How important are checks and balances to the definition of "democracy?" Oblique commentaries on the Israeli Supreme Court

 Consider the following attempt at a syllogism.  Mouse is a syllable.  A mouse eats cheese.  Therefore, a syllable eats cheese.  Stop banging your head on the table, it will be OK, I promise.  Also, do not blame me.  I did not write it.  This little nugget of nonsense comes to us from Lucius Seneca, from his letters to Lucilius.  He wrote it about two thousand years ago, and he did so in order to denigrate the depths to which his beloved discipline of philosophy had sunk.  Seneca believed that there was and is one discipline superior to and valuable over all others.  Gender studies, I mean, philosophy.  The goal of philosophy, according to Seneca, was to show you how to be a good person, and lead a tranquil life.  According to Seneca, those are one and the same.  Unfortunately, those who would call themselves philosophers are easily distracted by stupid and pointless word games which do nothing to help you lead a good/tranquil life.  This is not a new trend.  It was obvious, and troubling to Seneca two millennia ago, so when Peter Boghossian, the former philosophy professor, stands aghast at those "hoodwinked by word games," one might ask him to return to his Seneca.  I do not speak gently of the discipline of philosophy, but that is the discipline as it became, as it is practiced, rather than what it occasionally has been.  One may similarly ask, "are you a feminist?"  The best reply is, "which wave do you mean?"  Philosophy is so old that the waves have reverberated into uncountability, yet the predominant pattern, the tide, one might say, is a waxing and waning between those who play stupid word games, and those who are even worse-- solipsists.  Today, we waste our time with a word game.

What is the technical definition of "democracy?"  At some point, either you or someone within earshot of you has uttered the following pedantically false banality:  "well, you know, technically, America is a republic, not a democracy."  The person who said it never read Plato's Republic.  Here, though, is what your semi-literate pedant meant.  A democracy means direct democracy, and a republic means an indirect democracy.  Note the use of the word, democracy in both.  OK, let's try to escape the trap.  In a republic, you vote for representatives who make policy decisions, and in a democracy, you vote directly on policy.  See?  We can escape that trap of circularity.  No, ___ Studies majors, not all definitions are circular.

However, that is not "the technical definition of democracy."  It is merely a thing that self-satisfied people say when they want to correct you on a matter that needs no correction.

"Democracy" comes from demos- and -kratia.  Translated from the Greek, it simply means rule by the people, and one will note that both direct and indirect democracy would meet the definition.  If those who make policy are answerable to the demos, then the only way rule is not by the people is a failure of the electoral mechanism.  That's a whole, other can o' worms, but indirect democracy-- the "republic" as you know it-- meets the Greek definition.

Is there a technical definition?  If we follow from the etymology of the word, the best technical definition would be a translation of the preferences of the population into political outcomes, with the problem being Kenneth Arrow's impossibility theorem.  Without belaboring the point yet again, Arrow proved mathematically that five conditions for democracy cannot simultaneously be met by a mechanism for aggregating preferences.  Stripped of highfalutin econo-speak, democracy is a mathematical impossibility.

Which, while being a vital point, also creates the following problem.  A word that describes nothing is a useless word.

Making me even worse than the asshole who tells you that America is technically a republic, not a democracy.

As I must often remind myself, I suck.

Robert Dahl, arguably the preeminent political scientist, and certainly the preeminent political philosopher of the 20th Century, did not even like the word, democracy.  He preferred, "pluralism."  Alternately, we can collectively leave the word, democracy, loosely defined, allow you to define it for yourself in the context of a specific claim (but not circularly), and focus, rather, on the question of what matters given the constraints of what is possible.  See: Arrow, Kenneth.

And so we return to some philosophers who mattered, like James Madison and Alexander Hamilton.  A very bad and wrong philosopher once said that the point was not merely to study the world but to change it.  That guy changed the world in such a way as to murder more people than anyone in history, and thus be lauded by the "be kind" crowd.  Madison and Hamilton, on the other hand, changed the world for the better, and among the better insights from The Federalist Papers, and built into the structure of the Constitution, was the need for checks and balances.  If you have read any two Federalists, they are 10 and 51.  There is more, to be sure, but those are the best.  Ambition must be checked against ambition, the evils of faction, yadda-yadda-yadda.

Checks and balances are so critical to how we think about American-style democracy that when a country-- Israel, say-- effectively eliminates a central check, one may be tempted to ask the following question.  Is it still a democracy?  I have no interest in debating any Israeli policy.  I have never done so in the past, and I will not start now.  Democracy, however we define it, is about structure and process.  Israel just stripped its Supreme Court of significant powers of judicial review.

Is it still a democracy?  Less of a democracy?

I have been a regular "expert" respondent in Bright Line Watch's assessments of American democracy, and my inclusion in that sample obviously demonstrates a lack of credibility, but my assessments have been influenced by my belief in the importance of checks and balances.  Of course, there are many kinds of checks.

Judicial review is an interesting one.  After all, consider the etymology of "democracy" again.  Demos- and -kratia.  The primary critique of judicial review, when sincere (which is never), is that judges are only elected in certain polities, and when judges are not elected, judicial review is kind of anti-democratic.  Of course, even when they are not elected, they are appointed by elected officials, which is merely a degree removed from the demos- rather than externally imposed upon the demos-.  Still, there is something at least a little strange about treating judicial review as fundamental to the compound word created by demos- and -kratia.

Which is not to say that I reject judicial review.  There is a small faction, so to speak, who reject Marbury v. Madison, but I am not among them.

Perhaps, then, a better way to approach the question is to avoid Seneca's word games.  Democracy is definitionally good.  Is this democracy?  If so, it is good.  If not, it is bad.

If "democracy" is so ill-defined, such syllogisms are only a degree off from cheese-eating syllables.

Instead, we can ask whether or not a particular check/balance is a beneficial institutional feature.  In the case of judicial review, I'll say yes.  Whether or not it is "democratic" is both a strange and the wrong question.

Mouse on the Keys, "Completed Nihilism," from An Anxious Object.