From: Charlie Stross (charlie@antipope.org)
Date: Sat Aug 03 2002 - 05:30:31 MDT
On Thu, Aug 01, 2002 at 08:27:57PM -0700, Lee Corbin wrote:
> > > In other words, I'm saying that
> > > while a nation is democratic (in every historical example)
> > > it does not kill millions of its citizens.
> >
> > This would appear to be true, if you stipulate that you are
> > not counting nations where the vote is fixed, or the citizens
> > are coerced into voting a certain way, or few inhabitants can
> > vote.
>
> Yes, that's what "democratic nation" means to me.
Really?
Look, I'm not sure I'm with you on this. Today, in the US, over
90% of incumbents in Congress are qualified lawyers. While there's
a widespread franchise, people aged under 18 aren't allowed to
vote; neither, in many states, are people convicted of crimes
(which is a fairly unusual restriction among other democracies).
With election turnouts around the 40% mark, politicians drawn almost
exclusively from one caste, with some minorities excluded from the
process entirely (criminalising an activity typical of a group so that
people who engage in it may be disenfranchised is an old game), and
huge amounts of money required to fight an effective campaign, there's
got to be some question over how truly 'representative' the elected
representative government is.
Nor are other democracies better. France: yeah, as long as you go to the
right school you can get into politics. The UK has its share of politics
wonks who did degrees in politics, served as an MP's researcher, then
got all the way up to the top by making a career of it. The Japanese
political system is legendary for being hidebound. And so on.
It seems to me that representative democracy on a large scale -- any
scale larger than a million people for sure, and in many cases on a
smaller scale as well -- tends to provide conditions that encourage the
development of a professional political caste. Once such a group exists,
it's easier for them to hang onto power by manipulating public opinion
than for any group of outsiders to break in; and newcomers are easily
co-opted once they're in office.
> > However, it also appears that democratic societies tend to
> > slide into being less free, and eventually non-demcratic.
>
> Is that really the case? Besides Weimar Germany, have any other
> examples?
Loads. Arguably the USA and the whole of the EU are going that way right
now, with restrictions on civil liberties and free speech being imposed
in the name of the war on terrorism. (Which is open ended and permanent
because, don't you know, the definition of terrorism is movable.) To be
more specific: India's flip-flop into Indira Ghandi's state of emergency
in the 1970's fits the bill. So does the descent of Lebanon into civil
war around the same period. (Remember, Lebanon was the *working* arab
democracy for many years.) There's nothing inevitable about the triumph
of democracy, and to assert that there's some sort of historical logic
to it is to fall into the same sort of whiggish wishful thinking as Karl
Marx, with his dialectical progression towards the triumph of communism.
We're on a two way road, and one direction leads towards turning the
triumph of democracy into a digital panopticon prison. Luckily, there's
an argument over who gets the steering wheel and the bad guys haven't
won yet. But if Ashcroft's declarations about aiding the enemy in the
war on terrorism don't send a chill down your spine, you're obviously
watching the news through rose-tinted glasses.
-- Charlie
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