Marshal Gillis, St.Francis Xavier University

Eric Nash presents a look at contemporary representative democracies and their vulnerabilities, from the perspective of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Nash identifies these vulnerabilities as slowness to act, and inconsistency. However, it is not completely clear to me how a government can be both slow to act, and inconsistent.

It seems that when something is slow to act, its actions are generally consistent, and vice versa. Nash brings up the example of Donald Trump, and how wildly different his presidency was from previous presidents, as an example of democracy being inconsistent. While his erratic behavior was certainly inconsistent, it seems that he was quite quick to act in many cases. Insofar as Trump was acting inconsistently (i.e. pulling out of international agreements) he was doing so in a way that was quite quick to action.

Furthermore, these vulnerabilities are only trivially true of democracies, and so do not, in my own opinion, constitute the grave challenges that Nash makes them out to be. For example, the claim that a democracy is inconsistent is tautologically true, in the sense that a democracy is composed of many people who will necessarily disagree about some issue; since a democracy is meant to distill many voices into one, it naturally follows that some of those voices will not be represented. Additionally, the voice with which the government speaks will change over time in a democracy. This is not a fault of the system, but a part of the design. Public opinion changes over time, in some circumstances quite rapidly, and a democracy is designed to represent that changing opinion.

The weakness of being slow to act is, likewise, another intentional feature of democracy. Since a democratic represents many different voices, there must be a process by which the government decides which voice it will represent over others. Most political decisions affect vast amounts of people, and those decisions can be catastrophic when all the people who are potentially involved are not considered. Nash holds up the communist government in China as an example of a smaller government that was quicker to react to the COVID-19 crisis, in contrast with the slower response of the larger, American government. However, one might instead

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