Democratic institutions are quarantine arrangements to combat that ancient pestilence, lust for tyranny:
as such they are very useful and very boring.
-- well, some times more so than others --
from Nietzsche's
The Wanderer and his Shadow
s. 289, R.J. Hollingdale transl.
Alexander Meiklejohn, quoted here
Shadows of Hope by
Sam Smith
quoted
here
"Does a man (sic) have a right to his opinions? In a democracy, the answer "yes" is often taken for granted, and is defended with arguments about personal freedom. But the thoughtful answer is: "not necessarily." The square root of forty-nine is not a matter of opinion. To put it more strongly, no one has the right to believe that it is eight, since this is an opinion that cannot be defended."
Inklings : What Do You Think?
by Lewis Jones, from
Skeptical Briefs June 1999
Soon to Be a Major Motion Picture
by Abbie Hoffman,
Norman Mailer (Introduction), Johanna Lawrenson (Afterword)
pages 209, 63
See note below
from
Liberalism : The Classical Traditio
by Ludvig von Mises
or here. Online here
quoted here
"The dictionary definition has lots of different dimensions, but, roughly speaking, a society is democratic to the extent that people in it have meaningful opportunities to take part in the formation of public policy. There are a lot of different ways in which that can be true, but insofar as it's true, the society is democratic."
Noam Chomsky
"Defective Democracy"
"The two axial principles of our age -- tribalism and globalism -- clash at every point except one:
they may both be threatening to democracy"
" Marxism's natural death in Eastern Europe is no guarantee that subtler tyrannies do not await us, here and abroad. History has demonstrated that there is no final triumph of reason, whether it goes by the name of Christianity, the Enlightenment, or, now, democracy. To think that democracy as we know it will triumph -- or is even here to stay -- is itself a form of determinism, driven by our own ethnocentricity. Indeed, those who quote Alexis de Tocqueville in support of democracy's inevitability should pay heed to his observation that Americans, because of their (comparative) equality, exaggerate "the scope of human perfectibility." Despotism, Tocqueville went on, 'is more particularly to be feared in democratic ages', because it thrives on the obsession with self and one's own security which equality fosters.- A page on this site on / Fascism Lite /
I submit that the democracy we are encouraging in many poor parts of the world is an integral part of a transformation toward new forms of authoritarianism; that democracy in the United States is at greater risk than ever before, and from obscure sources; and that many future regimes, ours especially, could resemble the oligarchies of ancient Athens and Sparta more than they do the current government in Washington. History teaches that it is exactly at such prosperous times as these that we need to maintain a sense of the tragic, however unnecessary it may seem. ( The Gods of the Copybook Headings...)"
"...at the end of the day, political parties are just a buffer between ordinary people and the corporations who are exploiting them. People vent their anger at the political party of the day and miss the point that the political party is only doing the bidding of big business. Rather than getting directly active in the streets and in their local areas to fight back against the whole system of oppression, many believe they can improve their lot by voting for a different set of administrators once every four or five years."
LOS ANGELES, Nov. 6 /PRNewswire/ ‚ Following another disturbingly low national voter turnout, Rock the Vote today declared a "state of national emergency" in the health of the nation's democracy and body politic, and unveiled a platform to increase involvement among all‚ but particularly our youngest‚ voters.
...
Rock the Vote's initiatives include:
- An end to national voter registration requirements
- An expansion of Election Day to Election Days
- An aggressive exploration of technology's role in enhancing voter education, participation, and turnout
"The true and only true basis of representative government is equality of rights. Every man has a right to one vote, and no more, in the choice of representatives.
"The rich have no more right to exclude the poor from the right of voting, or of electing and being elected, than the poor have to exclude the rich; and wherever it is attempted, or proposed, on either side, it is a question of force and not of right."
"The rare Mark Twain essay referenced by Heinlein in Expanded Universe", --
"The new law was framed and passed. Under it every citizen, however poor or ignorant, possessed one vote, so universal suffrage still reigned; but if a man possessed a good common-school education and no money, he had two votes; a high-school education gave him four; if he had property likewise, to the value of three thousand sacos, he wielded one more vote; for every fifty thousand sacos a man added to his property, he was entitled to another vote; a university education entitled a man to nine votes, even though he owned no property. Therefore, learning being more prevalent and more easily acquired than riches, educated men became a wholesome check upon wealthy men, since they could outvote them. Learning goes usually with uprightness, broad views, and humanity; so the learned voters, possessing the balance of power, became the vigilant and efficient protectors of the great lower rank of society."
The Robert A. Heinlein Online Archives
Discussion of the unusual form of democracy(?) in Heinlein's / Starship Troopers / on this site.
"The Consumer Superhighway and the Internet represent two opposing models of interactive communication. The Superhighway most likely will be organized on what Electronic Frontier Foundation chair Mitchell Kapor calls "the broadcast model." In this paradigm, a small group of people own the system and decide what gets air time. According to Kapor, this model "breeds consumerism, passivity, crassness and mediocrity." In contrast, the Internet is a network of computers and data lines that are owned by thousands of different companies and public institutions. If one of these lines or computers disappears, information can simply be rerouted. Also, the content of the Internet is programed by the people who use it, rather than the people who own it. Kapor argues that a system like this "breeds critical thinking, activism, democracy and quality."
Personally, I think people are so undemanding that
we're going to get similar results
(that is,
general "consumerism, passivity, crassness, and mediocrity")
regardless
of which "model" we follow.
(Re-reading this article 21 July 99 I see that the tagline reads,
"The Info Superhighway could be a virtual democracy,
or a shopping mall in a box."
Which one did we get? Yup.)
Until recently, nobody had conducted a systematic survey of the effect of political institutions on happiness. You would expect people in democracies to be happier than people living in authoritarian states.
Even among democracies, you might expect different sorts of constitutional arrangements to be more or less conducive to human flourishing. You might expect citizens to be happier in systems that gave them a greater sense of control over what their politicians do, or in systems that gave them a fuller role as participants.
... Which is where Switzerland -- one country with many political systems -- comes in. Switzerland has a federal structure that reserves major powers to the 26 cantons, and the cantons vary in the ease with which citizens participate.
Mr Bruno Frey and Mr Alois Stutzer of the University of Zurich have studied a survey of 6,000 Swiss residents that asked: "How satisfied are you with your life as a whole these days?"
... The extent of democracy in the cantons is captured on a scale running from one to six.
Messrs Frey and Stutzer find that a one-point increase in this index increases the share of people who say they are very happy by 2.7 percentage points. This means that the marginal effect of direct democracy on happiness is nearly half as big as the effect of moving from the lowest monthly income band to the highest.
But which aspect of direct democracy is it that makes people happier? The outcome or the process? ...
Participation in initiatives and referendums is restricted to Swiss nationals. Foreigners enjoy the better results, but only nationals get the benefit of taking part. It turns out that direct democracy improves the happiness of foreigners and Swiss nationals alike -- but the increase for foreigners is smaller, about one-third of the increase for nationals. A happy country, it seems, is one where politics is not just a spectator sport.
(As proposed in this site) "The Body of Ratifiers" is a large number of voters selected at random from the Voters' Roll (one Ratifier for every 1,000 voters is a good statistical number). Ratifiers never meet as legislators do, but instead, they deliberate and vote in their own homes on a supplied terminal in their own spare time. They read the legislation, review the proponents' and opponents' arguments, and either ratify or reject it.Informal home-built site, but apparently taken seriously by Atlantic Monthly.
"The purpose of the IWW is to establish democracy in our everyday life on the job."
Hmm, "Democracy ... everyday ... on the job". Interesting concept.
"As protection against any clique running this union to suit themselves, the following safeguards have been devised: "
a page on this site on:
/ One Big Union /
and
/ The Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) (The Wobblies!) /
"Perhaps replacing the House of Representatives with a House of Lobbyists would help make government more accountable.
...what is necessary in government is not "democracy," whatever that may be, but accountability and responsibility."
"...why do voters -- in poll after poll, state after state -- express frustration at the refusal of lawmakers to deal with issues they care about most? Activists typically resort to the initiative process when they have exhausted every other means of getting a grievance redressed. ... most went on the ballot because elected legislators preferred to do nothing. ... Laws voted on at the ballot box tend to be more carefully vetted, more thoroughly debated, and more widely understood than those gaveled through on pro-forma voice votes in the capitol."
" According to the "iron law" democracy and large scale organization are incompatible. Any large organization, Michels pointed out, is faced with problems of coordination that can be solved only by creating a bureaucracy. A bureaucracy, by design, is hierarchically organized to achieve efficiency--many decisions that have to be made every day cannot be made by large numbers of people in an efficient manner. The effective functioning of an organization therefore requires the concentration of much power in the hands of a few people. The organizational characteristics that promote oligarchy are reinforced by certain characteristics of both leaders and members of organizations. People achieve leadership positions precisely because they have unusual political skill; they are adept at getting their way and persuading others of the correctness of their views. Once they hold high office, their power and prestige is further increased. Leaders have access and control over information and facilities that are not available to the rank-and-file. They control the information that flows down the channels of communication. Leaders are also strongly motivated to persuade the organization of the rightness of their views, and they use all of their skills, power and authority to do so. "
"People who voted for Bush tended to assume that he was in favor of their views, even if the Republican Party platform was diametrically opposed to them. The same was largely true of Kerry voters.-- Links are mine -- ed.
The reason for this is that the parties try to exclude the population from participation. So they don’t present issues, policies, agendas, and so on. They project imagery, and people either don’t bother or they vote for the image. ...
In the year 2000, there was a huge fuss afterwards about the stolen election, with the Florida chads and the Supreme Court. But ask yourself who was exorcised about it? It was all among a small group of intellectuals. They were the ones who were upset about it. There was never any public resonance for this. In the current election it’s being reiterated. There’s a big fuss among intellectuals about the vote in Ohio, how the voting machines didn’t work, and other things. But the interesting thing is that nobody cares.
Why don’t people care if the election is stolen? The reason is that they don’t take the election seriously in the first place. They reacted about the way that people react to television ads. It’s a mode of delusion. ...
There is an alternative, and that is to try to run a program that’s committed to developing a democratic society in which people’s opinions matter."
Soon to Be a Major Motion Picture
by Abbie Hoffman,
Norman Mailer (Introduction), Johanna Lawrenson (Afterword)
pages 209, 63
* Lincoln actually said:
"This country, with its institutions, belongs to the people who inhabit it. Whenever they shall grow weary of the existing government, they can exercise their constitutional right of amending it, or their revolutionary right to dismember, or overthrow it."
The entire import of this Address is to counsel the great desirability of
negotiation over revolution. Elsewhere in it, Lincoln says:"Plainly, the central idea of secession, is the essence of anarchy. A majority, held in restraint by constitutional checks, and limitations, and always changing easily, with deliberate changes of popular opinions and sentiments, is the only true sovereign of a free people. Whoever rejects it, does of necessity, fly to anarchy or to despotism. Unanimity is impossible; the rule of a minority as a permanent arrangement, is wholly inadmissible; so that rejecting the majority principle, anarchy, or despotism in some form, is all that is left."