What will Canada look like in the year 2020? To encourage a debate about the major challenges Canada will face in the coming decades the Dominion Institute, CBC.ca, La Presse and The Toronto Star have invited twenty leading thinkers to write about an issue or event that they think could transform the country by 2020.

Mark Kingwell

A fiction, surely, because it's so often untrue in practice, but a bracing one. The vast majority of human history has run with no such belief in play. If democracy seems basic and best to us now - to the extent that we are even willing, along with our friends to the south and across the Atlantic, to forcibly export it - it is well to remember that the experiment of demos polis is still in its infancy. Our notions about democracy date from no earlier than about 1670, and even that is a scholarly stretch given that the modern forms of electoral politics are essentially twentieth-century inventions.

However, the reasons for qualifying our regard of democracy run beyond its youth and potential for abuse. Democracy is not just exclusive; it is frequently bizarre. Plato distrusted the demos because, like many a leader today, he did not really trust the people to act in their own best interest. Desires are too strong for most people to master, he argues in the Republic, and a city that gave into democracy was, he thought, ripe for domination by the clever demagogue he called the tyrant. Hence the need for the philosopher-king, who would guarantee justice by virtue of his great wisdom (and a strict division of labour).

In a varied country like Canada, where not long ago Don Cherry was voted the nation's leading public intellectual (I'm not making that up), such elitism is, of course, impossible to utter, even if it is secretly harboured. Politicians have become brokers of interest rather than leaders, and citizens reduce themselves to consumers of goods and services enjoyed in return for regular obedience to the tax code.

This devolution, however efficient, does little to improve the status of politicians: a recent Angus Reid poll found that just 15 percent of Canadians trust their elected public servants, a sad story that is, more sadly still, news to nobody. Elections, meanwhile, are stolen with impunity even in countries that claim to be in democracy's vanguard. (It helps if your brother is the governor of the disputed territory.)

The kicker is that none of the other pressing issues of our shared future - dwindling resources, climate change, global water degradation - is likely to be addressed effectively unless and until elected governments get in on the action. And they'll only do that if we citizens insist on it.

This won't be easy. One clear future for democracy runs roughly as follows. Let's call it the Dark Age Ahead, or DAA, scenario, after the bestselling gloom manual by the late Jane Jacobs.

Greater and greater distrust of the process combines with mounting cynicism among those who contest elections. Technological advances create more, rather than fewer, opportunities for electoral abuse, even as the gap between tech haves and have-nots widens. Political apathy grows more widespread, fed by a popular culture of comprehensive banality and the sort of blind affluence that consumes products and services without ever asking the real cost of their availability.

The wealthy countries of the developed West grow ever fatter in their all-leisure-all-the-time manner, ignoring the growing unrest over water, food, and disease among the vast bulk of the planet's people, now living in the megacities of Asia, Africa, and South America, with their vertiginous combinations of futuristic luxury for the top percentile and medieval immiseration for the rest. So much for democracy's promise at the global level.

At the national level, democracy declines into a parody of itself, a hyper-mediated sideshow that commands dwindling interest, such that some ten times more people are moved to vote for an aspiring television singer or potential fashion model than for a leader.

Ah! you will say, that is the present, not the future. And of course you would be right. The DAA scenario is merely a modest extension of existing trends, based on the sound predictive principle that most people, and certainly most politicians, fail to change their self-harming behaviour even in the face of massive evidence - particularly if they are palliated by rounds of shopping and relentless braindead television.

Under these conditions, no amount of tinkering with policy levers or, still less, attempts to market politicians as if they were the aspiring singers or fashion models, will do anything to lessen the damage. On the contrary, that is the political equivalent of widening freeways as a response to traffic or adding belt holes are as cure for overeating. Giving in is giving over, and heightening the media image of politics cannot ever be its salvation. It is all reminiscent of the therapeutic definition of insanity: "doing the same things over and over and hoping for different results."

If the DAA scenario has any value, it is negative. It issues a call to action based on the perception that history, if not quite over, in the manner predicted by Hegel or Francis Fukuyama, is nevertheless stalled. Democratization, so far from ushering in a conflict-free, post-historical comfort for all, has generated new pockets of suffering, new chasms of inequality.

Progress has been revealed as a dangerous addiction to technology and fossil fuels. The Western forms, moreover, perceived as licentious, are resisted, sometimes violently, by those of more transcendental conviction. The stall lies in there being no credible alternative. If not democracy, then what? If not freedom for all, then freedom for whom?

What sorts of shifts in action or structure could usher in a different democratic future: not the dark demagoguery of the Roman forum, with its bread and circuses, but the airy public space of the Athenian agora?

Well, instead of making predictions about what democracy will be like in 2020 - a mere three or four elections away, after all - allow me to do something actually much more future-oriented, which is to express some rational hopes about the democratic experiment. The phrase not an oxymoron, I assure you. Though hope frequently gets a bad rap from the hard-headed, its thoughtful forms are not just rational but, to the present point, indispensable in any flourishing polity. Hope is, among other things, the most activist of citizen virtues.

I express these hopes negatively, in the form of identifying the most proximate dangers to the basic optimism of all democratic politics, together with their solutions. If democracy is to shape a bright rather than dark future, we all must act to resist the following threats, in ascending order of seriousness:

1. Redective populism. We regularly decry the elitism and arrogance of our elected leaders, but the alternatives usually offered - direct democracy, regular plebiscites, vote by numbers - are afflicted by the same youngest-common-denominator pathology that reduces so much cultural production to the sophistication level of a twelve-year-old. In our version of the "here comes everybody" syndrome, we get, not the vaunted "hive mind" or so-called "wisdom of crowds," but just a reduction of everything to aggregated passing desire. Crowds can be dumb as well as wise. Resting political decision-making on them is the political equivalent of solving the ills of big media by giving everyone a blog.

Solution: more proportional representation, but not at the expense of parliamentary supremacy. The virtue of electoral politics, when they work, is to find the optimum distance between majoritarian muscle and elite domination. Elected governments and a separation of powers are essential to this balance (though see the next point on why we need more decentralization).

2. Bureaucraization and its evil twin, cynicism. Democracy has been facetiously defined as the freedom to choose who will get the blame, but bureaucracy - rule by no one - ensures that there is no one to blame. Thus, the standard democratic fear of experts or elites is actually far outstripped by the danger of institutional nonentities. The familiar "tragedy of the commons" - whereby what is owned by none is neglected by all - is now made into governmental infrastructure. The resulting who-cares attitude by neglected citizens is more than just media-saturated malaise; it is the rational response of agents who feel nobody is accountable, hence that demands of accountability are a sucker bet.

Solution: increased civic participation. Calls for democratic participation are common, but they too often succumb to what democratic theorist Carole Pateman called "solely protective participation": that is, the scant action of helping to decide who the decision-makers will be. Decentralization of governance, not only practicable but necessary in complex societies, is the only way citizens will remain connected to the effects of political decision-making. It is too easy to disavow unjust policy when it is made opaque and distant.

3. Exclusive claims. By far the gravest clear danger to the future of democracy is the creeping loss of its rational centre: the idea, best defended by the German philosopher Jürgen Habermas, that "the unforced force of the better argument" is the basis of social justice. That is another way of saying that, in the public sphere, discursive reason is the one and only standard by which democratic arrangements can be assessed. Truth is not assumed; indeed, truth is not the regulative ideal of democracy, justice is. Public argument is always futural: we strive to come closer, to get better, to refine.

The threat posed by exclusive claims is two-fold: obvious external enemies, who regard liberal reason as the satanic enemy; and less obvious internal enemies, including both identity-politicians and presidents, who rely on inner conviction rather than public argument. Any political position that claims access to god's will, the spirit of the people, or the impossible-to-share experience of oppression is inherently anti-democratic. It assumes a purity of conclusion or community that is foreign to the experiment. Democracy can, indeed must, embrace criticism and otherness; that is its genius. Assertions of privileged knowledge or essential truth are not criticism, however; they are ideology.

Solution: citizen education understood as cultivation of public reason. In ancient societies, all educated people were versed in rhetoric, the art of rational persuasion. Nowadays rhetoric is just another word for spin. All citizens need to be initiated by schools and universities in the discipline of making good arguments and criticizing bad ones. And politicians need to lead by example. Logic for everyone!

4. Comfort. The only reason this danger ranks higher as a threat to democratic hope than the previous ones is because it is so stealthy and hard to resist. It is the enemy we cannot fight because we cannot see.

We in Canada often appear to believe, say while contesting a federal election or, still more, viewing a leaders' debate, that the larger, world-historical tectonics of democratic threat are not our concern. Our worries rise and fall with the state of the GST, disbursement of transfer payments, softwood lumber tariffs, maybe border security. The great fiction of Canadian democracy - a fiction more pernicious than the systemic one at every democracy's heart - is that our polity can continue on more or less its present course no matter what happens elsewhere. Canadian society, whatever its own intramural inequalities and injustices, is a privileged bubble that floats above a roiling cauldron of human desire and need.

Solution: public spaces and public debates that centre on the transnational obligations of all democrats.

There is a peculiar benefit to our bubble, and here hope enters the picture in positive guise. Canadians enjoy, at their best and most responsible, a political perspective denied, per circumstance, to others. This perspective is not a matter of our much celebrated multiculturalism - in practice, more a matter of rival World Cup flags than anything substantive. It is, instead, a function of Canada's status as a postmodern democracy in a world struggling with premodern misery and modern domination. Across an unlikely land mass, a varied and shifting populace strives to achieve not simply a hands-off modus vivendi but an ongoing discursive enactment of justice.

The achievement could be an example to the world, but only if we take the world into account. Canadians (including other writers in this series) often lament their loss of a place in global affairs, but they rarely consider the loss of the globe's place with them. Justice doesn't stop at the border, and neither does democracy, even if sovereignty and citizenship do. Exporting democracy is democracy's inner logic: it is, and always has been, a matter of extending the given. How we assert ourselves outside our borders will determine whether Canada continues to deserve the title of democratic nation.

The old rap against democracy was that it encouraged levelling: of class distinctions, of course, but perhaps also of excellence, resulting in a state-wide version of the tall-poppy syndrome. In the words of Gilbert and Sullivan, "if everybody's somebody, nobody's anybody." The new challenge for democrats is not that one, which is much exaggerated. No, the real challenge for Canadian democrats is, rather, to continue extending and extending the promise of justice for everyone - which is likewise justice, indeed life, for ourselves.

Until everybody's somebody, nobody's anybody.

Mark Kingwell is a professor of philosophy at the University of Toronto and a Senior Fellow of Massey College. He specialises in theories of politics and culture. He is a contributing editor for Harper's Magazine, the Globe and Mail books section, and former columnist for the National Post. He frequently appears on television and radio, often on the CBC.

Canada in 2020 is an initiative of Dominion Institute in association with CBC.ca, La Presse and The Toronto Star.

What do you think Canada will look like in the year 2020? Enter the Canada in 2020 essay contest and compete for $2020 cash prize and the opportunity to be published in The Toronto Star. Visit www.twenty-twenty.ca