There is nothing to sour you on the concept of democracy quite like actually having to live in one.
Look, before you get the wrong idea, obviously democracy is wonderful and great and everything: about 64 countries (as well as the EU) are holding elections in 2024, which by any metric is an enormous chunk of the globe’s population dutifully marking a piece of paper as the universal symbol of “Umm, I suppose … these people? If I absolutely must.” Sixty-four national elections is a lot, and it goes a long way towards demonstrating democracy’s perpetual “hanging-by-a-thread” popularity as a system of government du jour. Well, for at least one more election cycle.
Among the 50-odd elections that have been carried out so far, there’s been a pretty even spread of the usual outcomes: surprise upsets, inevitable confirmations of the worst of our fears, some corrected injustices and others that keep a sort of meandering and maddening status quo. But then there are the really batshit ones, the singularly crazy polls that deliver existential chaos, unrest, protest, threats of physical violence and profound, lasting upheaval.
I am of course talking about the recent vote for the Board of Trustees of the block of flats where I live – which, for the sake of anonymity, I shall call Spankerton Heights to protect the innocent, the disinterested, the cantankerous and the permanently malcontent. Otherwise known as the voting public.
The fraught democratic fistfight for the control of “Spankers” has convinced me that the frenzied pandemonium of America’s unending electioneering, the sweaty high-stakes tension around the future of Taiwan, and the Herculean undertaking of India’s enormous ballot – none of these comes close to the medieval, operatic clusterfuck of your average sectional title election process. Collectively, there is more poise and nuance in a public services riot, more sensitivity in a children’s playground, and more respect for one’s fellow man in a parking-lot knife-fight.
A democratic duty
The problem in my building, much like your average democracy, is that people think the right to vote comes automatically bundled with getting to Loudly Have Their Say Very Often And At Length Whether Or Not That Was Even The Question In The First Place. Which means that the actual voting ends up being a kind of exhausted white flag after the thoroughly bruising build-up to it.
Blocks of flats are the perfect microcosm for democracy. It’s an uneasy consensus writ small – a restive population only united by the fact that their desire to not be in any way responsible outweighs the bad-tempered rancour directed at the people who are responsible.
The metaphors are everywhere: everyone moans about the lifts but will resist the increase in levies required to do something about them with the passion of a dachshund resisting a walk in the rain. People will complain about noise but loudly denounce rules attempted to address the problem as appalling and draconian. It’s the population of a country shouting about how fed up they are, but now all of them are your neighbour, and you inevitably run into them in the lifts when you’re gross and sweaty from gym.
My building has a singularly imposing art-deco lobby. It’s the kind of place where the original architects not so much abandoned the idea of imparting some sense of welcoming softness as tossed it directly into an active volcano. It’s all edifice and angle – the marble-clad heart of a building that has seen the collapse of empire, World War 2, the imprisonment and release of Nelson Mandela and the invention of both the sausage-stuffed crust pizza and OnlyFans.
It’s also generally colder than a Norwegian toilet seat. This is where, uncomfortably perched on plastic chairs on an inevitably chilly weekday evening, the citizens of Spankerton traditionally shuffle together to exercise their annual democratic duty in the AGM and election process.
The one upside of this discomfort is that it makes the meetings slightly snappier than would otherwise be the case. That crackling tension between the folks who just want to get the hell back to their apartments, and those who want to talk at length about sewage and effluent (this is one of the things they do not tell you about adulthood: how much of your life will be used up talking about sewage and effluent), the use of the common areas and whether or not a tree someone was quite fond of has been wantonly overtrimmed, often spills over into people endlessly yelling and accusing each other of fascism.
Which is what just about every democratic process looks like right now. And so, I have a perpetually broken lift and the world is being boiled alive by climate change. At least, as some sort of compensation, I know more about parliamentary procedure and the Protection of Personal Information Act than I ever thought I would.
As a final thought, I issue a general plea to the populations of Mauritius, Somaliland, Sri Lanka, Gabon, Senegal, Guinea-Bissau, Romania, Uruguay, Namibia, Iceland, Lichtenstein, Romania, Ghana, Bolivia and Chad – all who still intend to go to the polls before the end of the year. It’s not too late for you to try something else. Maybe a singing contest or something.
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