Pride in Democracy vs. True DemocracyFollow

Hey guys, warning in advance, this is a political thread - sort of at least. It might also be a little long. I'm a liberal, and so my views might seep a little into what I write despite my trying to be nonpartisan about this, so please bare with me. Basically, I was considering the fact recently that in the US, we pride ourselves very deeply on our committal to democracy. One problem does exist with this, and it can be seen to an extent even to this day. Democracy was historically a failed system of government.

During the Athenian age of Greece (our political system was based on true Greek democracy, however instead of having true random candidate selection like the Athenians did we use elected representatives) democracy seemed like a brilliant idea. It worked amazingly well, and people were for the most part happy as their country flourished. However, after the end of the Peloponnesian war (forgive me if I butchered the spelling), more and more unrest began to form in the Greek house.

The way their system was set up worked fairly well. Firstly, one out of every 50 people (the numbers may be off here, I haven't had my greek history class for close to a year) was elected to serve in the house. The house basically was meant to represent a general sampling of the people, hence the massive number of members. Out of these, one was chosen to lead the senate at each individual meeting. This way, no man could truely run the country and all were accountable. There was also a common house, in which all males had the right to participate. This was used on a community basis to figure out community issues that had little bearing on other communities (ie: where to dig a well).

What had originally kept the Greek representatives doing their job properly was an interview at the end of their term, where their performance was evaluated by the rest of the house remaining. If their performance was good, they recieved their pay and were back to doing whatever they had done before their stint in office. If their performance was horrible, or corrupt, then they would recieve some form of punishment, possibly even death (a general recieved death as a punishment for being foolhardy and leading his troops into a mass slaughter despite intelligence stipulating that the ambush would occur). This system worked pretty well to keep the governing bodies doing their job effectively and the country prospered.

The major failing came into place thanks to rich landowners. These landowners felt they had the need for more of a say and more-than-equal citizen's rights. So, they began to use their wealth to press members of the house to vote in certain ways. In fact, there is a rather famous period of time called the "rule of 30" in which the landholders had all but seized control of the senate by payrolling most of the members. This began to pull the democracy apart from the inside. Even though the people were to be held accountable, they were not because the people rating them were on the same payroll. Ironically, this came to a head the day that a man named Socrates (the scholar) was heading the senate. The ruling 30 had deemed a group of their undesirables as worthy of a death sentance. However, Socrates deemed that the men were innocent. Using his power of the chair, he vetoed their execution.

Infuriated, the ruling 30 began a smear campaign of Socrates, the "gadfly (or pest) of Athens." This culminated with what is considered the ultimate failing of democracy, the execution of Socrates, when he refused exile. Despite being considered being one of the most revered learners of the day, and a highly decorated war hero, Socrates martyred himself to expose the corrupted system.

The failure of democracy parallels that of the failure of communism. It fails to take into account the basic human desire to get ahead by any means necessary. In this case, mega-corporations (or rich landowning families to the Greeks) are able to flex more muscle in the government than the actual voters. This causes civil unrest, and government corruption to the point where the government eventually bottoms out.

This situation is not far gone from the state that exists in many democratic countries. As opposed to rich land owning families, we have multi-billion corporations who often have vested political interests. Their interests are often fulfilled by government representatives whose campaigns they help to fund, while the general populace begins to be ignored. Tax cuts targetting the highest working class are an indicator of this today.

Ultimately, my question is this: why do people take so much pride in democracy? Why is it, that almost no one realizes that the democracy that we pride ourselves in, was based on a failed system? What do you think the liklihood of history repeating itself is when so few people know?

NB: Sorry about the length, but there's a lot of history involved that needed to be packed with the questions.



Edited, Mon Dec 13 11:07:59 2004 by scubamage

I am a firm believer that not all mistake will be repeated!

With outsourcing at an all-time high, and the economy falling hard again, are you sure that we really have the commitment to the extent that you think we do?

Also, our having a republic is not that different from the way that Greek democracy worked. The difference is that instead of having randomly selected people for a relatively good representative sample of the population, we have a smaller less representative sampling in our senate. In fact, this can be even worse than the original Greek model since instead of having it be part of your civic duty to serve as part of the governing body, you can exist almost entirely outside of the political arena. You can also have corrupt life-long politicians who take opportunities others don't, or won't, due to the lack of random selection. Plus with little or no accountability for the members of the house and senate, who's to say that our interests have been spoken? Politicians are the cliche archtype of liars. There's a reason for that, and you trust that they won't be corrupted?

Also, the Greeks did not have repeat terms for anyone who served in a governing body out of fear of corruption. The generals and military leaders were exempt from that stipulation, of course. It was how all other government jobs were filled.

We may be a republic, but aside from random selection versus election, there is little difference between the systems. In fact, the republic leaves more room for corruption.

Edited, Mon Dec 13 11:27:44 2004 by scubamage

OP, you need to differentiate between direct democracy and parliamentary democracy, majoritarian democracy and proportional representative democracy, "true democracy" dosen't mean sh[i][/i]it in your context



***** about it on the internet?

No, I mean it's "commitment", not "committal".

Uhmm, perhaps the fact that people only give credibility to people with a D or an R next to their name has something to do with it?

what there is now +

1) online internet voting in every house

2) dramatically better polisci curriculum starting at age 10.

3) penalties for not voting.

4) death to all the Bush's to start the party off.

5) no more R and D please. red and blue are so... yucky. how about mauve and aqua?

Ok, a lot of you seem to be missing some things.. maybe I wasn't quite clear enough. I do not have any problems with democracy. I don't mean that every instance of democracy has failed. I mean that the original basis of democracy failed, there is a difference.

I'm trying to teach you all a little by illuminating this fact. It is not a perfect system, but no system is. However an imperfect system should not be one which is actively spread to other nations in an act of nation building. Also, I meant to highlight the fact that many Americans are obsessive about their pride in democracy as if it was completely infallible. It is not. That is why I explained what happened with Athens, the original petri dish for the system of government.

As for outsourcing, it's simple. Outsourcing does not benefit the citizens of a nation outside those in the higher level positions in whatever company, and often the company's stockholders. These companies provide massive amounts of monetary compensation to law makers and politicians, and they in turn put a blind eye towards the problem.

The parallel can be drawn to the rule of the 30 in Athens, where they used their corruption to remove "undesirables" in an attempt to make more money. Only in this case the undesirables are the workers of our country, and their removal doesn't mean execution. Little can be done in recourse towards their actions because they are within the scope of current laws, and the laws aren't heading towards any significant changes.

I hope that clarifies some.

So 4 paragraphs, one of which is a single line quote is too much? C'mon Nobby! You're nitpicking...

Hmm, I was refferring to Rome actually. Good pickup however.

you clearly have no idea what your'e talking about

Yes. But none of this is talking about how "Democracy" is a failure in any way. The rich having a disproportionate amount of power exists in *all* political systems. You seem to want to say that Democracy fails because it only fixes 90% of the problems that exist in all other systems, but fails to fix that last 10%.

So far, every system that's tried to prevent "the rich" from having that disproportionate amount of power has failed much more spectacularly then the worst Democracies. I'm thinking that's maybe not something we can or should try to fix.




Yes and no. In an absolute "everyone is equal" way? No. Everyone's opinion "should" be equal in that case. Clearly, if there's a decision to be made about passing a new law that affects me and everyone around me, we should all have an equal voice in deciding if the law should pass. The real quesion is: "Should that always be the case?". Let's say I'm a business owner. I've invested 1 million dollars of my own money into the business. Should I not have more say about how that business is run then the 50 people I hire to work for me? Of course I should! And no rational person would say otherwise.

So, we can show two extremes at work. On the one hand, you have a very basic idea that all people should be equal. On the other hand, you have a very basic idea that the person who has the most vested in something should have more say in the decisions affecting it. The problem always arises as to at which point one of those ideas should hold sway. There's no really good answer for that. I also don't think it's a failure that we can't always define where that line should be. I think it's just a representation of the fact that governments are the products of people and people are flawed. I'm far more worried about the guys who have come up with the "perfect" system, then the guys saying "It's not perfect, but it's good enough". So far, the system we have in the US has been in the second catagory, and that's good enough for me....