the rubble of war:

The world is very full of people — appallingly full; it has never been so full before — and they are all tumbling over each other. Most of these people one doesn’t know and some of them one doesn’t like; doesn’t like the colour of their skins, say, or the shapes of their noses, or the way they blow them or don’t blow them, or the way they talk, or their smell, or their clothes, or their fondness for jazz or their dislike of jazz, and so on.

Well, what is one to do? There are two solutions. One of them is the Nazi solution. If you don’t like people, kill them, banish them, segregate them, and then strut up and down proclaiming that you are the salt of the earth.

The other way is much less thrilling, but it is on the whole the way of the democracies, and I prefer it. If you don’t like people, put up with them as well as you can. Don’t try to love them; you can’t, you’ll only strain yourself. But try to tolerate them. On the basis of that tolerance a civilized future may be built. Certainly I can see no other foundation for the post-war world.

So when you head to the ballot box this November, try to remember that to live in this great country, and to allow democracy to survive, all you have to do is tolerate. As Forster says, tolerance is not the same as weakness. Putting up with people doesn’t mean giving in to them. It just means accepting them, warts and all.

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