About 30 years ago now, I invented a word.

I probably shouldn’t be as proud of it as I am. It wasn’t exactly hard work. Really I just took two existing words, shortened one, mashed them together, and pronounced it slightly differently so that it scans well.

The word I came up with, in case you didn’t see the title of this blog post, was: “Pseudocracy“, my neologism of “Pseudo-democracy”. I pronounce it like: “Soo-doc-racy”

I’ve used it fairly consistently over the years – at least within my own internal dialogue – but I don’t think I’ve ever written it down, and in discourse with others I would tend not to use it (generally to avoid the “huh?”). So I thought I should probably write it down. And I think I’ll start using it more in everyday communication.

A pseudocracy would be a state/organisation/etc which pretends to be a democracy, but actually isn’t in practice.

One thing that every pseudocracy I’ve ever seen has in common is that they all love to make very loud noises, trumpeting how they’re totally democratic. This will usually be accompanied by rhetoric about how democracy is good, and the only way to do things, and there is an implicit assumption that because they’re a democracy, this makes them good and right.

It’s really a pretty ingenious piece of propaganda: you scream at the top of your lungs about what a champion of democracy you are, and you infer a feeling of self-superiority to all participants in your system over those poor saps who don’t live in such “democratic” systems. There’s no discussion or debate about whether your system actually is a democracy, and no discussion about how it might be, for example, rotten to the core and servile to financial interests to the point that it is effectively an aristocracy. Instead, the narrative simply assumes and implies that the system is a democracy. The way this is very often framed is that is is essentially wrong (ethically) – or at the very least misguided – to question whether the pseudocracy is a functioning democracy or not – of course it’s a democracy – it says it right there on the tin!.

Any attempt to question this will inevitably be met with a rejoinder along the lines of “well, yes, our ‘democracy’ might not be perfect, but it’s a whole lot better than a lot of other places in the world“, as if this was a reason to not try to improve things in the pseudocracy. The narrative will characterise the system as a “mostly-functioning democracy”, seeming to give some ground. This is a tactic to avoid actual discussion of what would be necessary to turn the pseudocracy into an actual democracy – any attempt to do so will be met with “well we have a system which allows change, all you need to do is work within that system”.

But another important characteristic – perhaps the defining feature – of the pseudocracy is that it is engineered to make meaningful change towards a state of actual democracy effectively impossible: While there may be processes in place which would theoretically allow the pseudocracy to change into an actual democracy, in practice there is a large number of near-implacable barriers in place to prevent that from happening.

Expect to see heavy “lawyering” – there will be processes and procedures in place for everything, and change definitely is possible, you just need to work within the system, and it’s totally just an unfortunate coincidence that these processes and procedures are arranged in such a way as to make any actual meaningful change effectively impossible. And if you question those processes there will be totally-reasonable-sounding explanations for all of them. Like, for example, “we’ve been doing it that way for 200 years”. Also, How dare you suggest that this might be intentional obfuscation and obstruction, or that the fallible human being with “honourable” in his title might not actually be honourable? It says it right there in his title! (that we conferred on him after he repeatedly demonstrated his servility to the pseudocracy).

You can also expect to see heavy propaganda within the pseudocracy. There will be lots of drum-beating, and politicians and their lapdog media rags shouting loudly about how we’re so great, and how we’re a “free” country, and how we’re a force for good in the world. They’ll point at their rigged court system and the fact that they hold elections where you get to have a say in which corporate whore becomes leader, and they’ll say: “look! we do things in a totally fair manner!”. They love to point out how they champion free speech, and how they totally allow protests which will lead to no change at all – as long as you’ve got a permit for your protest, obviously.

Some friends and I had a “joke” about 15 years ago, which went something along the lines of: “If a country has ‘democratic’ in it’s name, you know it’s not very democratic at all”. This still holds true. I wasn’t initially sure whether I’d label countries with “democratic” in their title as pseudocracies or not, but they certainly are – they’re nondemocratic states pretending they are democratic. But when I say “pseudocracy” I tend to mean the more insidious types – the ones where, at a glance, the average person might be inclined to say “oh, well, I guess it’s mostly democratic?”. And especially the ones where nobody really questions it at all, where the propaganda is already pervasive, and most people simply assume that it’s a democracy. Maybe you could split the group into two, with a term like “soft pseudocracies” referring to the ones with “democratic” in their title. I think perhaps the distinction is whether the population of that country believes it to be democratic – maybe it’s all down to how good their propaganda is. I think that the reality is, like most things, that there are grey areas and the lines are blurry.

I guess narrative convention requires me to provide a closing paragraph for an article like this. But I don’t really have one. I was going to make a snarky comment about how I definitely don’t want to name any countries as pseudocracies, because that would be really offensive to those countries, in much the same way that, for example, implying that a country which has definitely committed war crimes, and who has failed to prosecute those war crimes, and who has prosecuted and jailed the person who brought those war crimes to light, might be war criminals, is super offensive and hypocritical and worthy of an apology. But I’d hate to ruffle any feathers.

So instead I’ll point out that this is a made-up word that I invented, and there probably aren’t any pseudocracies out there, only true democracies where people have agency over their futures. And that it’s totally definitely not the case that every single “democracy” on earth right now is actually a pseudocracy, and how there never has actually been a democracy, only pseudocracies.