Me: Old War I == World War I
Cold War == Something else.
I may have misunderstood FlikTheBlue though. I posted the words of Woodrow Wilson because he led the US during WWI. I think his speech stands on its own.
No. Those guys you listed were all authoritarian assholes. Looking at my own post, I definitely overstated my case, especially when it comes to foreign affairs. Humans are flawed, and even those in purported service of liberal democracy will screw it up at times, especially when it comes to foreign countries. But the evidence clearly shows that in the struggle between government by a liberal democracy vs. government by authoritarian asshole; the liberal democracies do better. Obviously the NATO countries were better off than the Warsaw pact. South Korea (eventually, after getting past their own authoritarian as shoes phase) better than North Korea. Japan and Taiwan better off than mainland China and the southeast Asian nations living under authoritarian regimes, and so on. Democracy doesn’t guarantee good results, especially not when it comes to international relationships. But authoritarianism guarantees bad results. I can’t think of my examples within the last several hundred years where a nation had prospered under an authoritarian government. Even if one does go back those hundred plus years, all the examples would be imperialist nations that prospered off of inflicting misery on others. The only actual examples I can think of are countries that occasionally get an enlightened, benevolent, authoritarian. But even that comes to an end when the enlightened ruler dies or gets overthrown, and things revert to the having an authoritarian ruler = things suck. To the extent that the west is going authoritarian, whether here in the US, or Hungary, or South Korea, or anywhere else that the people are opting to return to those ways, we’re just screwing ourselves over.
To make a long story short, it’s democracy that’s on the side of lawful good, at least it’s the only system that really has that potential, barring the occasional, extremely rare, enlightened and benevolent authoritarian. The only such leader I can think of off the top of my head within the last several hundred years is Gorbachev, and his efforts ended up being wasted by the people that followed.
Singapore seems to do OK, and China seems pretty prosperous without lessening its authoritarianism.
Democracy is morally neutral. There’s nothing inherently good about it, it’s only as good as the people that make it up
I’ll give you Singapore. China is economically prosperous, but at the cost of having to be loyal to the ruler / ruling party or risk being disappeared. To clarify, democracy gives us a better chance at having good results than authoritarianism. To find good authoritarian rulers one has to scour the history books for the likes of the better Roman or Chinese emperors, or some of the Arab rulers like Saladin during the time when Europe was in what used to be called the dark ages, or even the occasional ruler in Europe from that time like Charlemagne. For democracies the list is long, long even if we stick to just the 21sr century.
How else are you going to quantify “prospered”?
McCarthy blacklisting was only marginally better. Let’s not pretend the US didn’t also practice groupthink while ostensibly a NG democracy.
Sure, it’s the best system we currently have to suppress evil people.
That doesn’t make the system itself good. It just means mostly/sometimes the good people outweigh the bad.
The people who oversaw brutal regimes of conquest, slavery, institutionalized torture and occasional human sacrifice? I know “good” is relative, but even the cuddliest Roman or Chinese emperor would make most current authoritarians look like Quakers in comparison.
Saladin and Charlemagne were both aggressive expansionist conquerors. There’s nothing good about that.
I’m willing to bet not as long as you think (see M4M’s Wilson example). Jimmy Carter, maybe, is LG. No other US president in my lifetime has been.
I’m grading on a curve, comparing leaders to their contemporaries and those just before and after them. Otherwise we wind up with a very small list of people who qualify as good guys. I disagree with that for the obvious reason that up until around 10 or so years ago, the world and been slowly becoming a bitter place since some time roughly in the 1700s or so. Obviously there were lots of horrific things during that time, and progress was usually in a 3 steps forward 2 steps back manner. But progress was made, so either we say that the progress was by bad guys who did good things, or by flawed good guys who were a product of their time. I prefer the latter, or else we end up in a world where the list of good leaders looks something like Jimmy Carter, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, and maybe one or two others. And clearly all the progress over the past few hundred years wasn’t made by just those three guys. To stick with Americans, since those are the leaders I’m most familiar with, I’d list Washington, Adams (both of them), Lincoln, Roosevelt (both of them), Eisenhower, Kennedy, LBJ, Carter, Clinton, Obama, and Biden. All those men, even Carter, were flawed, and yes. I know about the founding fathers being slave owners, FDRs internment of Japanese Americans, Obama keeping Gitmo open, and so forth… But none the less they did move us forward as whole. That doesn’t mean I think they were all good guys. Woodrow Wilson was mentioned above as being a noteworthy bad guy. I’d add Andrew Jackson as another who was especially awful. But overall we’ve done better with democracy than we would have with a dictator.
Or the Great Man theory of history is bunk and the progress was made in spite of all those guys by the nameless masses.
That would surely be news to its victims, both internal (Blacks, Native Americans, Leftists…) and external (Central and South America for starters, about a million to five million Vietnamese (and that’s counting only the dead), and too many others to count).
Lawful good and lawful evil are game categories that do not work in the real world, to the extent that they do both the US and URSS where at best LN, and if you get strict CN to CE.
One has to be careful about unqualified citations of “prosperity”. Singapore is tiny, making it a special case that isn’t necessarily scalable, but more importantly, it has one of the highest wealth disparities in the developed world. That’s a real problem when using it as a model for prosperity.
China is the opposite; it’s very large both geographically and in population, and has historically been underdeveloped. Its ostensible prosperity comes from rapid industralization as it became the manufacturing center of the world, but again, look closer and things aren’t so rosy. China has a pretty abysmal standard of living – lower than (for instance) Serbia, Panama, India, or Belarus. It’s easy to attract manufacturing if you pay your workers practically nothing.
No, it isn’t. The moral standing of democracy stems from the fact that when it’s working, it’s a powerful bulwark against authoritarianism. The weakness of democracy is that in order to function, it requires an informed and engaged populace. Without that, casting ballots isn’t democracy; it’s just a meaningless exercise performed by uninformed morons fed a steady diet of disinformation by self-serving plutocrats and aspiring authoritarians. Cite: the USA last November.
Sure, but prosperity is not my standard for judging a country (I prefer something like the Social Progress Index or similar, which does downvote the authoritarian states), it’s just the term I was responding to.
Are you saying democracy has an independent existence from the people who make it up? Because the rest of your counter is all about how it’s the people that fail democracy, like there’s some Platonic democracy outside the “uninformed morons”.
That’s a very big “when”. One could almost call it special pleading. “Democracy works - except when it doesn’t” isn’t exactly a killer argument - and I say this as someone who actually is more of a cheerleader for true democracy* than almost anyone else I can think of on these boards.
* By which I mean sortition, the only true democracy.
Of course not. Democracy is a model, or more accurately, a principle – the principle that a people have an intrinsic right to collectively determine their own destiny, and thus is a categorical rejection of authoritarianism. It’s that principle that has moral standing. Actual implementations will vary, and all will be flawed in one way or another, and invariably undermined by the morons whose presence we all have to suffer. It’s why the flood of lies and disinformation constantly promulgated by Trump and his minions is such a grave existential thread to American democracy, to America itself, and, indeed, to the world.
But that principle should be sacrosanct and is the best approach to governance that we know. Or as Churchill famously said, “No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.”
I disagree - Principles don’t have moral standings. Their implementations do. It’s only when they have real-world effects that their actual moral impact is realised. The Authoritarian model has the Wise Good King Everyone Loves embedded in it just as the Democracy model has the Rule by Evil Majority embedded in it, right at the core - neither is inherently morally good or evil.
Trump is a direct result of American democracy. This is what unfettered democracy does.
And please don’t quote the butcher Churchill at me on matters of morality, he’s even less of a moral authority than Woodrow Wilson was.
OK, disagree. You’re also disagreeing with Immanuel Kant. I think I’m in good company here.
The principle of self-determination has the same moral standing as the principle of right vs wrong; it’s the basis of the administration of justice. It’s how we build civilized societies.
Wrong. Very very wrong. Trump is a direct result of the failure of American democracy. American democracy failed for precisely the reason I indicated upthread – it requires at least a preponderance of informed and engaged voters, and American democracy didn’t get them. No one in his right mind, Republican or otherwise, would want a felonious self-serving narcissistic idiot with worsening dementia as their president. No one in his right mind would have ever supported his nomination. If they thought tax cuts for the rich were a fine way to run a country, there were (relatively speaking) sane Republican candidates to choose from.
WTF is “unfettered democracy”? Democracy shouldn’t be “fettered”. The problem was unfettered and unchallenged right-wing media, an endless stream of lies masquerading as “news”, and an unhealthy reverence for free speech absolutism, all aided and abetted by a Supreme Court whose chief justice once mocked the idea that money could possibly be a corrupting influence in politics. Not to mention a large swath of the population that was blissfully unaware of either real news or fake news, and just automatically voted “R” because … less taxes, and maybe they’ll abolish the EPA.
It wasn’t about morality. In any case, Churchill was a human being and as such was complicated – he was a racist, a brilliant orator, and an inspirational wartime leader, all at the same time.
Do not. And I say that as a (former) Minnesotan. You’d be drinking in a basement, drop an ‘eh’ or ‘aboot’ and all hell would break loose.
We’ll be trained to avoid certain triggers, like calling Minnesotans a bunch of lite-beer drinking lightweights.
Fac insanum stultorum stercore et vide quid accidit
That’s a machine translation so it probably falls short of proper grammar, but it doesn’t roll off of the tongue.
I’m not one to lend any support to authoritarianism. I will tell you that many historians consider Mustafa Kemal Atatürk an example of a benevolent dictator. After defending Turkey from invasion, he didn’t seek to aggress on any more territory (except after he died, Turkey clawed back a piece of Syria which it has to this day, Hatay Province).
Atatürk focused on literacy, social development, and women’s rights (Turkish women got the vote in 1930–34) instead of militarism, though he was an army officer.
Whereas I think anyone who embraces idealiam, as Kant did, is a fool who can’t be trusted as to the wetness of water. Never mind the foundations of morality.
Trump is American democracy working as designed. If it’s a failure, the failure is inherent in the whole system.
Of course it should - Bills of Rights being a prime example of the kinds of fetters a democracy needs.
In a discussion about morality, if you quote someone talking about how superior a system is, your interlocutor is going to, rightly, infer that you mean ‘including morally’.
Or else why the fuck bring it up?
That slope you’re standing on. It’s looking awfully slippery.
The U.S. has bad voters. Morons actually. If they had better voters we wouldn’t be in this discussion, because they would’ve have voted for someone who’s only evil and not insane.
“Only qualified and informed people (like me) are allowed to vote. Otherwise all my ideas about principles, morality and keeping authoritarianism at bay will be only sound and fury blather, signifying nothing.”
Representational democracy has always been the tyranny of the majority.
And I agree with @MrDibble that it’s about time we try sortition.
The problem isn’t that they’re not informed, it’s that they’re actually mis-informed. They believe things that are objectively false, because they’ve fallen for years of bullshit propaganda. You can’t have a functioning democracy under such conditions. People voting out of pure ignorance would actually be better, because that way, they might randomly do the right things some of the time.