There are ways to make decisions and there are the actual decisions one makes. The former is about procedures, the ‘how’ questions. The latter is about substantive calls, the ‘what’ questions. Now it only takes a moment’s thought to realise that no method or procedure for making decisions will be perfect. We are fallible, biological creatures. We humans are in the ‘least-bad’ business. And for me, it has long seemed that the least-bad way to make political decisions was to let the numbers count. Majoritarianism. Democracy in other words, at least in its old-fashioned sense of counting everyone equally and voting. (Human rights lawyer types and top judges have these past couple of decades tried to redefine democracy so that it includes a hefty substantive component, namely that these elites also approve of the decisions made – and of course the judges don’t put it that way; they talk in terms of a decision having to be in keeping with ‘the rule of law’ or ‘sufficiently rights-respecting’ or some such.) But the point is any procedure will sometimes misfire. Majoritarianism misfires, hence Winston Churchill’s famous quip that democracy is the worst form of government… except for everything else. But then, too, letting a bunch of unelected judges have a veto over majoritarianism misfires too. No option is – make that can be – perfect. You pick your poison.
