Does Fantasy Have To Be Anti-Democratic?

I've been thinking a lot, lately, about two subjects that don't always live in the same intellectual neighbourhood: Fantasy and democracy. Democracy, because the Canadian federal election is this Tuesday (if you're Canadian, please do vote). And I've been thinking for some time now about how to reconcile my love of fantasy with the values of democracy.

Fantasy is often viewed as being an essentially anti-democratic genre, and it's hard to argue with that in the post-Tolkien milieu that still dominates the field. Epic fantasy, especially, idealizes monarchy and the aristocracy; it romanticizes agrarian life and rural conservatism while condescending to the people who actual live on and work the land (there's usually, for instance, only one peasant or working-class character, and he or she is always humble, down-to-earth and played for laughs).

The problem with kings, in fantasy, is when you have a bad one, and when he's replaced with a good one, the problem is solved. Cities are viewed with suspicion, as dens of sin, disease and crushing poverty... And yes, medieval cities were all that, but so was the medieval countryside, and unlike life on the farm, the city offered freedom and opportunity. There was a saying in Germany in the Middle Ages: "City air is free air."

In reality, the solution to bad kings was no kings, or (as in the British and Canadian tradition) monarchs who are so powerless that it doesn't matter very much if they're good people or not. The greatest good has been accomplished by getting more people, and more different kinds of people, empowered and involved in the decision-making process. Too often, fantasy writers suggest, this was all a mistake, and what we really need is a king with a magic sword to stab evil and keep the lower orders in their place.

Tolkien gets blamed for a lot of this. But in fact, his idealized agrarian society of hobbits functionally has no government at all, either before or after the Return of the King, and both the hobbits and the king like it that way. It's a society that gets along because the hobbits want it to, which is a good functional description of anarchism in action. Of course, it's an insular, patriarchalist, classist, culturally conservative and anti-intellectual sort of anarchism, but the fact remains that Lord of the Rings isn't quite the "Hooray for aristocracy!" tract some critics suggest.

That being said, it was the idea of the returning king who would save us all, not an anarchistic agrarian society, that echoed through the legions of Tolkien imitators.

Of course, many fine writers have reacted against this trend, and its troubling ethical implications. Ursula Le Guin's early books were full of lost kings and mentoring wizards, but then she started thinking about what all of that would really mean. Terry Pratchett, in a more comedic vein, is another example. His Discworld city of Ankh-Morpork, ruled by a sort-of benevolent dictator, has the usual prophecy of a king who will return... but the king has decided not to. And the dictator, partly by accident, has over the course of several books installed all the institutions required for a functioning democracy except democracy itself, including social mobility, mass communications, a free press, the rule of law and equal opportunity for women and minorities.

The exceptions are bright lights, but they shine in a dark sea of secret heirs with magic swords and their wizard mentors who return to take the throne and defeat the Evil Overlord of Blahdeblah. They're exceptions.

The interesting thing is that this disdain for democracy often extends to fantasy set in a more contemporary milieu as well. Urban fantasy is full of wizards keeping magic alive in secret, of families with the magical door to another world kept safely locked away in the basement, or secret orders of monster hunters protecting us from threats they never bother telling us about.
Aristocracy is alive and well in fantasy novels set in modern-day Canada and the U.S.

And in the stories, this is always treated as good, or at the very least absolutely necessary. There's usually a hand-waved explanation that either us plebes would have our puny minds blown by the existence of magic and monsters, or we'd be jealous and try to destroy the people who can do magic.

In other words, some people -- special people -- are above accountability, and the more important their job, the more above accountability they need to be, to Do What Has To Be Done.

Again, much like the generally anti-democratic principles of epic fantasy, this view is entirely at odds with the values of a modern democratic society. We have learned, through painful experience, that the only thing that prevents power from being abused, that keeps the public good being advanced, is openness, transparency and accountability. People who believe they need to wield their power in secret, without scrutiny, tend to be at best tragically mistaken.

Christine McCall, and the other heroes of Cold Iron Badge, are police officers. They live in a world that's very like our own -- except, as Christine has pointed out, on a strange day not very many years before, the gates to Fairyland opened, and magic returned. But that event, although it shook the world, did not bring down civilization or destroy democratic institutions.

The Borderland Guard aren't conventional cops by a long shot, but they have many of the same responsibilities. There are crimes to investigate, a border to patrol, and people to protect -- or try to. And being a police officer, in contemporary Canada, means being a member of an organization that is (sometimes more in theory than in practice) accountable to democratic institutions. It means accountability.

This is not terribly innovative; it's not the first time it's been done in a story. It also isn't going to be immediately relevant to the plot... not for a while.

But it's important to me, and something I felt was worth exploring. Democracy gets short shrift too often in fantasy, but democracy is better than rule by monarchs or aristocrats, and in a democracy, power is supposed to be used for the public good by people who are accountable to the public.

Magic doesn't have to be a secret, and monster hunters don't have to be a shadowy conspiracy keeping us ignorant for our own good. In Cold Iron Badge, the monster hunters aren't just responsible for the people they protect; they're accountable to them as well.