A democracy for him involved "majority rule and minority rights," a memorable phrase. The magazine was the _U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings_, if I remember correctly. It was more than 30 years ago.
On 5/6/06, Yoshie Furuhashi <critical.montages at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 5/6/06, Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> wrote:
> > Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
> >
> > >Moreover, it's about time that we recognize this country's electoral
> > >process as plutocratic and oligarchic, rather than democratic.
> >
> > Yes and no - it's neither one nor the other, but full of
> > contradictions. Christian Parenti writes from Colombia, where he's
> > researching a piece for The Nation, quoting a local left politico:
> > "To run for office from the left in colombia, you have to be willing
> > to die." Now that's a real plutocracy.
>
> Well, Doug, that's a difference between a plutocracy/oligarchy in the
> periphery mired in decades of civil war (Colombia) and a
> plutocracy/oligarchy at the core that has been at peace at home since
> the late nineteenth century. That America is peaceful doesn't make it
> democratic.
>
> > In the US, to run for office
> > from the left, you have to be willing to risk mocking press coverage
> > or none at all. Yeah, the big guys dominate the public sphere, and a
> > couple of centuries of bourgeois common sense have been drilled into
> > our heads, but we're not terrorized and we're not powerless. You have
> > to take seriously the possibility that many, maybe most, Americans
> > are pretty satisfied with the status quo.
>
> Let's take Max here. Max's politics is on the left edge of the
> "mainstream" in the US. Max's smart, funny, well-spoken, and you
> agree that Max looks better than Ross Perot. Or you can take Nader or
> any other comparable leftist of similar qualifications. Such leftists
> can't hope to get elected to any high office here, and they don't even
> pose a serious challenge in terms of getting on ballots and receiving
> sizable shares of popular votes, but Perot can. Is that because
> Perot's more in tune with Americans? I don't think so. It's because
> Perot got money, and leftists don't, and you need money to gain
> electoral "credibility" in plutocracy.
-- Jim Devine / "Economics is extremely useful as a form of employment for economists." -- John Kenneth Galbraith.