Can we have democracy without informed consent

Someone on the BBC comments section made me make a blog. It was either that or rage at the 400 character message limit and craft a reply that didn't really have much to do with the discussion at hand. Essentially, in a comment on a blog by Nick Robinson, the following comment was posted.

These LibDems think they have a natural right to power. The 57 are holding the country to ransom. Their leaders are a typical Oxbridge elite who see their way as the only way & democracy as for the plebs. We don't want this govt, we want a General Election NOW!
-- nickthesocialist

I'm all for ranting invective, but certain key things bug me - and one of those is when people use phrases like "Oxbridge elite" in a context clearly designed to be spoken in the same tone of voice (and for pretty much the same reasons) as a 70's skinhead saying the words "dirty foreigner". The following reply thus issued forth from my mighty internet steed.

> Rails against lack of democratic spirit in the political elite
> Demands that a democratic election be set aside

Doublethink at its finest!

We the people chose this government (really, we did - there was no rational democratic choice to make a coalition with labour at the time and a minority government wasn't in the national interest) so we get to live with it, for better or worse.
-- me

Which, in turn yielded the following response:

Whisper it quietly Bob: "no informed consent from votes without reasonable public understanding of facts and principles, and without reasonable debate reflecting the full range of views having support in reason and / or in numbers"

The 'reasonable' will prevail when we have adult understanding and settlement on Equal Democracy

Until equal, 'free' - obliged - 'to calculate'
-- All for All

This reply gave me pause. My instant reaction was to think "yes and whilst we're at it I'd like a million pounds and an indestructible robot body please", but then I thought to question why it was that I thought such a thing, and was this utopian ideal of a perfectly informed electorate ever plausible?

Informed consent would appear to be, on first examination, a perfectly reasonable pre-condition for consideration of a true democracy. It is, after all, the basis of our contract of care with doctors (and other healthcare providers), so why should we not apply it to the contract we make with the various charlatans and megalomaniacs who enjoin us to gift them sway over us for 5 year increments? There comes with this, however, a realisation that there is a limit as to just how informed we can be. If a doctor tells me that I need a radiation treatment, then it is entirely possible given how I chose to while away my undergraduate years that I could tell him in more detail and with more understanding the workings of whichever device it was that he had concluded was to be the delivery system of choice for the treatment he had selected. How that treatment interacts with my body, and why that treatment would be most effective in dealing with whichever ailment my non-indestructible non-robot body had saddled me with would in all but the most trivial of cases be a complete mystery to me. The consent I am giving is therefore not in any measure informed. It is instead founded on a trust held between myself and my doctor.

To first order, it would appear that the same principle applies within the political arena; it is equivalently true that many of the minutiae of government are opaque to those of us who may only devote enough time to gain a casual understanding of the issues. By applying the same "redefinition" of "informed" it might be argued that this would be sufficient to produce an ideal democracy. The fallacy of this position of course lies in the lack of the same covenant of trust we grant to doctors. Politicians, in common with Wizards, are noted for their deep and pervading willingness to sell their own grandmothers for more power. Most, it should be noted, have (or start out with) noble intentions - lofty ideals and a zeal to help their fellow man - but they have all of them arrived at the conclusion that whether their goal be noble or nefarious, the way to achieve this is power, thus disqualifying them from receiving any form of trust from us to them. If we are to consent to giving a party (or an individual politician) power, then where possible it should be with as much information and oversight as possible - informed in the literal sense of the word, as opposed to the fig leaf we apply in matters of health. Without it, the statement

no informed consent from votes without reasonable public understanding of facts and principles, and without reasonable debate reflecting the full range of views having support in reason and / or in numbers

is unarguably true, but is that really a reasonable statement to make? My argument is that it is not, for one very simple reason: individual choice. It is the right of the individual to be exactly as informed or as ill-informed as they wish to be, and this need not even be a binary state. Whilst there are undoubtedly many people who remain blissfully unaware of the political events of any given week, there are others still who choose to spend their limited time following only a subset of these issues to range of understanding. It is therefore unreasonable to state voter understanding as a pre-requisite for a true democratic mandate.

As an addendum: does the unreasonableness of the goal mean that we should not strive to achieve it anyway? Clearly not. This is one of those many instances in life where the journey is more important than the destination. It does not change the fact, however, that you cannot appeal to some utopian ideal of democratic mandate to invalidate an unwanted result. The result was what it was for better or for worse, and it remains hypocritical of the original poster to assert that the "Oxbridge elite" were not interested in democracy, before calling for the setting aside of what is by any reasonable measure a democratic result.

Addendum to the addendum: I deliberately choose to accept without qualification the axiom that first past the post produces a democratic result in an election. There's a proper argument to be had about that, but it would cloud this particular issue.