Democracy and theocracy are two words that come to us from Greek. The one means the rule of the people (demos); the other means the rule of a god (theos). What they have in common is that, more often than not, they mean government by ordinary rulers who claim to represent the people or a god, rather than actual rule by either the people or a god. Indeed, there has never in history been an actual theocracy, in the sense of a god actually calling the shots. Instead, there has always been some prophet, priest, or ayatollah speaking for the god, or a king or emperor pretending to be a god (“Ray, when someone asks if you’re a god, you say yes!”).
Democracies, too, are usually ruled by representatives of the people rather than by the people themselves. On a scale much larger than a New England town meeting, true democracy becomes impractical. The questions that then arise are how to chose rulers that truly represent the interests of the larger community, and how can the community hold those rulers accountable. Implicit in the latter question is ensuing that ordinary citizens are properly and sufficiently informed of what rulers are doing in their name.
Rulers of theocracies, by contrast, cannot be held accountable by the gods in whose name they rule, and are therefore autocrats in all but name (autocracy, another word from Greek, means rule by oneself). In Iran, the Ayatollah Khamenei can declare anyone he dislikes an enemy of God, and God will never object. How is this any different from Louis XIV or Charles I, who claimed to rule by divine right? Theocracy is always a sham, the rule of liars pretending to speak for a supernatural power. But sometimes, democracy is a sham, too.
Take, for instance, the presidency of Donald Trump, a man whom an unfortunate combination of circumstances carried into the White House. In no sense did the results of the 2016 elections reflect the preference of the American people; Trump was the least favored of all the candidates, and not remotely qualified for the office he sought; yet moneyed interests, media bosses, and at least one hostile foreign power stood to gain by promoting his candidacy, and they were aided by bugs in our constitutional software, including the one that had given us President George W. Bush sixteen years earlier. Trump was elected by a minority in an election where a larger minority preferred Hillary Clinton, and a plurality of eligible voters made no choice at all. Yet all through the Mueller investigation and the subsequent impeachment, Republicans railed about Democrats “undoing the choice of the American people”, which Trump was surely not.
Beware of anyone claiming to represent “the national will”, as Hitler did. The great dictators of the last century all claimed to be manifestations of the popular will. All claimed to be for “freedom”, as if that word, left unqualified, has any meaning at all (freedom from what? freedom to do what?). Just last week I was listening to some blowhard on the radio yammering about how “freedom isn’t free”, whatever that is supposed to mean. In the words of Horst Wessel’s Nazi anthem, “millions look with hope upon the swastika; it’s the dawning of the day of freedom and bread.” Freedom! And all you had to do was kill a few million of your neighbors…
If democracy has an Achilles heel, it’s low-information voters. I am a Marxist, and I believe in class consciousness, even if it is not necessarily the same class consciousness Marx and Lenin had in mind. The industrial proletariat is almost extinct in post-industrial America, after all, but there is still a sharp divide between the vast majority of us who live by the fruit of our own labor — whether of our hands or our minds — and a small, extremely wealthy class of parasites who do no work but control capital, and who exercise both political and economic power far out of proportion to their numbers. These people divide us against one another on race, gender, religion, language, and myriad other lines, to their own advantage, and we let them rob us blind. We vote for their candidates because, as Douglas Adams put it, otherwise the wrong lizard might get elected. What sort of democracy is that?