From: Lee Corbin (lcorbin@tsoft.com)
Date: Sat Aug 03 2002 - 13:38:36 MDT
Charlie writes
> > [Randall wrote on Thu 8/1/2002 4:02 AM]
> > > 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.
> >
> [Lee]
> > Yes, that's what "democratic nation" means to me.
>
> Really?
>
> Look, I'm not sure I'm with you on this... people aged under 18
> aren't allowed to vote; neither, in many states, are people
> convicted of crimes... 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.
Yes, but you're in danger of defining democracies right out of existence.
Randall's list was:
A. Is the vote fixed?
B. Are the citizens coerced?
C. Can but few inhabitants vote?
and while the answer, pleasantly, is "No" for our democracies, they
indeed differ as to how representative they are.
> 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.
Right. But I think it makes sense both to *call* these democracies and
to defend them as such (compared to the baleful alternatives).
> 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.
Yes, and careful steps gradually should be taken to lessen these effects,
if we can find any.
> > > However, it also appears that democratic societies tend to
> > > slide into being less free, and eventually non-democratic.
> >
> > 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.)
This always happens in a war---the acid test will be, as you imply,
whether these become permanent. Now by "the restrictions on civil
liberties", don't you only mean the internment or harassment of
certain minorities? Treatment of minorities has nothing to do with
the essence of democracy, going all the way back to Greece. Going
back to Randall's list (C) means *very* few, i.e., an oligarchy.
Not even in WWII was there any danger of the US or Britain becoming
an oligarchy.
> 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.
Nice examples, thanks. Now that you mention it, I don't know how
much more *inevitable* Karl Marx saw communism as I see democracy.
I certainly do not see it as totally inevitable, any more than I see a
singularity as inevitable. But the odds heavily favor their development,
IMO. Yes, personal freedom and democratic institutions could turn out
to have been just an aberration in Western Europe (and its colonies)
that died out entirely by 2100 AD. For each of your examples,
I think that five could be given from around the world that went and
are going the other way (in Asia and Latin America, and perhaps Africa).
> 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.
Vice presidents and others in American administrations are always
denouncing their opponents, and their opponents always talk about
the "chilling" effect on free speech, and I'm often annoyed by
such chilling. But nobody ever seems to go to jail for it, and it
doesn't seem any more or less likely than throughout the 20th century
that anyone will.
No chills down my spine. If a city goes up in a nuclear blast, I'm
all for interning the suspect populations en masse as the US did the
last time, and sorry we didn't do so preventively.
Lee
P.S. (sorry to be a bit provocative there, but it helps keep awake
those who read this for entertainment)
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