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not really, loquitor---if you think about what democracy would entail--the polity has to be in a position to make informed judgments. without adequate information, such judgments are impossible--i mean, you can go through the procedures and arrive at a conclusion, but whether that conclusion would be anything other than a kind of agitation of preconceptions or not isn't clear. if we are to talk about ANYTHING to do with a democracy, the question of information and its reliability is central to it. the ability to critically assess information is an assumption. arguments that happen between positions that folk arrive at about that information--and by extension about the situation to which that information refers and what action should or should not be taken--is what deliberation is. and deliberation is the center of the process.
americans like to talk about democracy, which is strange given the extent to which they are willing to allow its main preconditions to slide away. kinda make you wonder what american foreign policy is exporting under the word, doesn't it?
so in a situation where adequate information is at hand and we can assume that something like rational judgments are possible because we know how to fashion them, you and i could debate the meaning of "collectivism" and whether it is or is not a good process.
but even in a tiny space like tfpolitics, there's no particular agreement about what constitutes information and what role it ought to play in debates.
on the other statues---i understand your point, but am unclear about why you make it beyond relaying an anecdote, which is interesting enough in itself, but seems pitched toward being some kind of allegory. are you wanting to talk about the status of the notion of fascism by way of it?
i generally use the term in a kind of technical sense when i use it. i understand that it is also a problematic term in that it's been used and abused alot and so may or may not signify. do you want to go through this again?
here's a parallel little story: plato was an enemy of democracy--he opposed it at every level--the republic is a little allegory written by an opponent of democracy, rooted in the assumption--which i know you share--that there are natural hierarchies which distinguish folk and that democracy--somehow--presupposes that folk are all equal---plato's counter is that hierarchies of ability undercut the idea of equality at the level of form. i don't buy that. but anyway, when folk talk about the republic, they tend not to want so much to talk about "the laws" which comes after the republic and which is a text about authoritarian rule, a society governed by secret committees which meet at night and take decisions with no transparency. i think that the american system has followed plato's trajectory from the republic to the laws, in a general way. as i keep saying, i see the american system as a form of soft authoritarian rule, which has the quirk of a dominant political discourse that throws around the language of democracy. i also see that the american system is doing to the language of democracy what the past 50 years have done to the discourse of fascism--draining it of any meaning, making it a replacement for living under a particular form of political domination. the other quirk is that this soft authortarian rule happens in the context of abundant consumer goods, so you can like your life surrounded by plush things, be powerless and manipulated and not really even notice that you are politically disenfranchised and your formal freedom is no more than that.
if this was not the case, the way in which information is presently manipulated would be unacceptable.
my other little bit of optimism is that once the extent of this manipulation--particularly obvious as it now is in the context of the last 5 odious years--once this becomes obvious, it will also become unacceptable.
we'll see
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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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