Democracy is an unending process of humbling unconstrained power

The suggestion that the problem of abusive power should be central to how we think about democracy is a vital clue why it can be considered indispensable everywhere. If democracy is understood as an unending process of humbling unconstrained power, then we must abandon all earlier efforts to link it to arrogant first principles. 'Democracy is not figurable,' writes the French scholar Jean-Luc Nancy (1940-2021). Like water, it has no fixed form or substance. Not only does it vary through time and space, as we have seen, but its defiance of fixed ways of living and refusal of all forms of top-down power masquerading as 'normal' or 'natural' are compelling. Democracy has a punk quality. It is anarchic, permanently unsatisfied with the way things are. The actions unleashed by its spirit and institutions create space for unexpected beginnings. Always on the side of the targets and victims of predatory power, democracy doubts orthodoxies, loosens fixed boundaries, widens horizons and pushes towards the unknown.

Thinking of democracy as a shape-shifting way of protecting humans and their biosphere against the corrupting effects of unaccountable power reveals its radical potential: the defiant insistence that people's lives are never fixed, that all things, human and non-human, are built on the shifting sands of space-time, and that no person or group, no matter how much power they hold, can be trusted permanently, in any context, to govern the lives of others. We could say, thinking back to the age of the first popular assemblies, that democracy is a means of damage prevention. It's an early warning system, a way of enabling citizens, and whole organisations and networks, to sound the alarm whenever they suspect that others are about to cause them harm, or when calamities are already bearing down on their heads. Nietzsche famously complained that democracy stands for the disbelief in rule by elites and strongmen. It does, and for good reason. Democracy brings things back to earth. It serves as a 'reality check' on unrestrained power. It is a potent means of ensuring that those in charge of organisations don't stray into cuckoo land, wander into territory where misadventures of power are concealed by fine words, lies, bullshit and silence.

- John Keane, The Shortest History of Democracy, Melbourne, 2022, p.197-8