>> This is not evidence of any deficiency in the people; it is evidence
>> that elections are a bad way to run a society.
And Joanna asked:
> Yup. Who was it exactly who decided that democracy = elections?
============================================ The short answer is the working classes in all of the advanced capitalist countries who agitated for voting rights as a means of redressing their social and economic grievances without having to battle cops and troops in the streets, which could often result in blacklisting, imprisonment or death. Until they won the universal suffrage, parliamentary democracy was narrowly limited by the property franchise to landlords and capitalists.
Even the revolutionary wing of the workers' movement which favoured the forcible economic expropriation and political disenfranchisement of the bourgeosie still conceived of elections as the means by which the working masses would choose their trade union and political representatives and plan society. This did not become the practice in the USSR and other states where capitalism was overthrown, for reasons which have long been the subject of debate on the left, but the Bolsheviks did not in principle disavow elections and, particularly under Stalin and his successors, maintained the fiction that such as were periodically held were the authentic expression of Soviet democracy.
It is the fascists who oppose democracy in principle - in both its liberal and socialist incarnations - and who dispensed with elections when they came to power.
It's significant that even today, in societies where parliamentary institutions are absent or very restricted, the FIRST demand of any popular movement forced to operate underground, is invariably for the convening of a popular constitutent assembly to establish a fully representative electoral democracy. Nepal, Bolivia, South Africa, etc. are recent contemporary examples which come to mind.
I doubt Carrol and Joanna's message about "elections being a bad way to run a society" would make much headway with American and other working people who value, often passionately, the right to elect their representatives, much less with those peoples who still lack the right to do so.
How much workers have been able to advance their interests by utilizing the political institutions they have fought for is another matter. But the problem is not the democratic rights or institutions in themselves, but how the relationship of forces between the classes has evolved historically - in particular, the effect economic growth and political stability determining those relations has had on the popular legitimacy of those institutions and the degree to which working people understand and vigourously pursue their interests.
In that regard, the current election is a step forward in that it has produced through the Obama campaign the first political vehicle of consequence in a long time for a large number of Americans to challenge the racist and imperialist underpinnings of the American political culture. Those standing outside the political system and bemoaning the campaign seem unable or unwilling to acknowledge this, and the potential for further political advance which this modest beginning may represent. Especially curious is the position of those who admit to subtly encouraging support for Obama in their workplace while strongly repudiating those on this list for openly doing so!