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It's a huge mistake to distill the institutions and traditions which give rise to the kind of life we are able to live in "the west" as "democracy". Democracy c

It's a huge mistake to distill the institutions and traditions which give rise to the kind of life we are able to live in "the west" as "democracy". Democracy can easily devolve into mob rule, and it often does. Moreover, democracy alone is often extremely unstable as it takes only one democratic vote to end democracy for the future. Rather, the foundation of the "free world" is a combination of strong individual liberty as well as representative/consensual governance. Especially in regards to limitations on the powers of the government and the powers of the collective. It's that balance which keeps things functional. Without it, without limits to power, without strong protections of individual liberty, without strong protections for the mechanisms of democracy it's almost as unstable as unrestrained anarchy or unrestrained communism. We should be spending more time and effort talking about liberty, because that's closer to the crux of the problem. Here's a quote from the article: "More fundamentally, democracy lets people speak their minds and shape their own and their children’s futures." No, they don't, democracies just allow people to vote, but that doesn't mean that minorities can't be oppressed or that individual liberty can be almost completely absent.

saraid216 13y ago
From the article, > One reason why so many democratic experiments have failed recently is that they put too much emphasis on elections and too little on the other essential features of democracy. The power of the state needs to be checked, for instance, and individual rights such as freedom of speech and freedom to organise must be guaranteed. The most successful new democracies have all worked in large part because they avoided the temptation of majoritarianism—the notion that winning an election entitles the majority to do whatever it pleases. India has survived as a democracy since 1947 (apart from a couple of years of emergency rule) and Brazil since the mid-1980s for much the same reason: both put limits on the power of the government and provided guarantees for individual rights.
- InclinedPlane 13y ago
  The problem is such things are NOT features of democracy, they are features of the "democracy" term we use as short-hand for all of the institutions and traditions which protect individual liberty and give rise to long-lived consensual governance. But short-hand isn't enough.
  - saraid216 13y ago
    By this measure, we should never use any term to describe any government or country. They all fall short.

saraid216 13y ago

From the article, > One reason why so many democratic experiments have failed recently is that they put too much emphasis on elections and too little on the other essential features of democracy. The power of the state needs to be checked, for instance, and individual rights such as freedom of speech and freedom to organise must be guaranteed. The most successful new democracies have all worked in large part because they avoided the temptation of majoritarianism—the notion that winning an election entitles the majority to do whatever it pleases. India has survived as a democracy since 1947 (apart from a couple of years of emergency rule) and Brazil since the mid-1980s for much the same reason: both put limits on the power of the government and provided guarantees for individual rights.

InclinedPlane 13y ago
The problem is such things are NOT features of democracy, they are features of the "democracy" term we use as short-hand for all of the institutions and traditions which protect individual liberty and give rise to long-lived consensual governance. But short-hand isn't enough.
- saraid216 13y ago
  By this measure, we should never use any term to describe any government or country. They all fall short.