Brad DeLong:
> On the contrary, if the twentieth century teaches one lesson, it is
> that _Democracy_ is the necessary and inescapable prerequisite for
> avoiding complete and total moral, human, and political disaster.
>
> And if the twentieth century teaches a second lesson, it is that
> those who claim that _Democracy_ is a term of propaganda are only a
> tiny fraction away from being the tools and dupes of genocidal
> maniacs.
Some of what you say could be true. The United States has certainly fallen into some total moral, human and political disasters, like the War in Vietnam and the Drug War, from which a vigorous actual democracy might have saved it. It's hard to tell.
As for being the tools and dupes of genocidal maniacs, I don't know. "Democracy" in the formal liberal sense was practiced in Germany in the 1920s and early 1930s and did not prevent a genocidal maniac from coming to power. However, elsewhere we observe leaders who just killed large numbers of other people, like Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon in Indochina, without actually planning to wipe out entire nations. Formally similar regimes in the West _did_ oversee genocides in the 19th century, as in the U.S.; one might also find the Irish Famine genocidal, but again these were probably not explicitly planned. But perhaps these regimes have been quietly moved off the board of the democracy game even though they had elections and everything. As I pointed out elsewhere, Nicaragua and Serbia have been judged "democratic" not dependent of having contested elections but dependent on the results of those elections; one could apply this rather clever gambit to various United Stateses of the past and so write a glorious and unbesmirched history.
In any case, I have come to the conclusion that the democratic forms of liberalism do not suffice to prevent us from becoming the tools and dupes of genocidal maniacs or other undesirable types. Maybe there is some kind of ideal democratic state that would not be like this, but on the evidence it seems that the State must be resisted and sabotaged wherever possible, no matter what it pretends to be. Temporary good may come from one man putting a gun to another's head and optionally firing it, but as a regular, institutionalized practice it's a bad business regardless of the colors on the triggerman's uniform or the papers he carries in his pocket or the fact that a lot of people voted for his master.