The Worst Form of Government

The British people’s referendum vote on June 23 proposed (by a slim majority of 51.9% to 48.1%) that the country should leave the world’s largest single market and embark on an unpredictable standalone future for which there had been no political or economic planning. A Churchillian remark crossed my mind immediately: the one about democracy being the worst form of government apart from every other one that had ever been tried.

The country’s politics fell apart straight away. As I wrote these words, Britain had no functioning political party of any significance (the Conservative prime minister and the leader of the United Kingdom Independence Party had resigned, and the Labour party’s MPs were in revolt against their leader; all was turmoil—though of course, changing just about every hour).

As soon as I got back to my library after the referendum (I was in Germany when the result was announced), I took down the only really serious reference book on quotations to check on the accuracy of the half-remembered Churchill remark.

The internet is useless for quotation-checking. You get hundreds or thousands of repetitions of inaccurate earlier tertiary-source plagiarizings of misquotations that are often also misattributed (most witty remarks attributed to Churchill, for example, are apocryphal). For serious fact-checking you need Fred Shapiro. He doesn’t include a quotation unless he has verified the original source, and he includes cross-references to related sayings.

Shapiro reports in The Yale Book of Quotations that Churchill did say roughly what I recollected, in a speech in the House of Commons on November 11, 1947; but he was alluding to a more detailed earlier remark by someone else. Here’s Churchill speaking in Parliament:

Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.

Churchill gives it a lovely semi-paradoxical, almost Wildean, sting in the tail (the worst ... except for all the others), but “it has been said” indicates that he is paraphrasing some earlier source. Shapiro locates it, and gives the cross-reference.

It was Robert Briffault (1874–1948), a British surgeon, social anthropologist, and novelist, in Chapter 15 of his 1930 book Rational Evolution, a rewritten edition of The Making of Humanity (1919). And it was not just an epigram, but part of a lengthier rumination on governance:

Democracy is the worst form of government. It is the most inefficient, the most clumsy, the most unpractical. ... It reduces wisdom to impotence and secures the triumph of folly, ignorance, clap-trap, and demagogy. ... Yet democracy is the only form of social order that is admissible, because it is the only one consistent with justice.

Briffault is not just making a quip here; he’s mulling over a serious and troubling conundrum.

Both the British government and its opposition officially favored remaining in the European Union; virtually all economists said Britain’s economy would be damaged by leaving. Most politicians, thinking Remain would win, were blind-sided when people in depressed areas of the north of England voted Leave in huge numbers, largely because they resented the immigrants now living in their towns. (Whether relevant or not: One colleague of mine met a man who voted Leave because, he said, Preston is “full of Bangladeshis.” The Lancashire town he named is over 82 percent white British, and EU membership had absolutely nothing to do with immigration from Bangladesh: Bengali and Sylheti immigrants had been arriving in Britain for a hundred years before Britain joined the EU in 1973.)

The neglected poor and the unemployed had sought to give the political classes a bloody nose. Folly, ignorance, clap-trap, and demagogy had triumphed. And interestingly, racist abuse and hate crimes against ethnic minorities bloomed (xenophobes seem to be sore winners). “Go back to your f------ country next be your family” said the incoherent note delivered to one household.

But what if Briffault is right that only democracy is consistent with justice? The referendum was legally enacted by an elected government; how could anyone deny the right of working people in depressed northern cities to vote in it, even if the result of the vote was going to do immediate and massive damage to their country’s economy and their own interests? (The pound has plummeted against the dollar: Hard-up British families dreaming of a trip to Disneyworld will find it much less affordable now, while prosperous American professors thinking of taking in the Edinburgh Festival this August will be smiling.)

The Churchillian bon mot remains a classic, a witty and memorable expression of a paradoxical truth about political systems. But whereas it used to make me smile, today it doesn’t.