When I was in high school in the 1990s, the teaching staff suggested it might be time to change our uniforms from grey to green. I will never forget our year advisor, Mr Smith, standing before the assembly and saying, “Everyone is wearing grey shirts, grey shorts, grey dresses, and everything just looks… grey.”
Interestingly, however, the school decided to put it to a vote. My generation was not taught a lick of grammar, but we were still inculcated with the importance of the democratic process. So we students cast our ballots and, although I don’t think the school ever availed us of the exact numbers, I inferred from Mr Smith’s sullen attitude that the green uniforms had been overwhelmingly voted down.
I can tell you the reason: teenage boys want to look tough and manly. A grey shirt says tough and manly. Pastel green says I prance around the meadow with fairies.
A few years later – I believe it was the year after I graduated from high school, in fact – the uniforms became green anyway. I guess the teachers felt democracy had ‘failed’ because it didn’t result in their preferred outcome. So they did what any totalitarian regime does: they forced the citizenry to do things their way because their way was the ‘right’ way.
It’s an attitude that has been rearing its head more and more in the past 20 or 30 years and it suggests to me that the western world has become complacent in the stability that democracy engenders.
I remember learning about the democratic process in primary school and it made absolute sense to me. Let’s use a relatively benign example. Group A wants to raise taxes to fund better roads. Group B wants taxes to remain at current levels because unemployment is up and higher taxes could stunt the economy. When these two groups can’t agree on a course of action, their arguments are publicised and the decision is put to a vote. Whichever position gets the greatest number of votes wins out. While we don’t have this sort of ‘direct democracy’ in Australia (I wish we did), we still have a say at every election and whenever a referendum is called.
The beauty of democracy is that it offers a comparatively fair way to break a stalemate that would otherwise never end because there is no objective way to do so. In September 2016, the Australian federal government proposed a plebiscite on the subject of same sex marriage for February this year and those in favour of changing the Marriage Act immediately started trying to circumvent the democratic process.* “The polls show 60% of Australians are in favour of gay marriage, so why bother with a plebiscite?” they said, even though they knew perfectly well that in 1999 polls showed Australians were in favour of becoming a republic… but the ballot box showed otherwise. They also trotted out the combination of logical fallacy and sanctimony which goes, “Anyone who disagrees with gay marriage is a homophobe, so why waste millions of dollars on a plebiscite? Just make it legal. It’s the right thing to do.”
What these people can’t seem to understand is that any view of what is ‘right’ is subjective. Like it or not, marriage as it stands was and is an integral part of our society’s fabric and the demos should have a say about whether it is changed. A great many Australians also think putting a moratorium on Islamic immigration is the right thing to do, so should we just ram that through parliament without a vote, too?
What it reduces down to, weirdly enough, is bad sportsmanship. Accepting that sometimes the majority’s decision goes your way, and sometimes it doesn’t. We’ve also seen this bad sportsmanship about the Brexit vote in the UK and the result of the last US election. While the bad sports might try to frame their objections in moral terms, what they are really saying is, “The students chose the grey uniform, but we don’t like grey. Let’s just make them wear green uniforms anyway.”
To anyone who understands the purpose and value of democracy, it’s nothing short of chilling.
* They got their way (after a fashion) when a majority left-leaning senate voted against holding the plebiscite. Given their certainty of success, one wonders why they were so afraid.