charlesesl

My impression of the American belief after the attack on Pear Harbor is that all ideologies other than democracy is undemocratic therefore automatically evil. This is a belief that has always confused me. I mean, Hitler were invading Europe and Japanese where invading Asia. So America helped put a stop to them. There is nothing wrong with that. But after WWII, why must America fight every country that isn’t adopting democracy. Ancient civilizations existed for hundreds to thousandths of years with totalitarian government and some countries are still doing fine with them today. What's it to the Americans to see every other nation of Earth adapt the same government system as them. Democracy sounds all good and it works pretty well for most western countries. But countries the rest of the world clearly isn’t benefiting much from it. India's previously elected president had to forfeit for personal safety. Their new government consists of a coalition of 20+ parties. I mean how would you even come to a consensus between 20 something parties. The Taiwanese election was a joke. Everybody makes personal attacks on everybody else. The Africans have a civil war every time they elect a new president. So what is the point of switching leaders if you can do better without? Middle East did pretty well with Jamahiriya and Monarchy until US started to take an interest in spreading Democracy. Korea and Vietnam were doing pretty well with their communist revolutions until America come along under the banner of saving freedom and democracy. The Vietnamese managed to finish the revolution but the Koreans were divided for more than 50 years. So I guess what I am asking is is democracy so good that America and the rest of the western world need to spread it at all cost?

__________________
It did not really matter what we expected from life, but rather what life expected from us.
Dr. Viktor E. Frankl

Hwed

Whoa there, sailor. There are hordes of countries out there that aren't adopting democracy that America hs nothing to do with...

The only times America steps in are when:

* A country steps outside its bounds and attacks another country, thereby forcing their will on a neighbor.

* A country represents a present or emerging threat to the safety of America.

All told, America is the only superpower in the history of the world to wield its might as responsibly as we have.

wonderwench

Here's the reason why:

Death by Government

History is replete with people fighting against the scourge of totalitarianism - and often losing. In a less technological age, what happened on the other side of the world was a local matter. Given that we do have a global economy and interdependence, totalitarianism threatens the world with a new Dark Age. This is why winning the war on terror is so critical. Civilization is under assault by medieval barbarians. If America withdraws into isolation, we may stave off the impact to our own society by a matter of years, but eventually the Dark Age will engulf us as well.

onetime2

Last I checked there was something on the order of 231 countries in the world. The vast majority of them have never seen military action from the US and that same vast majority is not democratic.

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Strive to be more curious than ignorant.

SinisterMotives

To answer the author's original question, democracy isn't perfect, but Western-style democracy has certain self-rectifying mechanisms built in that many other ideologies lack. I don't know that "greatest" is the right word because that would imply that the same ends couldn't be achieved with another ideology. I'd say, based on the comparative level of personal freedom, health, and material well-being of people governed by the various ideologies that exist today, democracy has brought the most good to the most people in those places where it has been practiced.

DelayedReaction

It really wouldn't work out very well if we decided that (for example) theocracy was a better form of government, would it? America believes the democratic process is the best because it works for us.

We really don't spend too much time pushing against other countries. The Cold War wasn't so much about ideological conflict as it was about positioning against a competing superpower; we needed allies just as they needed allies.

Technically we're not a democracy; we're a republic. The people don't govern; they choose representatives to make policy decisions for them. In fact we don't even choose our executive branch; the electoral college has nothing to do with popular mandate.

__________________
If ignorance is bliss, you must be having an orgasm.

MSD

After the Red Scare was over, the only countries we have chosen for intervention were those that were obviously violating international law (Genocide in the Bosnia and Serbia,) countries that have requested help, or countries that have recently posed a threat to us or our allies. Iraq may not have been a direct threat to us, but they still had a lot of shit that they could do to Israel or Saudi Arabia, not to mention that Saddam and his goons hated us and had the ability to supply weapons to others who shared their hatred, whether or not they did.

smooth

We just haven't gotten to them yet...

__________________
"The theory of a free press is that truth will emerge from free discussion, not that it will be presented perfectly and instantly in any one account." -- Walter Lippmann

"You measure democracy by the freedom it gives its dissidents, not the freedom it gives its assimilated conformists." -- Abbie Hoffman

Tman144

Democracy is a horrible system of govenrment, it's just better than any other thats been tried before.

Can anyone tell me who said that first? I think it was Ben Franklin, but I'm not sure.

__________________
"Don't touch my belt, you Jesus freak!" -Mr. Gruff the Atheist Goat

Zeld2.0

Exactly - it's hard to say democracy is the "Greatest" ideology on Earth because who knows, maybe one day someone might come up with something even better

And it has its own flaws and great issues but it is better than any other form out there

John Henry

Better for whom?

Someone once commented to me that monarchy is better than democracy, because a king only has one head to chop off. Presumably a paraphrasing of another famous quote.

The USA is, at present, a democratic country only in principle. It does not have a democratically elected leader or government. We can therefore only assume that the military actions of this government are not in the cause of democracy, but only in its name.

When trying to understand political matters, I often find it useful to conduct what I call "The Paxman Test". When considering "information" given by any person with political motives, simply ask yourself "Why is this lying bastard lying to me?"

Looking back through history, for almost every war fought for an ideology we can infer an underlying motive. The truth is that if you want people to fight (whether for your good, their good or somebody elses) an ideology is a very powerful way of doing it. There are many reasons for the strength of ideology. Here are some.

1) It is infinite. If your fight is against an enemy, they can be vanquished. If it is for wealth or land, once people have achieved as much wealth or land as they want, they will stop fighting. But you can fight forever to make the world more Democratic, more Communist, more Muslim, more Christian, etc.

2) It is mutable. A good ideology should be vague and broad enough in it's definition that one is able to tweak its interpretation to suit one's ends. The two main benefits of this are that it lets you to switch enemies as often as your imagination allows and that you can persuade your forces that their attack is for the benefit of their victims. "I'm here to liberate the gooks. Trouble is, the poor gooks would rather be alive than free"

3) It has no will. Unlike people, who are able to say that they'd rather not be liberated, thank you very much, an ideology can't turn around and tell you it doesn't want to be spread or imposed.

4) It is intangible. A good leader needs charisma. A good ideology does not. There are no short, fat, ugly ideologies with poor personal hygiene and an annoying, squeaky voice. They're all beautiful.

5) It allows the agressor to disassociate themselves from their actions. I just added this one after seeing the Saudi ambassador on TV excusing their human rights record with the line "As I said, we are following Islamic law."

So the answer is that America does not go to war to enforce democracy, it just uses democracy to go to war.

By now, you're probably thinking "Man, this guy's some kind of a paranoid freak" You're correct, but just because you're paranoid... I'm not saying these people are sitting round in board rooms saying "How can we spin this around to make it look like it's for democracy?" They just get carried along on the wave. Remember, the first person the liar lies to is himself.

Now don't take all this as some anti-republican, anti-american or even anti-authoritarian rant. Every nation on Earth plays the same game and always has done. I'm just answering the question in its context.

__________________
"No one was behaving from very Buddhist motives. Then, thought Pigsy, he was hardly a Buddha, nor was he a monkey. Presently, he was a pig spirit changed into a little girl pretending to be a little boy to be offered to a water monster. It was all very simple to a pig spirit."

highthief

It was Winston Churchill I think who made it famous, if not said it first.

"Democracy is the worst form of government, with the exception of all the others"

I tend to agree, democracy is currently the best system for educated nations though it is far from perfect and will one day be superceded by a better form of government.

wonderwench

What better form of government?

Given that the only reason to have a government is to provide protection against those who trangress our liberty, humanity will have to evolve into a race of angels for the need to go away.

Tman144

After a bit of searching, I believe you are right hightheif. A look at brainyquote.com attributes the quote to him. The whole thing reads, "Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except all those others that have been tried from time to time. "

I also found another one that I found amusing by Churchill, "The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter."

__________________
"Don't touch my belt, you Jesus freak!" -Mr. Gruff the Atheist Goat

wonderwench

The best preservation for democracy is an active conservative party (in the true sense of protector and conservator of enduring values) and an active liberal party (in the true sense of innovation to address the current problems of society).

It is important to note that America is actually a republic, not a democracy. The design was intended for representation - not egalitarian voting on every subject.

roachboy

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?

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite

highthief

Given that you only get on average 50% voter turnout anyway during presidential elections, perhaps the old "philosopher king" idea isn't so far out. Half the population doesn't contribute to democracy anyway, as they do not participate.

http://www.fairvote.org/turnout/preturn.htm

The rest of us can simply tell the sheep what to do.

wonderwench

I have come to the conclusion that it would be better if voting rights were limited to those who:

- Are proficient in English.
- Are not financially dependent upon the government (with the exception of military personnel).

At this point, those of us who pay the bills are outvoted by those who receive entitlement payments, corporate welfare and union protected bureaucratic jobs.

ARTelevision

wonderwench, I do like the way you think.

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create evolution

wonderwench

Then you don't scare easily, Art.

I have been known to freak out those who have delicate constitutions.

roachboy

gee, wonderwench--if you are going to impose langauge and class criteria for voting, you might as well accept the consequences of your own position----you might as well extend the limitation to race--maybe only people who agree with your "politics" should be allowed to vote as well.

maybe only you should be allowed to vote.

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite

wonderwench

You are incorrect, so allow me to enlighten you.

I am claiming that voting should be a privilege earned by responsible individuals. This has nothing to do with economic class or genetics. It has everything to do with character and behavior.

Why should parasites run our country?

roachboy

a ridiculous position, wonderwench...it is not even worth discussing further.

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite

wonderwench

It's only ridiculous if one doesn't understand the importance of our founding values.

roachboy

you actually believe that it is coherent at any level to explain the outcomes of social problems with reference to arbitrary subjective attributes? do you really believe that class position is a function of "character and behaviour"? on what possible basis? in the context of a profoundly unequal social reality, it seems somewhere between pollyanna and fundamentally dishonest to maintain that position.

"founding values"???---on what possible planet are these relevant directly now? even in the 1830s, de tocqueville argued that the entire illusion of jeffersonian pseudo-democracy was close to being wiped out by capitalism--by 2004, these values, and the social situation that made them correspond to anything material, have been wiped out for at least 150 years. i am familiar with the pseudo-theoretical justification for this kind of delusion, which lies with the "original intent" doctrine propagated by mediocrities on the order of edwin meese and fundamental to variants of ideologically rooted social mobility for the far right...but this doctrine is totally indefenisble on any grounds. this flimsiness explains why it only functions in circles tightly circumscribed by rightwing think tanks--outside the montonous circle jerk of these spaces, the notion of "original intent" has no currency whatsoever.

your position, btw, is completely antithetical to any kind of democratic politics--the idea that questions of social position can be explained by reference to some hallucination of individual character is of a piece with the idea of natural hierarchies--a notion that we have seen over and over through the past 200 years, which underpins any number of racist-to-fascist ideologies. the only thing surprising is to find that even now people still operate within these ridiculous, outmoded and dangerous frames of reference.

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite

ARTelevision

roachboy, would you please clarify your position on ancient Greek democracy and it's high degrees of elitism in relation to some of your comments here? I want to comprehend the fullness of your always well stated positions. And in this discussion, I'm not clear on this point.

__________________
create evolution

wonderwench

roachboy,

I have a reading suggestion for you. It is much more eloquent and thorough than anything I can post: Russell Kirk's "The Conservative Mind".

As you cite Tocqueville, you must also be familiar with the concept of the "Tyranny of the Masses". Tocqueville warned that democracy would lead to the inevitable "bread and circuses". The U.S. is not a democracy, btw, it is a republic.

Your rhetoric could use a refurb. Overuse of pseudo-theoretical undermines your message, if you have one other than The Right Is Evil.

Back to the topic. I made no such suggestion that class be a factor in voting - merely that voting be a right reserved for individuals who accept responsibility for their lives.

roachboy

two elements in this post:

wonderwench: as for the language i write in---well, it is a shorthand---nothing i can do if you find it alienating. given that this is a board, i dont find myself with any choice about writing in shorthand. most of the references i make and the arguments i try to work out from them or around them, however, are quite precise--i long ago learned about using this gambit without being able to back it up. so why not try taking on an actual argument or two---i levelled a basic critique of your position, and you did not respond. feel free to, however.

art--the way in whihc athenian democracy defined the polis and the way in which the polis worked are seperable--as for the former, the restriction of the polis to male property-holders would obviously have to be done away with if anything beyond a normative claims based on direct democracy could ever be made---the question of thinking about what went on inside the polis is a different matter--most of the general points that i think important about it are laid out in the previous, longer post (there are others as well....). there has been quite a bit of work in recent years on athenian democracy, much of it interesting--vidal-naquet, rene leveque and cornelius castoriadis have all written extensively on it, from different viewpoints--jean-pierre vernant's work is quite cool as well. all are or were (castoriadis died several years ago) interested in both looking at the content of athenian democracy as a political question and in historical terms.

often the split i argue for gets criticized, and the arguments for rejecting that split are varied--i'll hold off on proactively saying anything about it, maybe react later if it comes up.

i have been involved with thinking about these matters for some time, more from the political than historical perspectives--i find that conflict over the meaning of democracy is interesting, and that understood in the way i advocate, it becomes quite the opposite of how it is currently used--it becomes the basis for a quite withering critique of the existing state of affairs. i sometimes think that the right ideologues sense this-- which is why i find them fleeing the idea of democracy--except when it comes to lying about war........

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite

oktjabr

Would be interesting to read about it, can you recommend some title from these authors?

__________________
"If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stomping on a human face -- forever."
-G.O.

SinisterMotives

I can see some value in Wenchie's idea of extending the vote only to responsible, self-supporting individuals. However, the problem she would seek to solve thereby - that of freeloaders voting for their own entitlement benefits - would be just as easily solved if those hard-working people who don't vote made the time to do so.

wonderwench

No, SM, it wouldn't. As long as politicians can buy votes by taking money from one person and giving it to another, we will have this problem.

SinisterMotives

So the solution would be to regulate those grey area tactics that candidates use to get such people to vote, rather than to completely deny them the vote.

wonderwench

The more we must resort to regulations, the more dishonest people find or design loopholes.

There is a correlation between expanding voting rights to people who feel no vested interest in society other that what they are able to take from others and the decline of civilization.

roachboy

what are you talking about?
where to start?

you act as though there is equal access for everyone to adequate education in the states--which is patently false.

you act as though there are no structural reasons--political reasons--in the states for maintaining people in poverty. which is patently false.

you act as though poverty or marginalization are to be understood by blaming the poor--which is patently ridiculous.

you act as though the welfare state can be understood as nothing more than taking from one person and giving to another for no reason--which is ridiculous as well--the redistribution of wealth through the mechanism of the welfare system was the result of extended periods of conflict between the holders of capital and working people--the compromise arrived at articulated the idea that capitalism should enable a society to crawl out from the barbarism caused by a radically unequal distrubtion of wealth, that there is a content to notions of economic and social justice--that capitalism is NOT a system that provides the greatest good for the greatest number without some kind of state intervention. the state--for better of worse--expanded into these areas in order to INCREASE the domain of political action, of public input--what arguments like wonderwench's entail is a return to the most barbaric versions of capitalism, like what you might know about from the london of the mid 19th century--radical separation of the classes, no future whatsoever for people not born into privilege, and a repressive police apparatus whose primary function is to crush any attempt at protest, at organization, not to speak of revolt....

i assume that people who endorse this kind of position imagine that they would somehow be born into privilege themselves so that this barbaric capitalism would be cool with then, in the same way that people who are part of the society for creative anachronism imagine that the mideval period would have been kinda cool because everyone would be a baron or duke.

what would do you, wonderwench--eliminate the poor?
open up some nice camps for them to hang out in for a while?
maybe you wouldnt--what i suspect you would do in fact is simply not look at the consequences of your politics, were they to become implemented, that you would be pretty much unconcerned about what happened to the people who would be sent into a void in the real or metaphorical sense by your politics.


you mention some "problem"---what **is** this problem you talk about? the idea that citizenship means something, that citizenship is not identicial with economic position? and why should it be?

if the underlying premise of your argument is that somehow or other the poor, for example, are ignorant or have been manipulated, i have to say that your own politics as i have understood them from your posts do not put up a very compelling argument that your position is elaborated on a different basis. and that seems to have little to do with economic status...you seem to contradict your own position yourself.....

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite

wonderwench

Wow. That is quite a diatribe. I'm impressed.

Riddle me this. Why is it good to tax poor working families in order for relatively more affluent senior citizens to receive entitlement payments from the government?

You are also twisting my words into something I did not say: That voting rights should belong to only the rich. My qualification was self-sufficiency, something which many poor people are able to handle.

You are also making the mistake of equating money with quality education. Wrong again. The decline in the quality of public education is directly linked to the power of the teachers' unions, which now exist to protect their members at the expense of students.

SinisterMotives

That's not surprising, given the ambiguous language of some of the acts of Congress I've read. Sometimes they sound as if they're not really legislating anything. That could also be a big part of the problem of "judicial legislation" in that judges find themselves in the position of interpreting vague laws - often contrary to the original intention of a bill's authors.

I certainly agree with that as well. I think that has more to do with an individual's upbringing than with the availability of government aid programs per se though. My mother was on welfare briefly when my sister and I were toddlers, but neither of us would ever dream of living on the public dole unless we fell on dire circumstances and needed it temporarily while we got back on our feet. That's simply not the way we were raised.

bodymassage3

Maybe i'm the only one that found these examples interesting:

"India's previously elected president had to forfeit for personal safety."

"The Africans have a civil war every time they elect a new president."

filtherton

If were expressing interest in votes not being bought, we might as well eliminate any king of campaign contributions that don't come directly from the state. The problem as i see it, is that american politics is now doomed to chase the carrot hanging from the stick of big business. If you're going to discuss the faults of the american system you can't do so without mentioning the fact that american democracy is the best money can buy and still pretend to be remotely objective.

I think that the poor mostly abstain from voting nowadays anyway.

SinisterMotives

Trying to buy good government is itself a problem. I would go further and eliminate all campaign contributions except modest ones from private citizens. Let candidates run on the strength of their own ideas and convictions, not the amount of money they raise or how much corporate butt they kiss. Let there be frequent televised debates leading up to election day instead of slick million-dollar commercials designed to sell an image rather than a substantive platform.

Let's face it, what are campaign contributions used for anyway, if not to pay for the expensive Madison Avenue-style glitz and spin? I frankly find it insulting to the voters' intelligence that candidates are sold to the public using the same tactics that are used to sell laundry detergent. Perhaps that is one of the hazards of living in a cult of consumerism, but it's no way for a free people to choose a government.

wonderwench

You are underscoring my argument for limiting voting rights to self-sufficient citizens. The glitz and spin are largely used to promote the messages needed to buy votes.