Democracy - the greatest ideology on Earth?
 

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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."

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.

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?

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.

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.

wonderwench, I do like the way you think.

Then you don't scare easily, Art.

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

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.

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?

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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........

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.....

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.

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.

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."

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.

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.

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.

The glitz and spin are directed at freeloader and self-sufficient citizen alike. It's a rather broad stroke to link glitzy campaigns exclusively to the sort of vote buying you previously described.

Considering that ads are sound bites which consume a massive amount of campaign funding, the self-sufficient citizen is not the target audience. Real policy requires a more detailed forum. Debates, news articles and commentary are far better sources than ads for those who wish to be truly informed.

And I submit that it is the hard-working, self-reliant people who do not have time for much more than a 30-second sound bite - not the loafers who have all day to hang around at protests and rallies. You have described exactly that situation in your home state to me before.

No, what I have described is that hard-working people do not have time for the protesting and activism of those who sit on the steps of the state capital demanding more goodies.

I'm glad you cleared that up. For a minute there I thought you were implying that self-reliant citizens are somehow immune to the subtle psychological ploys - e.g., the appeals to one's sense of patriotism, images of waving flags, etc. - that are part and parcel of political ads.

Of course they are not immune to the emotional manipulation of ads. I would hope, however, that such ads are not the sole criteria upon which they make their voting choices.

So would I.

i had forgotten about this thread until just now, and am amazed----this last exhange is entirely is nuts----you are making arguments for limiting the franchise arbitrarily--worse than that, you are indulging rhetoric to justify it on the order of "parasites", "freeloaders", even going so far as to say that people without whatever arbitrary standard you are invoking to define your fantasy of self-reliance have "no committment to the nation"etc.--all of which that sounds really uncomfortably like a elements in some dressed-up fascist tirade--this way of defining a petit bourgeois "us" as over against rootless "them" is dangerous--it echoes the kind of thinking that lead to the murder of 6 million "rootless cosmpolitans" during world war 2.

as if this is not already enough, you get even more ridiculous when you talk about the left---remember that the first group the fascists went after were people on the political left, those who could name what they were doing, those who could mobilize opposition---this kind of thinking has absolutely nothing to do with democracy, even in its shallow american shadow-version.

however many its drawbacks, the existing order does tolerate dissent--people like you would eliminate that it seems, and then compound it by disempowering politically everyone who does not meet your arbitrary understanding of "self-reliance"---even if--against their own interests--they were to agree with you politically.

i certainly hope that you have not derived this kind of stuff from conventional conservative ideology--i hope that somewhere they lay other kinds of sources for it--because this is really not ok.

I've read this sentence over and over again, and for the life of me I cannot follow its logic. Are you saying that the brevity and/or cost of political ads somehow precludes their being targeted at gainfully employed voters?

If America really is this malevolent, pseudo-Democratic, sinister Oligarchy exploiting the naive, ignorant working class as some would have it, how did it get to be the "world's only superpower™"? India (a democracy) has significantly more workers and can't compete with the US.

Is the hard work that created this superpower fueled by indivduals for the sake of themselves and their families, or for their government and its ideology?

And why is it that when a foreign country wants its military or intelligence services trained to the state of the art, they send them to the US (or Israel). When the King of Jordan was sick, they sent him to an American hospital. Top athletes from around the world are trained and treated in America. How many countries' elite (from all over the world, not just the West) are educated in America? Why do people from all over the globe come here to live, work and raise their children? Who makes the best damn hamburgers in the world? Where else in the world can you go skiing and surfing in the same day?! The phenomenon of Disneyland or Hollywood?

Can these things even be legitimately cited as examples of the success of Democracy? Or are they signs of its failure? Are such things frivolous and meaningless and examples of a weak, lazy society with too much time on its hands?

Which leads to this: How does one even evaluate the 'success' then of any ideology?

Think about the messages. The most successful vote buying is that aimed at those who are getting the goodies. That is where a large portion of the ad money is spent. There are ads aimed at scaring the bejebus out of those who pay the bills - but that is deemed "negative".

Huzzah! Huzzah!

The corollary to the logical phallacy that American Democracy is evil, despite the vast amount of benefits the rest of the world enjoys, is that Statism (in the form of Socialism or Communism) is theoretically superior, it's just that it has not been implemented properly yet.

Answer to your last question: the success of any ideology is analogous to the proof being in the pudding - the welfare of those it is supposed to serve - the people.

Excellent points, powerclown. America has accomplished much of which we can be rightly proud. I think the resentment towards America on the part of some progressive-minded people stems from the fact that, having achieved great things, our culture has subsequently stagnated into a sort of complacent hedonism rather than maintaining its progressive momentum in order to accomplish still greater things. I don't think the world is wrong in expecting better from us, having witnessed what we've achieved thus far.

To be quite honest, I haven't heard a political ad recently, much less analyzed one. However, you have just stated that some ads are indeed targeted at working people, which seems to contradict your previous statement that they are targeted exclusively at people of the entitlement mentality.

Many rhetroical questions but what I meant was: Of all the Democracies in the world, why has the US-version of it been the most 'successful' ever? I myself haven't a clue...

I did not say they were targetted exclusively at entitlement recipients.

I think it is the combination the founding values, the Constitution and the design of our government that has made the U.S. a particularly fertile ground for Democracy . We also did not have the baggage of centuries of an aristocracy and rigid class system.

The short answer: We started out with a huge abundance of natural resources and land area, which allowed us to accept large numbers of immigrants of every race into the country. Such a diverse talent pool operating in a climate of unlimited opportunity was bound to pull a few tricks out of its collective hat.

That's the only way I could get the following sentence to parse. But no biggy.

That's the best argument for Democracy Ive heard all day...:)

I posted this a while back in another thread that was basically addressing the difference in nation building of democracy and what the U.S.'s version is

Yes that's a long read but IMO that is why America is so unique in democracy versus all others and why it works here, but not necessarily everywhere.

Interesting stuff Zeld.

Personal Freedom or Security & Order. It seems to me one of the reasons for the success of Democracy is its liberal allowance of relative personal freedom and the inclusion of most of its citizenry in its workings. Seems to me that the ideologies that underestimate the importance of personal freedoms (civil rights) and concern for the individual are the ones that are struggling today. Complicated issue!

It is indeed a complicated issue.

I remember though one way to look at it - the power of government vs. power of people.

It is like a graph with a line from the bottom left to the top right. The power of the people is towards the bottom, the power of the government to the top. As the power of the government increases, the point on the line goes up towards government, which decreases the power of the people.

But in the end, the thing is, once the government recieves more power, it will never relinquish it.

zeld--i am not sure about that last bit--it seems that the relative power of the state is greatly influenced by whether and how people organize themselves, what kind of political action they take, and how that action is assimilated, be it through law or through shifting the general frame of reference. if you look at the history of any country, you'll find that line too wavering, like all others do. the problem is that people have to be able to organize themselves, to understand that acting collectively is the only way to get social power in the present context--which is why the suspicion being cast upon collective action these days is something to fight---if people understand themselves as isolated individuals only, then, sadly, what you say in the last lines of your post, maybe well turn out to be true---but it is not inevitable.

I did too, but didn't get round to commenting on them. Exactly who is the President of Africa these days?

This is correct. Collective action goes against the grain in a society whose self-image is based upon a "wild west" ideal of rugged individualism. That image may have been valid when the US was a sparsely populated nation with vast frontiers where one could run away from civilization and be a nation unto oneself. In the modern world, everything is more intricately interrelated, and there is nowhere left to escape that essential fact. No matter where you go or what you do, government is there to be reckoned with, and that reckoning requires strength in numbers.

And just to add this thought to the gist of the last few posts:

Supposing that individuals do organize themselves to the extent that they overthrow the ruling class...Wouldn't the next generation of the Governed (in this theoretical system of organized, proactive individuals) be predisposed to overthrowing their Governors, as the latter had done before them?

The underdog is always predisposed to upset a hiearchical class structure. I think that is why the Founders scrupulously avoided a system of government based on privilege and class. Unfortunately, individualism is easily corrupted into egoism - a mindset that values competition over cooperation. Egoists are never content to be merely equal with their fellow men; thus they seek to establish a class hierarchy at every opportunity. The only way I see to prevent an endless succession of revolutions is to return to a proper valuation of the idea that all people are created equal.

a bit disconnected, one point from the other, so i'll use numbers to seperate them....

1. the founders dreamed about a country not founded on class and inherited privilege, and that was a nice dream--but as people of their times, not prophets, they had no way of knowing that capitalism would come and would sweep their world aside--which is has in its entirety--there is no point in refering to them as guides for understanding contemporary realities.

btw tocqueville (sorry but he keeps coming to mind these days)---who saw this happening already in the 1830s---argued in democracy in america that the single most important bit of law that prevented an economic aristocracy from forming was inheritance tax--he has a quite extended demonstration of this argument in the book, which i find interesting not only in itself buyt also in that lts of conservatives throw cliffnotes version of tocqueville around these day, clearly without having read him.
note that the right has been agitating for the repeal of inheritance tax for nigh some time now. i wonder if they understand the implications of their acts.

tocqueville also said something like the problem with talking to americans is that you have to flatter them in a manner worse than what you would have to indulge in with the worst kind of courtier, talking up the virtues us to the skies before you can say anything of substance. in that too, he seems to have been prescient.

2. it is not a foregone conclusion that revolution breeds more revolution, that revolutionary violence breeds only more--that is a myth constructed to reassure those who benefit from the existing order of things---what seem fundamental are the political views that would influence any such action, what kind of vision of the future was shaped it, and how the actors themselves, hopefully using that vision of the future to check themselves, dealt with violence once it came.