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democracy?
in america?
it is like g b shaw said about cilivization: it would be nice.
john henry makes interesting points, but i would spin the argument differently----the sad fact of the matter is that these days democracy itself is an ideological term (in the strict sense--something used by the existing order to justify itself, something based in the interests of a particular faction presented as if it worked in the interests of all)--i find the work being done by the american right to distance itself from democracy in any meaningful form to be interesting--they talk about democracy when they are in opposition because for them it means mobilizing their petit bourgeois constituency by any means necessary--including everything plato warned about as corrosive of democracy, from sophism to irrational appeal to the emotions---but once in power, the emphasis goes back to republics, where a "representative" form can function alongside notions of social hierarchy as natural.
it is questionable whether you could have ideology in the modern sense operational inside an actually democratic form of self-government. so the opening proposition to this thread might be accurate if by "greatest ideology" it meant "most extreme falsification".....
do not be confused--the american system has nothing to do with democracy.
democracy requires an informed polity. the information provided would have to be relatively undistorted because the decisions taken would have weight.
in america, infotainment is a form of population management.
the systems of production and dissemination of information, such as it is, are not often subject to analysis--they work far beyond the control of the polity--and the polity operates within a system that also tries to posit that capitalism represents the best of all possible worlds--so real critique of even the existing system of information (but a single dimension of the world) becomes quite difficult.....this is not to even start raising questions of substantive control (which would run well beyond the illusion of control provided by owning a few shares of stock).....
democracy would entail substantive freedom.
in america, the polity is free one day every four years. apparently that is enough for most. in america, people like to confuse the formal and substantive so they pretend that nothing is really wrong around them. and again, it worked for stalin too---few elements of stalinism were more fetishized than the soviet constitution, which gave an enormous purely formal level of "Freedom" to the legal subjects defined by it....
democracy creates perpetual uncertainty. because meanings would be at stake in debates within the polity, any markers of certainty would be dissolvable. it would require a completely different way of being-in-the-world---political life would be transformed into something involving something like philosophy---it would therefore be totally incommensurate with christianity, with anything deriving from plato, with a doctrine of forms---obviously american conservatives would recoil in horror from anything resembling democracy--just think about how tied their ideology is to locating and controlling nodes of certainty.
normally, people now refer to jefferson's rejection of democracy based entirely on his reading of plato--even as his vision of america as a community of yeoman farmers was an updated reproduction of athentian democracy knit around a notion of private property--in the end the problem was the dissolution of certainty--it is strange tht jefferson's own thinking and its contradictions are still being recycled today, long after capitalism shoved aside the quaint world of yeoman farmers and made even more a joke of the theory of property so dear to jefferson, taken from john locke, than it was at the time of locke outlined it....
democracy would----in a modernized form, one that did not repeat the limitations on the poilis particular to athens, say---would be an ongoing process that would unfoild without a safety net-----imagining the world around you would have to break entirely with notions of a static utopia, with a heaven as regulative concepts. in democracy you would have to take history seriously because you would be totally inside of it, making it as you took decisions. now history is something you watch on tv--it usually involves world war 2 or some other manly man spectacle of whacking and dismembering. what is constant about your relation to history is that it is something you watch happen somewhere else. what could be more more powerless, more antithetical to the notion of democracy, than being a spectator of history, to the world around you, sitting on your couch, watching tv?
in america, democracy can function as an interesting critical concept: for example, people seem enjoy pretending that they have real responsibility. but what substantively do you control? your private property? how many commodities you can accumulate? the number of guns you own? what tv channel you watch? closest an american ideology comes to avowing the almost total lack of meaningful power accorded to the people is liberatarian ideology, which advocates making powerlessness even more total by advocating a purely individualistic view of the world---and isolated individuals have ****no***** political power--that is why it serves the interests of the right to advocate the individual over the social---but what do you control about the way the economic system within which you operate is organized? what do you control about the legal order within which the notions of property ownership are articulated? what would such control actually mean? and why do you have so much trouble imagining it? could it be a little demonstration of how little contact the political regime under which you live has with anything resembling a democracy?
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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