Real Democracy, Part 2

I was intrigued to hear in a radio interview with Steven Cook, an expert on politics and governance in Egypt, that he believes the army's goal is to rule without governing.  They are a large and complex institution that owns many businesses and employs many people.  They have created a system where it is hard to distinguish between public and private enterprise.  The "government" is a sort of facade.  It needs to do important things that the army wants, and otherwise to look like they are doing justice, providing education and health care, conducting foreign relations, all the messy, detailed work of day to day government.   But the army is not to be disturbed.  It reminds me once again of the "Student Government" effect, though in a much more sinister way.

That governments we know do not actually serve the will of the people is a given.  We have been inclined to blame the people for apathy -- for not getting out and expressing themselves with passion, persuasiveness, and persistence.  Or we blame redistricting, settling boundaries so that many of us are in districts that have a definite political coloration that is not likely to change any time soon.

But we were all trained back in school, back in student government days.  We know the principal is in charge, and everything the student government does is according to what he or she wants.  We may not be totally sure who the principal is in our big grownup world, but we act as if there is one.  In most of our workplaces there is one, the boss.  We are trained to wait to find out what the boss wants before expressing an opinion. So our work settings train us too.

I wrote earlier about the difficulty of bringing real democracy to the UUA, since we have such a long history of electing charismatic people to follow rather than providing the leadership of peers that true democracy requires.

Now I am looking at the news coming out of Egypt and thinking of the sorry state of democracy in our  country.  It's not the army, but all those corporate lobbyists seem to be ruling without governing.  In Egypt, the army has been entrenched so deeply for so long that the people turned to them when the experiment in democracy seemed to be foundering.  It's scary.  What about here?  I am cautiously optimistic.