It is one of the core features of contemporary democracies: the political party. They are organisations centred around a main theme, which their members believe is the best approach to politics altogether. As the core democratic idea proposes, a population has many different interests that intersect at a common point, the general will. Coined by the political philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the term underlines the democratic idea that a society can be the sovereign of its nation, as there is a common ground on which everyone agrees. This approach, which he articulated thoroughly in his work The Social Contract, has become the foundation of today’s understanding of democracy: people of a nation should decide on their common ground to decide how to be governed. Not so long after the innovation of this idea, political parties emerged.
Nations started to adopt the new political philosophy as a consequence of rising dissatisfaction with monarchical governance, which had become a vehicle for furthering elitist interests and expanding personal power. However, with the implementation of the democratic idea, opportunistic thinking did not end simply because the sovereignty of the nation was transferred from one person to the whole society. Finding the general will among all the different voices of a nation quickly became a difficult task, and a simplification method was sought after.
Consequently, political parties emerged to reduce the number of countless voices to a few. One way to describe the political party is that it serves to increase the efficiency in finding the general will of a society by clustering public views into representative organisations. As we know today, however, political parties have turned out to be one of the most detrimental elements of the democratic idea. In this article, we will explain why.
Goals and Paths Towards Societal Success
Politics is primarily concerned with organising societal life in the most effective and efficient way to align a society with the purpose of life; that is, to move it closer to the universal understanding of the universe. This is the ultimate and indivisible goal. But being limited in our perception and being confronted with an endless pool of possibilities to arrive at that goal, politics is a complex and difficult field. Mistakes happen, we adapt and move forward – ideally. We at Essydo Politics, therefore, developed one of the most effective methods to reach that goal, namely, genuine knowledge production. It is the developmental path of individuals and societies in accordance with their natural special trait – their talent. It is a principle that accommodates societal success, political efficiency and cultural uniqueness.
What follows from this is also that the goal and the main properties of a society are fixed and clearly defined. In other words, there is a best way to arrive at the said goal for each society, and the concept of genuine knowledge production aims at leading each society as close as possible to this path. In yet other terms, our devletist approach also has the idea of the general will at its core, to some degree. The difference is that the devletist school of political thought lays out that there are broad principles that constitute the path of each society, while the general will is more geared towards the contemporary perception of the population of what is best for them. Here, the problems begin.
Problem 1: Perceptions Create Vulnerability
As the general will idea assumes that the exercise of democratic sovereignty stems from the people’s will at a given moment in time, there is one variable that might produce detrimental policymaking in objective terms: subjectivity. What if the population does not know what is best for them? For example, nobody wants to be taxed, but every nation with free healthcare is grateful for it. These two components are incompatible. There is a conflict of interest as the individual interest of the citizens collides with the objectively necessary idea of taxation.
Thought further, another problem arises from subjectivity. When politicians are able to alter the perception of citizens, they can extract individual benefits from them that are in conflict with what is beneficial for the nation. The worst part of this is that it is legitimised through the altered perception of the population. Sticking to our taxation example, if a politician, or in this case, a political party, is popular and alters the citizens’ perception in a way that allows him to tax them disproportionately to enrich himself, but the citizens allow this, it is a seemingly democratic practice, although it moves society farther away from its overarching goal.
Political parties utilise this subjectivity fallacy to enrich themselves and legitimise their rent extraction from the political system. Worse than individual politicians, political parties are lasting longer depending on their institutional setup. If a single politician exploits the subjectivity gap, the society can compensate for it after he resigns, but if a political party applies this strategy, this can turn into a structural weakness of the political system. Today, we can observe this. Political parties constantly create emotional agendas to gain popular votes and continue their rule. Taxation, immigration, energy and social policy debates are constantly on each nation’s agenda to disturb the public’s ability to objectively assess politics and make sound voting decisions and participate meaningfully in the democratic process to exercise their sovereignty.
Counteracting this is, by the way, our core mission as Essydo Politics, as we work to provide you with the necessary tools to deal with politics meaningfully – independent from interest groups.
Problem 2: Organisational Interests
The second problem is intricately linked with the first problem. Here, it is important to highlight the indivisible nature of national interest and societal goals. Within the devletist framework, the concept of genuine knowledge production points to the fact that national interests converge towards a common goal. Each societal path is unique. And again, mistakes happen, and we might not always be on the 100% most effective and efficient course to reach the said goal of universal understanding. However, if we start to purposely divide the paths, then we can be 100% sure that we are not following the best way.
Political parties do exactly that. They split the national interest into different subjective sub-interests that stem from clustered groups of individuals. One party defends the interests of the workers, another the interests of the businessmen. Others dramatically defend defined norms and values, and others aim to dismantle those. Some parties even take aim at the interests of other groups. Even if all of them are partially right in some policy fields at some point in time, they are completely wrong most of the time. Politics is an organic craft, meaning that it needs to adapt to the time and circumstances to keep society on track to achieve the overarching goal. Sticking to one approach in each situation, only for the sake of simplicity and defending a group’s interest, will produce ineffective outcomes.
Even worse, organisational development dynamics will lead political parties into a situation where they develop their own organisational interests, apart from their group’s interests. Why? Because the organisation will have a financial development system from which participating politicians benefit. Paired with the power, or perception of potentially gainable power, they will always have a leniency to also serve their personal interests. Over time, this becomes a habit and then a standard across the political party landscape – something we can observe today. In the contemporary societal setup, relative success is the subjectively constructed measure of success. Having more capital and/or power than others gains us success in society, and political parties offer the venue for people to achieve both.
An interesting debate is whether political parties developed this tendency because the societal setup is geared towards rewarding people with relative success, or whether societies today reward relative success because political parties emerged and the incremental changes of the political system produced this false subjectivity in society.
Conclusion
We do not assume that the problems that arise from political parties were born out of the conscious malevolence of anyone. We assume that these are just the natural structural outcomes of the existence of political institutions next to the state. Could this have been foreseen? Sure. Rousseau himself stressed that the democratic political system should never allow for political parties in the first place. When the person who essentially shaped our current political understanding outlines in the establishing work of this, then a new political understanding that we should abstain from establishing political parties, we must also acknowledge that the findings of this work are neither too far-fetched nor so complex to question their relevance.
In short, democracies cannot function sustainably with political parties. The effects on societies, due to their emotional, subjective and cultural nature, are not felt too much because our perceptions were altered. Therefore, we might not understand that we are moving farther away from the universal understanding of the purpose of nations, states, societies and, ultimately, individuals. Also, since these political parties created an altered societal perception of the good and succeeded within it, it does not look like a failure, subjectively. Objectively, however, we must acknowledge that political parties led us citizens away from participating meaningfully in the political process.
One interesting question remains: Is this constructed but comfortable lie better than the potentially uncomfortable truth? Are we better off with our altered perceptions of the good and right within a political system that can present itself as successful? Or would it be better to have a challenging political system where our personal, disciplined and virtuous pursuit of the truth is the primary objective, and politics would relentlessly push us to reach it? Undoubtedly, it is the second option.
