Based on the original article I published in 2022, in light of the subsequent shift away from “representative democracy,” we need to be clear about what democracy really is. Otherwise, how can we know what we want or what we are willing to defend?

Let’s start by discussing what democracy is not. Most people think democracy has something to do with electing leaders or “representatives.” This is called “representative democracy” (RD) and it is practically the polar opposite of “democracy.”

 

What Is Democracy?
Iain Davis

 

As a concept, RD immediately falls flat on its illogical face. The whole point of RD is to select the representatives who will form the government that will rule your life. The reason given for this is that we are all incapable of ruling ourselves.

Thus, all who elect RD governments assume that no one in society is capable of taking responsibility for their own life. Except, that is, for the tiny clique of representatives they vote for. These representatives, then, must be unique human beings. In addition to being able to rule their own lives—which no one else can—they apparently possess the ability to rule everyone else’s lives too. People elect magical beings as their representatives.

Electorates are told that RD enables them to exercise “democratic oversight” and that this has something to do with democracy. Democratic oversight of your elected decision makers is not a democratic principle. In fact, RD is anti-democratic.

The RD term is simply used by governments and their propagandists to sell dictatorial authority to people who don’t know what democracy is. Moreover, the few “democratic ideals” RD supposedly embodies are completely ignored by representative governments whenever it is inconvenient to uphold them.

In his 1949 essay Citizenship and Social Class, British sociologist TH Marshall described democratic ideals as a functioning system of rights and contended they were necessary components of an RD systems. These rights include the right to freedom of thought and expression, including free speech and peaceful protest, and the right to equal justice and equal opportunity under the law.

Few people would disagree that an RD system has to observe and maintain democratic ideals to have any credibility as a purported “democracy.” Yet, these values are consistently ignored by the magical representatives people keep electing and habitually choose to obey.

Though representative democratic politicians laboriously espouse these same democratic ideals, this is commonly done to score points over other self-proclaimed democratic politicians who they accuse of abandoning them. There is rarely any actual commitment to honour democratic ideals. Rendering the concept of RD even more illogical and palpably idiotic. What on earth do people think they are voting for?

To illustrate: take, for example, the EU’s recent European Media Freedom Act (EMFA). Touting the alleged media protections under the EMFA, the unelected and appointed leader of the EU, Ursula von der Leyen, was booed and heckled while speaking in Finland.

In response, she said:

To those who are here so loudly shouting and screaming. They can rejoice that they are in such a free country as Finland, where freedom of speech is a right, where there are no restrictions. If they were in Moscow, they would be in jail in two minutes. That’s why we have democracy!

The man questioning her was Armando Mema, a politician from the Finish municipality of Nurmijärvi. His own electoral platform is founded upon improving Nurmijärvi’s transport infrastructure and public services.

As von der Leyen was telling him how lucky he was not to live under Putin’s regime and how fortunate he was to enjoy EU protected freedom of speech, Mema was arrested and immediately thrown into the back of a meat wagon. Armando Mema received an on-the-spot fine, was told he would be automatically arrested and incarcerated if he dared to question von der Leyen in public again and says he is due to stand trial in Helsinki for supposed crime of exhibiting “disobedience to a public official.”

Armando Mema’s right to freedom of speech is not “protected.” It is “restricted” in Finland and everywhere else in the EU where he is not allowed to question his allegedly representative leaders. Armando Mema is one of approximately 450 million EU citizens who don’t have any protected right to freedom of speech precisely because the EU declares itself a “representative democracy.” If Russia operates a political dictatorship, the EU is indivisible from it. The EMFA exemplifies that fact.

The idea that an independent and pluralistic media—and therefore freedom of speech and expression—can be maintained through government regulation is an oxymoron. By definition, the media cannot be “independent” of the political state if that the state regulates it. Added to that, EMFA regulation couldn’t be more draconian.

The EMFA establishes a regulatory European Board for Media Services (the Board) to “protect users from harmful content, including disinformation and foreign information manipulation and interference.” It is “the Board” that will define what constitutes disinformation or “information manipulation,” whatever that is. Undoubtedly, reporting what happened to Armando Mema, or his criticisms of Ursula von der Leyen, will be deemed “disinformation” or “manipulated information” and censored by the EU’s media freedom Board.

The EU isn’t alone. All so-called Western democracies are pursuing the same agenda simultaneously. EMFA is more or less a facsimile of the UK Online Safety Act (OSA) and the very similar Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA), as proposed and currently under debate in the US. In a similar vein to the OSA and the possible KOSA, in accordance with EMFA Article 4, independent journalism and “media freedom” is protected from state interference unless the state wants to interfere.

Rather like Article 29 of the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human rights—that determines you don’t have any “human rights” if the UN or its member states decide otherwise—Article 4(4)(c) of the EMFA stipulates that governments can only take measures against journalists “on a case-by-case basis by an overriding reason of public interest.” 

Or, to put it more succinctly, whenever the political state likes.

Pursuant to Article 4(4)(d), when state censorship is supposedly necessary in “duly justified exceptional and urgent cases,” the state can not only censor the journalist’s reporting but also hunt the journalist down and punish them and their editors.

Remember, this is called the “Media Freedom” Act! So what does the EMFA empower RD governments to do if they claim they have to interfere in the “public interest.”

Under article 4(5) they can “deploy intrusive surveillance software” and any range of intelligence tools to spy on journalists. EU governments, under direction of “the Board,” can compel journalists to divulge their confidential sources and information; they can “detain, sanction, [and] intercept” media outlets, editorial boards and journalists or indeed “any person” from whom the state wants to extract information. If they wish to silence journalists and media outlets, the EMFA grants EU states the power to “seize” the premises and equipment—such as laptops or printing presses—of any media organisation or journalist the state doesn’t like.

The EMFA is an EU censorship and information control Enabling Act. The concepts of freedom or rights of any kind—let alone democratic rights or values—are well and truly discarded by the EU’s EMFA.

This kind of dictatorial legislation is pretty normal for RDs. Representative politicians like von der Leyen only extol “democratic ideals” as propaganda devices. Representative politicians, especially the most successful, despise democratic ideals and never miss an opportunity to ignore them completely. So why do people still imagine they live in “democracies” when they evidently live in dictatorships?

REPRESENTATIVE DEMOCRACY

In RD systems people infrequently vote to devolve their individual sovereignty to other people. They agree to obey the diktats of their “representatives” until the next “election.” At this juncture, they reaffirm their obedience to the magical beings who will continue to ignore all of their alleged democratic rights. Most people enduring an RD system will exercise their so-called democracy on less than 30 days across their entire lifespan. They are told, and thus believe, this is democracy.

In an RD system the “government” is permanent. It centralises all political power. Oligarchs can easily convert their wealth to political power by corrupting a tiny gaggle of useful idiots.

RDs are nothing more than functional oligarchies and the representative politician’s only real role is to implement the policies handed to them by oligarchs and their policy think-tanks. That’s why our representatives want us to believe that RD is democracy.

While we do, we can still delude ourselves that we have democratically enshrined rights and, consequently, remain willing to accept any oppression. We must do this, we are told, to protect our blessed RD against evil bogeymen like Putin.

Representative democracy is not democracy. Representative democracy empowers functional oligarchies. In a democracy, there would be no permanent group of law makers to corrupt. Simply put, oligarchy could not possibly function in a democracy.

DEMOCRACY

There is no mechanism by which rights are granted, upheld or revoked in a democracy. Everyone is born with individual, inalienable rights and everyone has the same equal rights. No one can justly transgress anyone’s inalienable rights absent lawful application of the science of justice.

If a country really were a democracy—and there are currently none—it wouldn’t have any politicians. The people would govern themselves through the observance and enforcement of nothing but the “Rule of Law.” In a democracy they would do this through jury-led trials where juries are formed by a random selection of the people—sortition.

Real democracy demands that the people are permanently engaged in the democratic process. They must be skilled in critical thinking and well versed in the “science of justice”—Natural Law. They must be ready, at any moment, to put their skills and knowledge into practice.

In a democracy there would still be a body to propose laws. In a democracy there would also be another, perhaps larger body, that would enact laws. But, just like the juries sitting in courts across the land, they too would be formed by a random sortition of the people.

In a democracy, people—selected randomly from the population—would temporarily serve in the law making body and a different group of randomly selected people would temporarily serve in the law passing body. Like jurors, once their service was complete they would disband and return to their normal lives.

In a democracy the Rule of Law would be based upon the peoples’ comprehension and application of Natural Law: their appreciation of the science of justice. The objective of the jury would be to establish the “guilt” of the accused and, most importantly, restore justice where necessary.

In a democracy guilt is proven only if the jury is unanimously convinced by the evidence that the accused acted with mens rea, or a “guilty mind.” That is that the accused knew their actions would cause real material harm or loss to another person, thereby violating that person’s inalienable rights. Merely breaking a written “law” is not enough for a jury to find someone “guilty” when that jury is familiar with the science of justice.

Should the jury accept that the accused broke some written law (legislation) but was not guilty of causing nor intended to cause any material harm or loss, then the jury would find the law, not the accused, at fault. Clearly the faulty law would need to be rescinded or amended. In a democracy any jury of the people could therefore “annul”—meaning declare void or invalid—any law they found to be unjust.

In such circumstances, a new group of randomly selected people would have to reconsider the annulled law. They would perhaps discard it or amend it accordingly and send it back to the separate but new group of randomly selected people who might consider enacting an amended version of the previously annulled law. This new law would then be put to the justice test in jury-led courts entirely controlled by the people randomly selected to form a jury.

In a democracy the Rule of Law would be the rule of the people. Laws would be formed and established by the people, for the people. Crucially, in a democracy, the people would not simply obey laws through fear of punishment but rather because they are just. If individuals choose not to obey the agreed laws they would by subject to trial by a jury of their peers who would determine their possible guilt and decide their punishment in order to restore justice.

The sociopolitical system described above has nothing to do with electing representatives.

This system is called “democracy.”

https://off-guardian.org/2025/08/14/what-is-democracy/