Is Democratic Theory for Export?

[Mediocrates]

If you read nothing else this month read this:

http://www.carnegiecouncil.org/viewMedia.php/prmTemplateID/8/prmID/268

One of the best concise essays on the viability of exporting democracy you will ever read. Ever the polymath Jacques Barzun at the top of his game.

[Dagny]

Very interesting, Mediocrates. I reread it more carefully tomorrow. Of course, the US is actually a Constitutional Republic. The following is an excerpt you may find interesting on a similar topic.

"There is, in Bush’s use of these ideas, a certain ambiguity or confusion between the right to be free and the capacity to be free. The two are not quite the same. Every human being has, by nature, a right to be free; but it doesn’t follow that every human being has the capacity or the moral equipment – the habits of the heart and mind – to be free. The American Founders used to say, in words that Bush now echoes, that they staked all their experiments on mankind’s capacity for self-government. But the emphasis was on the word experiments. The Founders were well acquainted with the history of republican government, strewn with countless failed experiments. In fact, republican government was the most difficult form of government to establish and preserve because in it, ultimately, the people are everything. There’s no king or aristocracy, there’s no other class in the government to correct the people’s mistakes or prevent them from committing injustice. It’s up to the people themselves to govern themselves morally. Thus even with the improvements in political science that the American Founders celebrated, they never expected republicanism to spread easily and universally across the globe. In this sense, they were students of Montesquieu, who taught that governments have to be suited to a people’s character and conditions.

We can get some idea of how the Founders might have thought about the problem of Iraq or Afghanistan by considering their reaction to the French Revolution. Here was an attempt to create a republican government in a society that was quite different from England or British North America. It was a Catholic monarchy (and the Founders thought the religious difference pertinent) in which the people had no experience in self-government, no habits of self-government – e.g., of electing local sheriffs or town councils or magistrates – such as people in England and in the American colonies had had time out of mind. John Adams, in one of his famous bursts of purple prose, wrote to Thomas Jefferson:

I was as well persuaded in my view that a project of such a government over five and twenty millions people, when four and twenty millions and five hundred thousands of them could neither write nor read, was as unnatural, irrational and impracticable as it would be over the elephants, lions, tigers, panthers, wolves, and bears in the royal menagerie at Versailles.

In other words, extremely unlikely to succeed."

http://www.hillsdale.edu/imprimis/2004/december/default.htm

[KettleWhistle]

Many people mistaken democracy for something it is not. So it is worth to point out what "democracy" means: it is a system of the government where most of the officials are elected by the citizens in free and unobsructed elections. It does not, neither explicitly or implicitly, guarantee human rights, women's rights, children's rights (in fact there is no such thing in the U.S.), social benefits, religious rights, freedom of speach, or any other civil liberties, or personal freedom.

[Roland]

... "democracy" means: it is a system of the government where most of the officials are elected by the citizens in free and unobsructed elections.
Catastrophic! :(
So the ideology of "democracy" is nothing more than a theory.
"Electing most of the officials by citizens" does not qualify the government as being democratic when the choice is limited to a handful of lobby-ized parties, whose differences are marginal at best, whose leading clique is not really bound to what they have promised once, when the actual "democratically" elected government does not have to ask their citizens within long periods of time if they still act with the citizens' legitimation.
Democracy only goes so far.
All those buzzwords they use need definitions with new buzzwords whose interpretation lies in the eye of the "public opinion" which is so easy to manipulate in these times of newspapers, TV and internet.
Do you think the US is democratic? I mean really democratic? Or any other nation?

[KettleWhistle]

"Electing most of the officials by citizens" does not qualify the government as being democratic when the choice is limited to a handful of lobby-ized parties, whose differences are marginal at best, whose leading clique is not really bound to what they have promised once, when the actual "democratically" elected government does not have to ask their citizens within long periods of time if they still act with the citizens' legitimation.
If the elections are free, then by definition it is democracy.


Do you think the US is democratic? I mean really democratic? Or any other nation? Yes. The US most certainly is democratic, as are many other nations. Here, you can vote for whoever you want, or even write-in candidates who are not on the ballot. Whether the parties are lobby-ized or not really doesn't matter that much, since that's a matter of politics, and is unrelated to the nature and conduct of the elections.

[Roland]

If the elections are free, then by definition it is democracy.So the definition is inadequate - at least for me.


Yes. The US most certainly is democratic, as are many other nations. Here, you can vote for whoever you want, or even write-in candidates who are not on the ballot. Whether the parties are lobby-ized or not really doesn't matter that much, since that's a matter of politics, and is unrelated to the nature and conduct of the elections.
Which means: Democracy needs a more effective protection against the tides of politics. Otherwise demoracy becomes a hollow formality. The german history alone has enough examples for the perishableness of democracy. You won't feel it, until it is too late - again.