6 ms·

Is democracy overrated?

38 points by akandiah 13y ago

thingification 13y ago
From the comments I see here so far, I don't see evidence that people have read the article (which is a transcript of part one of a radio talk that just went out over the air on the UK's Radio 4). It seems people are responding to the title. Here are some quotes: The totalitarian system, I learned, endures not simply by getting rid of democratic elections and imposing a one-party state. It endures by abolishing the distinction between civil society and the state, and by allowing nothing significant to occur which is not controlled by the Party. ... In the underground universities of communist Europe, my friends and colleagues studied those things, and prepared themselves for the hoped-for day when the Communist Party, having starved itself of every rational input, would finally give up the ghost. And the lessons that they learned need to be learned again today, as our politicians lead us forth under the banner of democracy, without pausing to examine what democracy actually requires.
- Afforess 13y ago
  >From the comments I see here so far, I don't see evidence that people have read the article That would be because the Article is bland and devoid of interesting or original content, but the title is provocative and Democracy is so frequently taken for granted.
- ApertureHour 13y ago
  >>>>> the Communist Party, having starved itself of every rational input, would finally give up the ghost. That statement really gets me thinking. Without wading down into full-blown social Darwinism, it wouldn't surprise me if human organizations are subject to a kind of memetic fitness. Maybe a trade off between ideological rigity or purity, and actual, objective inputs about their environment. When the Soviet state exiled, executed or imprisoned just about anyone who contradicted party doctrine, they systemically starved themselves of opportunities to make evidence-based decisions. It reminded me of the Stephen Hawking quote; "Science wins because it works".
- mattsouth 13y ago
  Perhaps it is a dry article, but I heard it on the radio this morning and really appreciated it (http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b037vb15 http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b037vb15 - may be blocked outside uk). I was grateful to see the text version. Summary is that Roger Scruton believes that democracy needs an independent judiciary, property rights and the right to free speech and opinion in order to succeed.
tomp 13y ago
No.
binderbizingdos 13y ago
All systems put their form of rule on a pedestal worshiping it, saying: "there is none like it". It will fall apart as all the other systems have and be considered "silly compared to our knew awesome form of rule"
- ahomescu1 13y ago
  Except democracy has been around for at least 2500 years, and we still have it. It seems that all those other "awesome forms" fail and revert to the natural, default state of countries: democracy. Which brings me to my second point: democracy seems to me like the natural order of a large group of people. It's natural for people to compete to achieve their goals, and democracy seems to be the only system that spreads success around.
  - jeremyswank 13y ago
    monarchy, autocracy, and tyranny have been around a lot longer than 2500 years. don't we still have those, too?
    - ahomescu1 13y ago
      We still have monarchies, but many of them are also democratic (hereditary monarch plus elected prime minister and legislature). I agree we still have tyrannies too, because I think there's a cycle between them and democracies. Democracy weakens, a tyrant takes power, this lasts for a while before collapsing, then his competitors take power themselves (in some cases, democratically).
  - jacques_chester 13y ago
    Democracies have collapsed and transformed into non-democracies and vice versa many times. States are shaped by their conditions, democracy does not seem to be any more of an attractor than various flavours of monarchism.
    - ahomescu1 13y ago
northwest 13y ago
> Is democracy overrated? No. It's just that we haven't gotten through to eliminating the corrupting elements and anchoring this legally, yet. Why? Because corruption (= ultimately money) protects itself.
- anonyfox 13y ago
  Even worse, in Germany the election turnout is less than 50% on average, getting even worse every year. Most people are literally not interested in everything around them and get mad when you start talking about politics. With people like this, democracies will fail. A living democracy needs involved and civilized people.
  - mtrimpe 13y ago
    That's also a massive opportunity though, since whomever could capture the attention of that 50% and get them to vote could become the biggest party overnight. To me that just sounds like an underserved market waiting to be addressed.
    - pampa 13y ago
      Yep. Just like in 1933
  - northwest 13y ago
    And what are the reasons that led people to lose interest? Maybe one answer is "because we don't feel enough pain yet". In this case, don't worry, the pendulum will swing back soon enough. The concept of real democracy is still the best one we can get.
  - ajuc 13y ago
    They aren't interested because they don't have a real influence. Imagine you own a company, but you can only change anything once every 4 years. And even then you only choose between a few groups of people from which to hire. When the people hired don't do what they said they would you can't do anything till the end of that 4-year period. I am all for more direct democracy (something like liquid democracy). We have the technology to eliminate middleman, but middle man doesn't want to be eliminated.
thirsteh 13y ago
"Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others." — Winston Churchill
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
albertoX 13y ago
Real democracy doesn't exists in any country. Except from e-democracy experiments like in Rio Grande do Sul(Brasil). Instead we are in a tight controlled Particracy. Thanks to internet we are getting closer to a new Era where citizens will have direct control on the governments. This is yet to be achieved but there are already thousands of people working silently on this. We will have the first real democracy in Europe at the end of 2015 and it will spread quickly. We are citizens, we are real democracy.
- johnchristopher 13y ago
  > We will have the first real democracy in Europe at the end of 2015 and it will spread quickly. What are you referring to ?
  - northwest 13y ago
    It sounds like a really bad killer virus.
  - phaemon 13y ago
    Well, they wouldn't be working very silently if he just went and told you, now would they? ;)
    - johnchristopher 13y ago
      Ah, well. I just noticed it was a one-post account. I was asking myself what could be going on regarding EU laws or constitution or sthg in 2015.
- jacques_chester 13y ago
  > Thanks to internet we are getting closer to a new Era where citizens will have direct control on the governments. This is a very old idea indeed. And direct democracy still has the same problem as representative democracy: you need some ground rules about the limits of the democratic decision-makers or the whole thing will come unglued.
Afforess 13y ago
I would say, yes. Theoretically, an all-knowing Philosopher King would be the best form of government. In reality, that's extremely hard to achieve. Modern day democracies, like in the US, are intentionally designed to move slowly, so that no single person or group of people can radically change how it affects it's citizens. That also means it is slow to reform.
- Peaker 13y ago
  They didn't mean "is Democracy overrated" in a hypothetical way. There are no "all-knowing Philosophers" to be made kings, and even if there were, there would be no reliable mechanism to find them. And if there was, there would be no reliable mechanism to ensure the former reliable mechanism is used to actually appoint such a philosopher and make them yield actual power. In short, Democracy is superior to this method, because it can be made to work.
  - Afforess 13y ago
    >In short, Democracy is superior to this method, because it can be made to work. I'm not sure how that makes it better. Democracy has failed much more often than it has succeeded. Many a revolution to Democracy has been tried, with only a few succeeding. And even where Democracies are lasting, they can still be cruel and brutal to minorities, by the hands of the majority. The main reason there is no protests in the street of America, despite the abysmal approval ratings of Congress, is that most Americans have reached a point where their day-to-day lives operate with almost zero visible interference from the government. Out of sight, out of mind. That's basically the best we can hope for.
    - asgard1024 13y ago
      Failure to introduce democracy is not the same thing as failure of democracy. Just like a failure to implement encryption doesn't mean that encryption is a failed concept. Can you provide example of democracy brutal to minority? Which actually allows the minority to vote as well? That could be prevented if only political elite of the time would have say in the matter, then it wouldn't have happened? I don't think there is a historical example.
pjgomez 13y ago
I think the real problem is we don't really have democracy: once every four years we are allowed to pick between Coke or Pepsi and then we hand over all our power to a bunch of people until the next election.
SmokyBorbon 13y ago
Absolutely. Mob rule is a terrible idea. People have been brainwashed into thinking differently.
asgard1024 13y ago
Is he talking about democracy as an ideal or democracy as commonly implemented? These are two very different things.. The ideal is to give everyone the same say in what laws should govern the society. In my view, that ideal isn't overrated. It's just basic fairness. If you have two kids, that argue for a toy, what do you do? You force them each to have it for half a time, fairly. The societies that evolved the ability to implement such fairness spend less resources warring about who should get how much power (arguing about the toy), and so spend more resources on productive activities (playing with the toy).
- dirtyaura 13y ago
  If you - and apparently many others in this thread - actually read the article, you would know that he is not talking about ideal vs commonly implemented democracy at all. He is talking about other institutions of free society that are in his view as important as democracy, but are usually lumped together with democracy in political speeches of the leaders of the West. These other institutions that can exists with or without democracy are judicial independence, property rights, freedom of speech and opinion and, finally, legitimate opposition. In his view, all these can exist independently, and often existed before democracy in Western European countries.
  - asgard1024 13y ago
    I read his article, but I didn't get his point, and you're basically explaining the reason why. He is not correct in lumping all those together in his analysis. Maybe he could say "Western democracy". I agree that these institutions existed before democracy. But you would also be hard-pressed to find democracy without them, but it's not because democracy would require these institutions to exist. I can perfectly imagine a democracy in Islamic society with Sharia law, that doesn't have those institutions. As long as everybody can secretly vote, with equal vote, they know what they vote about, and it's impossible to restrict voting of other people by voting, it's democracy in my books. However, I don't think it would last too long. The other innovations are probably so useful for majority of people that they would very quickly (and democratically) agree on implementing them. That's why we never see anything like this in the real world (in the real world probably both things co-evolve). In other words, I see democracy vastly more important than those institutions, because implementing democracy itself will probably lead to implementing these institutions, while the opposite is not true.
ekm2 13y ago
This reminds me of Pope John Paul II's reply when asked why the church was not more democratic: The church is not a democracy and truth is not established by a show of hands
- jongraehl 13y ago
  It's more plausible, not less, that divine inspiration is reflected in the vote of a group than in a single man's decision. Like a multiple sensor array, the noise in a single instrument (and the risk of its corruption) can't cause the whole to fail to detect the signal.
D9u 13y ago
Disambiguation is called for in respect to what democracy actually is... http://www.diffen.com/difference/Democracy_vs_Republic http://www.diffen.com/difference/Democracy_vs_Republic Black's Law Dictionary says that the difference between a democracy and a republic is that sovereignty is retained by the individual within a republic. (USA is a Constitutional Republic) The article fails to note that democracy does not preclude communism, and the DPRK (http://www.korea-dpr.com/ http://www.korea-dpr.com/) is a classic democratic communist nation in which the people have no individual sovereignty in lieu of that sovereignty being relegated to the collective in the name of the greater good for the nation.
- mtgx 13y ago
  Aren't all existing democracies republics? Personally I think the pendulum needs to swing a lot more in favor of true democracy, and accountability of those "few" representatives in power. Because it doesn't look like the current system, where the pendulum swings a lot more in favor of the representatives, has been working very well. We need more direct democracy, more referendums, more citizen law-making, where the representatives are only a relative "check" on that citizen power (to prevent extreme abuses of "mob rule").
  - D9u 13y ago
    Isn't "true democracy" a form of civilized mob rule? Why should individual sovereignty be forfeit in favor of the group sovereignty that is democracy? East Germany was another "Democratic Republic," which didn't turn out so well. Is the fault with "democracy," or the "republic?" (these terms have little relevance to America's present political parties) Or is it some other aspect. In my estimation, if a nation's citizens have no individual sovereignty, that nation cannot be properly referred to as a republic, yet such nations do fit the definition of "democracy" by virtue of the sovereignty enjoyed by the collective majority.
    - asgard1024 13y ago
      East Germany was only called "democratic republic", in reality it was neither. The fault isn't within those terms; the fault was that calling it that way was simply a lie. You also ask: "Why should individual sovereignty be forfeit in favor of the group sovereignty that is democracy?" Because we want to agree on certain things. Human societies have evolutionary advantage over independent sets of humans.
netcan 13y ago
"Western nations have acted upon the assumption that democracy is the solution to political conflict and that the ultimate goal of foreign policy must be to encourage the emergence of democracy.. .. three ideas - democracy, freedom and human rights - are spoken of in one breath" Ironically, thing that current liberal-democratic ideologies should have inherited from Marxism is the emphasis on influencing the people. Democrats of the last few decades give the general public's attitude and political culture a ridiculously strong presumption of innocence. The problems in autocratic countries are assumed to be institutional: bad systems, bad leaders. The People want peace, freedom and human rights. I think that's why human rights are expected to follow democratic elections. In the middle east right now we have seen this fail in a similar way in several places. Democratic elections bringing to power strongly non "democratic" candidates. Confessionalists, nationalists & theocrats. A more Marxist-like approach would worry more about spreading the ideology among the general public. In Eastern Europe (especially East Germany) "like Western Europe" was enough. In the middle east "lets be more western" is not going to work. We're understandably hesitant to start pushing a "little book of ideology" into the hands of 16 year olds around the world given our 20th century experience with such books. I don't know what the answer is to that. What I am pretty certain about is that if you want to see "democracy" in Syria or Egypt, you have more than just an institutional problem to fix.
duncan_bayne 13y ago
It's worth remembering that there are ways of achieving democracy that don't involve voting. For example, creating a Government from a randomly-selected group of citizens every few years. In my opinion that's a vastly superior approach to having everyone vote for one a bunch of - for the most part - crooks, thieves and liars.
saljam 13y ago
Not quite what the article was talking about, but what worries me about modern democracies is where the responsibility of government decisions lies. In theory the voters should bear it, since they chose the government. But in practice they just shrug "rotten politicians" and move on with their lives as their country wages war on millions of innocents. The politicians themselves rarely get their comeuppance, because hey, the people chose them! Democracy only works with a politically active population. And frankly, most people don't give a shit.
- rdc12 13y ago
  IMHO its worse then that, the system (The political parties, the media, electoral systems etc) has moved in such a way to make people not give a shit.
smky80 13y ago
No system of government really works that well because most people "defect" in the sense of the prisoners dilemma. So instead of working for the public good, the government ultimately becomes a means of exploiting the public good for powerful individuals' advantage. Pretty much everyone government ultimately devolves into a form of "mafia" -- a relatively tight network of powerful individuals united by some fairly strong bond such as familial/ethnic ties. This network can count on each other to "cooperate" and not "defect", while the public/masses just can't coordinate and cooperate enough to oppose them.
- asgard1024 13y ago
  Every society is subject to the problem you are talking about. That's why humans actually evolved to go at lengths to punish anybody who does defect. Without this sense (for fairness), no society could function. And as you correctly point out, mafia is the subject of the same rule. (That's why you usually get either a rigid hierarchical system or democracy, not so much a system where a large portion of population democratically controls the rest - that's unstable.) The key in democracy is exactly what it says on the tin - one person one vote. This is much more stable to this devolution, because other people in society can observe when this rule is broken by anybody and take action. Thanks to this, much less energy is required for infighting, and people can be happier.
  - smky80 13y ago
    > humans actually evolved to go at lengths to punish anybody who does defect They might have initially, but I'll make the argument that probably since the dawn of agriculture, and the generation of large societal surpluses, evolution has been pushing humanity towards defection. I think recent experience in the US shows quite clearly that votes don't really matter, only money does. Moreover votes can be manufactured through the media (money).
InclinedPlane 13y ago
Yes! (But also no) The problem is that in the "western world" there are complex systems designed to preserve both widespread individual liberty as well as consensual governance (for convenience I'll call these "free systems"). However, we tend to merely label these systems as "democracy" even though many other systems that have popular voting can exist which do not offer the same protections of liberty and consensual governance. This terminology and modeling problem makes it more difficult to spread the aforementioned "free systems" of government because it's very much more difficult to elucidate all of the factors behind such systems, some of which are socio-cultural and economic. One common pattern in "unfree" countries that have experienced bouts of democracy is for there to be a popular vote that brings in a government that then ends all of the democratic institutions. This has happened routinely for well over a century. Another problem is that you have a corrupt group in power with few checks on their authority and they simply rig every election in one way or another. I think it's mistaken to believe that it takes generations for a country to be ready for freedom and effective democracy merely because naive attempts to set up democracies can easily fail. I think it's also a mistake to assume that countries with long histories of democratic institutions and liberty are comparatively immune to collapses of those institutions. Much like the situation with economics we tend to live within political systems which rest on foundations that are not widely well understood, if at all, and rarely even discussed in depth at an abstract foundational level. It's no wonder it's so difficult for countries to try to bootstrap their way to democracy and it's a bit of a shock that our own systems of government in the "free" world work as well as they do.
mbrock 13y ago
From Wikipedia: "Democracy [...] encompasses social, economic and cultural conditions that enable the free and equal practice of political self-determination." This article is not alone in having a very narrow and technical conception of democracy as solely a method of election and legislation. That this in itself is not sufficient for a flourishing and liberated society seems obvious. The real issue seems to be how to encourage actual, real, functioning democracy, instead of installing a thin veneer of technical democracy on top of a society whose deeper currents are undemocratic. For some reason I'm thinking about the story of how the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia has historical roots in the Communist suppression of Zappa-influenced psychedelic rock band The Plastic People of the Universe. Maybe the world just needs more psychedelic rock.
- thingification 13y ago
  "This article is not alone in having a very narrow and technical conception of democracy as solely a method of election and legislation." That is an argument about words and not ideas. The article says that voting is not enough, and so do you. "That this in itself is not sufficient for a flourishing and liberated society seems obvious." Some things bear repeating.
osmsiberiano 13y ago
I'm glad to see this comment from a Brit, because it's exactly what I was telling to the Western friends for some time: formal procedures do not make democracy. (I think Iraq and Afganistan are clear examples.) It's a whole culture of participation of citizens and accountability from those who take the power, and those cultures are mutually dependent. We had all formal procedures in USSR & Russia in 1988-1991, but the citizens did not know what to do with them, and then they were gradually taken away. Democracy is a grassroots phoenomenon, it grows ground-up.

38 points by akandiah 13y ago

From the comments I see here so far, I don't see evidence that people have read the article (which is a transcript of part one of a radio talk that just went out over the air on the UK's Radio 4). It seems people are responding to the title. Here are some quotes: The totalitarian system, I learned, endures not simply by getting rid of democratic elections and imposing a one-party state. It endures by abolishing the distinction between civil society and the state, and by allowing nothing significant to occur which is not controlled by the Party. ... In the underground universities of communist Europe, my friends and colleagues studied those things, and prepared themselves for the hoped-for day when the Communist Party, having starved itself of every rational input, would finally give up the ghost. And the lessons that they learned need to be learned again today, as our politicians lead us forth under the banner of democracy, without pausing to examine what democracy actually requires.

Afforess 13y ago
>From the comments I see here so far, I don't see evidence that people have read the article That would be because the Article is bland and devoid of interesting or original content, but the title is provocative and Democracy is so frequently taken for granted.
ApertureHour 13y ago
>>>>> the Communist Party, having starved itself of every rational input, would finally give up the ghost. That statement really gets me thinking. Without wading down into full-blown social Darwinism, it wouldn't surprise me if human organizations are subject to a kind of memetic fitness. Maybe a trade off between ideological rigity or purity, and actual, objective inputs about their environment. When the Soviet state exiled, executed or imprisoned just about anyone who contradicted party doctrine, they systemically starved themselves of opportunities to make evidence-based decisions. It reminded me of the Stephen Hawking quote; "Science wins because it works".
mattsouth 13y ago
Perhaps it is a dry article, but I heard it on the radio this morning and really appreciated it (http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b037vb15 http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b037vb15 - may be blocked outside uk). I was grateful to see the text version. Summary is that Roger Scruton believes that democracy needs an independent judiciary, property rights and the right to free speech and opinion in order to succeed.

tomp 13y ago

No.

binderbizingdos 13y ago

All systems put their form of rule on a pedestal worshiping it, saying: "there is none like it". It will fall apart as all the other systems have and be considered "silly compared to our knew awesome form of rule"

ahomescu1 13y ago
Except democracy has been around for at least 2500 years, and we still have it. It seems that all those other "awesome forms" fail and revert to the natural, default state of countries: democracy. Which brings me to my second point: democracy seems to me like the natural order of a large group of people. It's natural for people to compete to achieve their goals, and democracy seems to be the only system that spreads success around.
- jeremyswank 13y ago
  monarchy, autocracy, and tyranny have been around a lot longer than 2500 years. don't we still have those, too?
  - ahomescu1 13y ago
    We still have monarchies, but many of them are also democratic (hereditary monarch plus elected prime minister and legislature). I agree we still have tyrannies too, because I think there's a cycle between them and democracies. Democracy weakens, a tyrant takes power, this lasts for a while before collapsing, then his competitors take power themselves (in some cases, democratically).
- jacques_chester 13y ago
  Democracies have collapsed and transformed into non-democracies and vice versa many times. States are shaped by their conditions, democracy does not seem to be any more of an attractor than various flavours of monarchism.
  - ahomescu1 13y ago

northwest 13y ago

> Is democracy overrated? No. It's just that we haven't gotten through to eliminating the corrupting elements and anchoring this legally, yet. Why? Because corruption (= ultimately money) protects itself.

anonyfox 13y ago
Even worse, in Germany the election turnout is less than 50% on average, getting even worse every year. Most people are literally not interested in everything around them and get mad when you start talking about politics. With people like this, democracies will fail. A living democracy needs involved and civilized people.
- mtrimpe 13y ago
  That's also a massive opportunity though, since whomever could capture the attention of that 50% and get them to vote could become the biggest party overnight. To me that just sounds like an underserved market waiting to be addressed.
  - pampa 13y ago
    Yep. Just like in 1933
- northwest 13y ago
  And what are the reasons that led people to lose interest? Maybe one answer is "because we don't feel enough pain yet". In this case, don't worry, the pendulum will swing back soon enough. The concept of real democracy is still the best one we can get.
- ajuc 13y ago
  They aren't interested because they don't have a real influence. Imagine you own a company, but you can only change anything once every 4 years. And even then you only choose between a few groups of people from which to hire. When the people hired don't do what they said they would you can't do anything till the end of that 4-year period. I am all for more direct democracy (something like liquid democracy). We have the technology to eliminate middleman, but middle man doesn't want to be eliminated.

thirsteh 13y ago

"Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others." — Winston Churchill

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

albertoX 13y ago

Real democracy doesn't exists in any country. Except from e-democracy experiments like in Rio Grande do Sul(Brasil). Instead we are in a tight controlled Particracy. Thanks to internet we are getting closer to a new Era where citizens will have direct control on the governments. This is yet to be achieved but there are already thousands of people working silently on this. We will have the first real democracy in Europe at the end of 2015 and it will spread quickly. We are citizens, we are real democracy.

johnchristopher 13y ago
> We will have the first real democracy in Europe at the end of 2015 and it will spread quickly. What are you referring to ?
- northwest 13y ago
  It sounds like a really bad killer virus.
- phaemon 13y ago
  Well, they wouldn't be working very silently if he just went and told you, now would they? ;)
  - johnchristopher 13y ago
    Ah, well. I just noticed it was a one-post account. I was asking myself what could be going on regarding EU laws or constitution or sthg in 2015.
jacques_chester 13y ago
> Thanks to internet we are getting closer to a new Era where citizens will have direct control on the governments. This is a very old idea indeed. And direct democracy still has the same problem as representative democracy: you need some ground rules about the limits of the democratic decision-makers or the whole thing will come unglued.

Afforess 13y ago

I would say, yes. Theoretically, an all-knowing Philosopher King would be the best form of government. In reality, that's extremely hard to achieve. Modern day democracies, like in the US, are intentionally designed to move slowly, so that no single person or group of people can radically change how it affects it's citizens. That also means it is slow to reform.

Peaker 13y ago
They didn't mean "is Democracy overrated" in a hypothetical way. There are no "all-knowing Philosophers" to be made kings, and even if there were, there would be no reliable mechanism to find them. And if there was, there would be no reliable mechanism to ensure the former reliable mechanism is used to actually appoint such a philosopher and make them yield actual power. In short, Democracy is superior to this method, because it can be made to work.
- Afforess 13y ago
  >In short, Democracy is superior to this method, because it can be made to work. I'm not sure how that makes it better. Democracy has failed much more often than it has succeeded. Many a revolution to Democracy has been tried, with only a few succeeding. And even where Democracies are lasting, they can still be cruel and brutal to minorities, by the hands of the majority. The main reason there is no protests in the street of America, despite the abysmal approval ratings of Congress, is that most Americans have reached a point where their day-to-day lives operate with almost zero visible interference from the government. Out of sight, out of mind. That's basically the best we can hope for.
  - asgard1024 13y ago
    Failure to introduce democracy is not the same thing as failure of democracy. Just like a failure to implement encryption doesn't mean that encryption is a failed concept. Can you provide example of democracy brutal to minority? Which actually allows the minority to vote as well? That could be prevented if only political elite of the time would have say in the matter, then it wouldn't have happened? I don't think there is a historical example.

pjgomez 13y ago

I think the real problem is we don't really have democracy: once every four years we are allowed to pick between Coke or Pepsi and then we hand over all our power to a bunch of people until the next election.

SmokyBorbon 13y ago

Absolutely. Mob rule is a terrible idea. People have been brainwashed into thinking differently.

asgard1024 13y ago

Is he talking about democracy as an ideal or democracy as commonly implemented? These are two very different things.. The ideal is to give everyone the same say in what laws should govern the society. In my view, that ideal isn't overrated. It's just basic fairness. If you have two kids, that argue for a toy, what do you do? You force them each to have it for half a time, fairly. The societies that evolved the ability to implement such fairness spend less resources warring about who should get how much power (arguing about the toy), and so spend more resources on productive activities (playing with the toy).

dirtyaura 13y ago
If you - and apparently many others in this thread - actually read the article, you would know that he is not talking about ideal vs commonly implemented democracy at all. He is talking about other institutions of free society that are in his view as important as democracy, but are usually lumped together with democracy in political speeches of the leaders of the West. These other institutions that can exists with or without democracy are judicial independence, property rights, freedom of speech and opinion and, finally, legitimate opposition. In his view, all these can exist independently, and often existed before democracy in Western European countries.
- asgard1024 13y ago
  I read his article, but I didn't get his point, and you're basically explaining the reason why. He is not correct in lumping all those together in his analysis. Maybe he could say "Western democracy". I agree that these institutions existed before democracy. But you would also be hard-pressed to find democracy without them, but it's not because democracy would require these institutions to exist. I can perfectly imagine a democracy in Islamic society with Sharia law, that doesn't have those institutions. As long as everybody can secretly vote, with equal vote, they know what they vote about, and it's impossible to restrict voting of other people by voting, it's democracy in my books. However, I don't think it would last too long. The other innovations are probably so useful for majority of people that they would very quickly (and democratically) agree on implementing them. That's why we never see anything like this in the real world (in the real world probably both things co-evolve). In other words, I see democracy vastly more important than those institutions, because implementing democracy itself will probably lead to implementing these institutions, while the opposite is not true.

ekm2 13y ago

This reminds me of Pope John Paul II's reply when asked why the church was not more democratic: The church is not a democracy and truth is not established by a show of hands

jongraehl 13y ago
It's more plausible, not less, that divine inspiration is reflected in the vote of a group than in a single man's decision. Like a multiple sensor array, the noise in a single instrument (and the risk of its corruption) can't cause the whole to fail to detect the signal.

D9u 13y ago

Disambiguation is called for in respect to what democracy actually is... http://www.diffen.com/difference/Democracy_vs_Republic http://www.diffen.com/difference/Democracy_vs_Republic Black's Law Dictionary says that the difference between a democracy and a republic is that sovereignty is retained by the individual within a republic. (USA is a Constitutional Republic) The article fails to note that democracy does not preclude communism, and the DPRK (http://www.korea-dpr.com/ http://www.korea-dpr.com/) is a classic democratic communist nation in which the people have no individual sovereignty in lieu of that sovereignty being relegated to the collective in the name of the greater good for the nation.

mtgx 13y ago
Aren't all existing democracies republics? Personally I think the pendulum needs to swing a lot more in favor of true democracy, and accountability of those "few" representatives in power. Because it doesn't look like the current system, where the pendulum swings a lot more in favor of the representatives, has been working very well. We need more direct democracy, more referendums, more citizen law-making, where the representatives are only a relative "check" on that citizen power (to prevent extreme abuses of "mob rule").
- D9u 13y ago
  Isn't "true democracy" a form of civilized mob rule? Why should individual sovereignty be forfeit in favor of the group sovereignty that is democracy? East Germany was another "Democratic Republic," which didn't turn out so well. Is the fault with "democracy," or the "republic?" (these terms have little relevance to America's present political parties) Or is it some other aspect. In my estimation, if a nation's citizens have no individual sovereignty, that nation cannot be properly referred to as a republic, yet such nations do fit the definition of "democracy" by virtue of the sovereignty enjoyed by the collective majority.
  - asgard1024 13y ago
    East Germany was only called "democratic republic", in reality it was neither. The fault isn't within those terms; the fault was that calling it that way was simply a lie. You also ask: "Why should individual sovereignty be forfeit in favor of the group sovereignty that is democracy?" Because we want to agree on certain things. Human societies have evolutionary advantage over independent sets of humans.

netcan 13y ago

"Western nations have acted upon the assumption that democracy is the solution to political conflict and that the ultimate goal of foreign policy must be to encourage the emergence of democracy.. .. three ideas - democracy, freedom and human rights - are spoken of in one breath" Ironically, thing that current liberal-democratic ideologies should have inherited from Marxism is the emphasis on influencing the people. Democrats of the last few decades give the general public's attitude and political culture a ridiculously strong presumption of innocence. The problems in autocratic countries are assumed to be institutional: bad systems, bad leaders. The People want peace, freedom and human rights. I think that's why human rights are expected to follow democratic elections. In the middle east right now we have seen this fail in a similar way in several places. Democratic elections bringing to power strongly non "democratic" candidates. Confessionalists, nationalists & theocrats. A more Marxist-like approach would worry more about spreading the ideology among the general public. In Eastern Europe (especially East Germany) "like Western Europe" was enough. In the middle east "lets be more western" is not going to work. We're understandably hesitant to start pushing a "little book of ideology" into the hands of 16 year olds around the world given our 20th century experience with such books. I don't know what the answer is to that. What I am pretty certain about is that if you want to see "democracy" in Syria or Egypt, you have more than just an institutional problem to fix.

duncan_bayne 13y ago

It's worth remembering that there are ways of achieving democracy that don't involve voting. For example, creating a Government from a randomly-selected group of citizens every few years. In my opinion that's a vastly superior approach to having everyone vote for one a bunch of - for the most part - crooks, thieves and liars.

saljam 13y ago

Not quite what the article was talking about, but what worries me about modern democracies is where the responsibility of government decisions lies. In theory the voters should bear it, since they chose the government. But in practice they just shrug "rotten politicians" and move on with their lives as their country wages war on millions of innocents. The politicians themselves rarely get their comeuppance, because hey, the people chose them! Democracy only works with a politically active population. And frankly, most people don't give a shit.

rdc12 13y ago
IMHO its worse then that, the system (The political parties, the media, electoral systems etc) has moved in such a way to make people not give a shit.

smky80 13y ago

No system of government really works that well because most people "defect" in the sense of the prisoners dilemma. So instead of working for the public good, the government ultimately becomes a means of exploiting the public good for powerful individuals' advantage. Pretty much everyone government ultimately devolves into a form of "mafia" -- a relatively tight network of powerful individuals united by some fairly strong bond such as familial/ethnic ties. This network can count on each other to "cooperate" and not "defect", while the public/masses just can't coordinate and cooperate enough to oppose them.

asgard1024 13y ago
Every society is subject to the problem you are talking about. That's why humans actually evolved to go at lengths to punish anybody who does defect. Without this sense (for fairness), no society could function. And as you correctly point out, mafia is the subject of the same rule. (That's why you usually get either a rigid hierarchical system or democracy, not so much a system where a large portion of population democratically controls the rest - that's unstable.) The key in democracy is exactly what it says on the tin - one person one vote. This is much more stable to this devolution, because other people in society can observe when this rule is broken by anybody and take action. Thanks to this, much less energy is required for infighting, and people can be happier.
- smky80 13y ago
  > humans actually evolved to go at lengths to punish anybody who does defect They might have initially, but I'll make the argument that probably since the dawn of agriculture, and the generation of large societal surpluses, evolution has been pushing humanity towards defection. I think recent experience in the US shows quite clearly that votes don't really matter, only money does. Moreover votes can be manufactured through the media (money).

InclinedPlane 13y ago

Yes! (But also no) The problem is that in the "western world" there are complex systems designed to preserve both widespread individual liberty as well as consensual governance (for convenience I'll call these "free systems"). However, we tend to merely label these systems as "democracy" even though many other systems that have popular voting can exist which do not offer the same protections of liberty and consensual governance. This terminology and modeling problem makes it more difficult to spread the aforementioned "free systems" of government because it's very much more difficult to elucidate all of the factors behind such systems, some of which are socio-cultural and economic. One common pattern in "unfree" countries that have experienced bouts of democracy is for there to be a popular vote that brings in a government that then ends all of the democratic institutions. This has happened routinely for well over a century. Another problem is that you have a corrupt group in power with few checks on their authority and they simply rig every election in one way or another. I think it's mistaken to believe that it takes generations for a country to be ready for freedom and effective democracy merely because naive attempts to set up democracies can easily fail. I think it's also a mistake to assume that countries with long histories of democratic institutions and liberty are comparatively immune to collapses of those institutions. Much like the situation with economics we tend to live within political systems which rest on foundations that are not widely well understood, if at all, and rarely even discussed in depth at an abstract foundational level. It's no wonder it's so difficult for countries to try to bootstrap their way to democracy and it's a bit of a shock that our own systems of government in the "free" world work as well as they do.

mbrock 13y ago

From Wikipedia: "Democracy [...] encompasses social, economic and cultural conditions that enable the free and equal practice of political self-determination." This article is not alone in having a very narrow and technical conception of democracy as solely a method of election and legislation. That this in itself is not sufficient for a flourishing and liberated society seems obvious. The real issue seems to be how to encourage actual, real, functioning democracy, instead of installing a thin veneer of technical democracy on top of a society whose deeper currents are undemocratic. For some reason I'm thinking about the story of how the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia has historical roots in the Communist suppression of Zappa-influenced psychedelic rock band The Plastic People of the Universe. Maybe the world just needs more psychedelic rock.

thingification 13y ago
"This article is not alone in having a very narrow and technical conception of democracy as solely a method of election and legislation." That is an argument about words and not ideas. The article says that voting is not enough, and so do you. "That this in itself is not sufficient for a flourishing and liberated society seems obvious." Some things bear repeating.

osmsiberiano 13y ago

I'm glad to see this comment from a Brit, because it's exactly what I was telling to the Western friends for some time: formal procedures do not make democracy. (I think Iraq and Afganistan are clear examples.) It's a whole culture of participation of citizens and accountability from those who take the power, and those cultures are mutually dependent. We had all formal procedures in USSR & Russia in 1988-1991, but the citizens did not know what to do with them, and then they were gradually taken away. Democracy is a grassroots phoenomenon, it grows ground-up.