Democracy as Popular Responsibility

For the past couple of weeks I've been watching this show Legend of the Galactic Heroes. It's a curious entity: a Japanese anime from 1988 that, in a whole host of ways, has a shockingly progressive ethos. And it also manages something that I've almost never encountered: meaningful, interesting exploration of political philosophy through fictional narrative. I'm not sure why exactly that's so rare. Perhaps it's because democracies are boring, for narrative fiction purposes anyway. Stories demand characters but democracies are fundamentally not about any one person. Political stories set in democracies, therefore, will often over-emphasize the importance of individual figures, which is fine if they're just stories but problematic if they try to get philosophical. (I believe that's in part the story of The West Wing.) Most fantasy worlds, meanwhile, are pre-democratic, essentially feudal/monarchical societies, which are much better for storytelling but also boring for political theory purposes because, well, non-democratic political theory is wrong per se and therefore not very interesting.

Legend of the Galactic Heroes solves this dilemma I think in part by structuring itself as a conflict between the Empire, a Germanic society ruled by an autocratic Kaiser and an oppressive, entrenched nobility, and the Free Planets Alliance, a democratic society that broke away from the Empire some few hundred years ago. So far this sounds like a pretty standard Cold War-style Good vs. Evil story. The thing is, though, that the Alliance is actually a deeply diseased "democracy," probably as a result of 150 years of perpetual war. The show does a deft job of depicting a society that is simply not free despite its formally democratic institutions. The Empire, meanwhile, is equally decrepit after five hundred years of comfortable privilege for its aristocrats, but has the good fortune to be conquered by Reinhard von Lohengramm, one of the protagonists of the show, who rises up from the minor nobility to become Kaiser and begin his own, new dynasty. Though no democrat, Reinhard is very much a progressive reformer.

And what this dynamic sets up is the very interesting question of which side of this war between a corrupted democracy and an enlightened dictatorship is actually the good side. It's a particularly pressing question for the other chief protagonist, Yang Wenli, an admiral in the Alliance fleet who actually hates war and really just wants to be a history scholar, who feels uncomfortable about fighting on behalf of the in many ways unworthy Alliance government. And for whatever reason (credit presumably goes in large part to the writers of the show), Yang is spectacularly wise, and every single thing he says about political philosophy, every decision that he makes as the war goes along, is fascinating. It really gets at the ideas of, what is democracy, why is it good and important, etc., in a very deep way that you just don't see in a lot of fiction.