Human societies cannot exist, or at least function very well, with everyone simply doing their own thing. We need rules and order. We need cohesion. And for that to happen, we need leaders.
The age-old challenge for every society that has ever existed is: How do we choose our leader?
Drawing straws probably won’t work because not everyone is wired to be a leader. We want someone who wants to lead—and, with rare exceptions, there is always more than one person who does, and who thinks he or she would be better than anyone else. It seems that right after God got done injecting a different brand of sexual desire in males and females to ensure propagation, He injected a lust-for-power gene into some of them—usually males—to ensure there would always be leaders.
But I digress.
Back to the point: societies need leaders, preferably leaders who lead well. So, how do we choose them?
We know about monarchies. The king has children, the eldest son becomes crown prince, and when Daddy dies, he becomes king. That doesn’t always work because the eldest son might not have the power gene—or the aptitude—to be a good leader.
The Ottomans took a different approach. When the Sultan died, his sons competed for the throne, sometimes violently. The winner eliminated his principal rivals, including brothers, and became Sultan. Ta-da! The Ottoman Empire had a new leader, selected by a very brutal form of competition. Remarkably, the system produced some very capable leaders and lasted for centuries.
More commonly throughout history, those with a strong lust for power, some aptitude, and usually some luck overcame their rivals and became the strongman, autocrat, or dictator. He or she ruled until someone else came along and forcibly displaced them. Messy, unpredictable and uncivilized—but it worked often enough to be the dominant system throughout most of human history.
And then there is democracy.
In a democracy, members of the society are empowered to cast votes for candidates seeking to become their leaders. The votes are counted, a winner is declared, and that person becomes the leader.
But here is the crucial point: For democracy to work, it is not enough to count the votes and declare a winner. The members of the society must accept the declared winner as their legitimate leader.
Consider the presidential election of 2000. Al Gore won the national popular vote by more than half a million votes. Before Florida was resolved, Gore was ahead of George W. Bush in electoral votes. Florida, where the election was extraordinarily close, would determine the presidency. After recounts and court challenges, the U.S. Supreme Court, by a 5–4 decision, effectively ended the recount process. Florida’s electoral votes went to Bush, giving him the Electoral College victory.
Gore had a very good case for believing he should have been president. He could have continued to fight the result. Instead, he accepted the decision, conceded the election, congratulated Bush and urged his supporters to accept him as their president.
And listen to how Gore explained his decision. After saying that he strongly disagreed with the Supreme Court’s decision, he said, “I accept the finality of this outcome” and that, “for the sake of our unity as a people and the strength of our democracy,” he was offering his concession.
Those words capture something fundamental about democracy. Gore did not have to agree with the outcome. He did not have to believe the decision was correct. But he recognized that democracy requires something greater than winning an individual contest. It requires accepting the outcome and recognizing the person declared the winner as the nation’s legitimate leader.
We can argue passionately over candidates, policies and votes. We can campaign, protest, litigate and disagree. But eventually the votes are counted, the established institutions render their decisions, a winner is declared—and the society must accept that person as its leader.
Can we have consensus that in a democracy, acceptance does not require agreement? It requires recognizing that the democratic process is bigger than any one candidate, any one election and any one person. And that without this acceptance, democracy will not work.
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