Justin Schwartz:
> Well, we have a democracy worth having, although it is exceedingly
> imperfect: what I (and most political theorists) call liberal
> democracy--universal suffrage, competitive (more or less) elections,
> extensive (if threatened) civil and political liberties. That's not to
> sneer at, since these advances were won by centuries of bloody struggle.
> But that's they key thing. We won these treasures by our own efforts. I
> think they are beyond price, but I don't think we can or should impose them
> on others, not because I think other ways of doing things (such as Sadam
> Hussein's) are just as good, far from it, but because that's not how one
> spreads democracy.
Surely the word _democracy_ implies that the desires and interests of the _demos_, the common people, be somehow taken into consideration in a serious way. Yet, regardless of universal sufferage, competitive elections, and some civil liberties, the effects of class guarantee that every effort will be made to neutralize, rather than incorporate, these desires and interests, to degrade and obscure public discourse, and to efface knowledge. What remains for the common people is a kind of vague veto power which keeps some of their rulers, some of the time, looking over their shoulders, since truly gross depredations of the general welfare might have adverse repercussions at the polls. But to call this sort of thing "people's power", which is what _demokratia_ literally means, is a joke. Any talk of exporting democracy by force or otherwise inevitably occasions the question of when we will begin to see it produced at home.
-- Gordon