[lbo-talk] Bringing Them Home Versus Bringing Democracy

[billbartlett at enterprize.net.au]

At 8:30 PM -0400 23/7/03, Jon Johanning wrote:
>On Wednesday, July 23, 2003, at 12:31  AM, Bill Bartlett wrote:
>
>>Democracy has to be built on confidence, a trust that those who win elections will not use power to oppress those who lose. That everyone, including the elected government, will abide by the law and be treated equally under the law. Americans don't even understand that themselves, or practice it at home, so it is going to be difficult for them to teach it to Iraqis.
>>
>>To sum up, you can lead a horse to water, but can't make it drink. Americans don't know what water is, let alone where it is. It follows can't even lead horses to it.
>
>Well, I think that's going a bit far, though I understand the rhetorical effect such talk is intended to have. Actually, I think that Americans understand democracy in this sense rather well, and we have proven it by many struggles since the 18th century aimed precisely at getting "equal treatment under the law," some of which we lost but many of which we won. Democracy hereabouts is not completely dead yet, although I grant that the places where it is most alive (especially on the local level) are often not very visible to the outside world.

It is precisely the process of electing those charged with administering the law on a local level which is most objectionable. Democracy is undermined by any system which politicises the actual administration of justice, this is inimical to the rule of law, which is in turn the essential foundation of political democracy.

Democracy is ideally about democratically determining what the law will be, on the understanding that the law will then be administered impartially. (Representative democracy falls short of the ideal in that it only permits citizens to democratically elect the people who will make the laws, rather than being able to make the laws directly.) The problem with electing administrators though is the elected administrators of the law (judges, police etc in the US system) can no longer be impartial. They are subject to political pressure. The law will not be administered fairly, the elected police and judges must get and retain the support of a majority (and only a majority) in order to retain their position.

This is cancerous, undermining democracy. I wasn't merely being rhetorical. I genuinely believe that Americans don't understand this, don't even understand the basics of democracy. Maybe they were world leaders a few hundred years ago, but they don't seem to have kept up with the pace over the last 300 years, are still wedded to their primitive vision of democracy. That early system had lots of bugs, the rest of the world has been gradually de-bugging it, but the US is still stuck with an early unstable version and has no idea how it works, let alone how to fix it.

Bill Bartlett
Bracknell Tas