Some old quip about liberty having something to do with well-armed lambs contesting the two wolves’ vote about dinner comes to mind.
All democracies have a constitution or some sort of basic law to prevent just that kind of abuse you bring up.
Would you rather live in a place that didn’t constitutionally guarantee basic human freedoms?
Or a system that did not place limits on the executive power, by separating it from judiciary and the legislative?
And that didn’t provide a mechanism for the orderly removal and transition of leaders out of power?
Just sayin’
You have a valid point.
So you are saying that a “democratic” choice is always preferable to an autocratic one? Even if the prior involves mass murder, and the latter does not? Imagine that, in my hypothetical example, we can go either with the will of the people (slaughter the minority) or with a non-representative government that keeps everyone alive instead. I cannot agree with you that the democratic option is clearly superior here. Indeed, the point is that there is nothing inherently desirable or laudable about mob rule in the first place.
I think many people in this thread feel like there’s a forced choice between modern Western democracy, Soviet Communism, Third Reich Fascism, or European monarchies, without considering the diverse arrays of societal organization from the tribalistic San people to the modern day geographical areas which are merely protectorates of other larger countries with no representative say (and yet function well).
Granted, democracy affords its citizens a greater variety of freedoms than many other modern systems of government. Still, my original question and premise goes unanswered. Even if we accept the assertion that “Democracy is the best form of government”, it doesn’t explain why many modern political leaders and the media place so much emphasis on its superiority.
It is interesting that you argue in favor of democracy by invoking an anti-democratic safeguard. If the will of the people can be thwarted by an irrelevant document, how does this further the democratic agenda? Are you not resorting to the same authoritarianism that you seek to reject?
Moreover, assume that the “constitution” can be amended by the people (as a democratic supporter, wouldn’t you want this?). The majority votes in representatives that collectively work to amend the constitution with Amendment X: “None of these constitutional rights or privileges shall apply to any member of the minority.” Very tidy and democratic; now there is no constitutional barrier to the carnage. Now what? Proceed with the mandate and have some good-old-fashioned genocide?
What do you mean anti-democratic? What do you mean by democracy? Mob rule a la Athens? That kind of democracy hasn’t been practiced in 2000 years, for good reason.
The modern notion of democracy involves a voluntary restriction of the scope of available actions, such as the principle of no political violence and respect for the basic law. You’re attacking a straw man.
Democracies don’t develop in a vacuum. There are democratic values in democratic publics, whose values include tolerance and love of freedom.
The theoretic possibility exists, of course. Just like the theoretic possibility that dictators would all be lovely fellows with the best interests of their fellow man taken to heart. So? The question is does it ever happen?
Let’s see. Here’s a nonexhaustive list of nondemocratic countries that have killed more than 1,000,000 of heir own subjects for political reasons excluding armed rebellion in the past century:
-Soviet Russia (20,000,000)
-Red China (20,000,000)
-Nazi Germany (6,000,000 mostly in militarily occupied Poland)
-Cambodia (2,000,000)
-Romania (1,000,000)
-Rwanda (1,000,000)
Here’s a list of established democratic states that have done the same:
Oh, wait, that’s right. There are none. How odd, since it’s so easy, isn’t it?
Such as Tibet?
Or perhaps that libertarian paradise of Somalia?
Or that divinely fun (if a bit tainted with AIDS Swaziland kingdom?
Perhaps you mean the populous high-tech nation of American Samoa?
Self-congratulatory nonsense? Absent divine right its about as fun/legitimate as it gets.
Rule can either be by will of god, by consent, or by virtue of me being an awesome dude with big guns. No other logical option obtains. I’ll go for a double helping of consent, thank you very much.
There are so many problems with your argument, I’d have to stay up all night to address them all… Let’s point a couple obvious ones out (apart from the fact that you’re using entirely made-up numbers, but let’s ignore that).
Firstly, I like how you counted NAZI Germany in your non-democratic category. So you’re under the impression that Hitler did not climb his nation’s democratic ladder? Sure, he eventually grabbed complete power, but it was the political system that put him in a position to do so in the first place. A failing of representative democracy, if you will. You cannot in good faith sweep this fact away and pretend that democracy played no rule in giving rise to the Third Reich. Your favored system is no more immune to abuse than mine.
Secondly, why exclude “armed rebellion?” Oh, you want to hand-wave away such minor matters as the American Civil War, which kind of saw a lot of people killed in a representative democracy? Hmm.
Finally, if you’re going to count German killings of non-Germans outside of Germany, why do you ignore US killings of non-Americans outside the US? Never heard of Vietnam and Korea? Hiroshima and Nagasaki ring a bell? Current wars in the Middle East? Two centuries of aggression in Latin American and the Caribbean? Nope?
Heh, you can prove anything you want if you spin the numbers to your own advantage and ignore inconvenient facts. Good debate, however, requires less dogma and more proof…
Hang on. You want to include figures from German-occupied Poland, but won’t include figures from US occupied Iraq or US occupied Viet Nam and you want to exclude the deaths in South Africa, deaths in Israel/Palestine, deaths in the Bosnian War and deaths in the Belgian Congo.
While these are all excellent examples of democracies killing people in lands they occupy, the Belgian Congo is probably the most perfect example. A democracy that ruthlessly oppressed ans slaughtered its own subjects entirely for profit.
The idea that Democracies don’t ruthlessly oppress and kill their own subjects is a ludicrous claim. You only have to look at the antebellum USA or almost any colonial European power to see that such statement is patently untrue. You tried to avoid these inconvenient facts by limiting it to the last century for some reason. As though democracy rather than social stability and education was the true reason why the abated. But there remain many other examples of democracies slaughtering their own subjects in this century.
I am now expecting you to exp0lain to us that Belgium, Israel or South Africa aren’t True Democracies because they don’t wear kilts…
Good point. A couple of posters have begun to address this. It’s simply international power games: The U.S. will intervene in other countries, sometimes via war, when it feels that this would reduce some perceived threat to the global political/economic system which allows it to prosper. As you said, sometimes it will use “spreading democracy” as a reason to justify this, but it isn’t the main reason, really; but to make such a justification, there has to be a some “emphasis” (as you put it) somewhere along the way.
Now, as others have pointed out, the fact that we and most (far from all) of our partners in this generally prosperous (not always, or for all) global system are democracies, does probably contribute to the fact that we probably don’t do such interventions (war, especially) as often as we might if we were dictatorships. But that’s not the subject of your OP.
By the way, it’s interesting how this issue brings together strange bedfellows – it was Jimmy Carter who first made “human rights” a main stated goal of US foreign policy (human rights per se, not as part of the package of, say, defeating communist power); yet it was Wolfowitz/Cheney/Rumsfeld who first made the universal equating of “democracy” and “poitical-economic stability” into a plan of destructive action. Maybe the lesson is that none of us can ever predict what will be the worse scenario. A dictator who, under international pressure, significantly improves his human rights policies – does this save or improve more lives than if that dictator is violently replaced by a democracy by a UN-approved coalition, but then that democracy slips ever closer to a religion-dominated government which supresses human rights? Etc., etc.
No, I’m not talking about the Poles who died in the Warsaw uprising. I’m talking about the millions of Jews and Poles and Roma that put up no resistance and were slaughtered for purely political and ideological reasons.
Armed rebellion, but nice try. Total casualties far under a million, with most by far caused by terrorist bombings and inter-Iraqi sectarian violence. Nice try.
During a War with South Vietnam and an armed insurgency. Nice try.
Insurgencies, and in the thousands, not the millions. Nice try.
You mean when the dictator of Serbia and the dictator of Croatia fought each other? Not even a nice try.
For your information, Blake, during the atrocities you mention, Congo was under the Personal rule of King Leopold, so more of an absolute despotism than a democracy. When news of the horrors reached Belgium, the Belgians forced the king to relinquish the colony to the state, and put an end to the horrors. But nice try. It is a nice one.
A dumbed down intro version, appropriate in this context:
Read up.
Show me which of those had a state-run policy of large scale political murder, with casualty rates in the millions, like the dictatorships have aplenty.
It’s strange how democracies end up having the highest literacy rates, while many dictatorships have a state policy of preventing their people’s education.
Should be awhile if he actually spends any time trying to find it. :rolleyes:
I would like to take this opportunity to point out the OP’s terminology “hardon for democracy” is used incorrectly in the context of his premise. Having a hardon for something in the colloquial sense of the term means you hate it, not love it. ex:
The OP has a hardon for democracy. i.e. wants to f*ck democracy. 
Funny how the symbology goes both ways depending on your perspective. 
The key strength of democracy is that it makes the governing regime answerable to the general population that it governs. So it doesn’t mean the regime is any smarter or wiser or more efficient or more benevolent - but it does mean that the regime gets replaced when it isn’t working in what appears to be the best interests of the population.
This is also why when a democratic regime is screwing people over, you’ll almost always find that the people who are getting screwed are outside of the democratic process.
Commissar:
Sorry, but your comparison is invalid. Why compare a murderous democracy to a non-murderous dictatorship? We’re comparing systems here, not specific examples. Sure, there are SOME dictatorships which have done a more benevolent job of ruling their populations than SOME democracies. But overall, democracy is a better system, because the population selects the ruler who has a stake in protecting their best interests. In most cases, this does not include minority genocide. In the rare case that does, I’d challenge you to prove to some reasonable degree that the most likely dictatorial alternative wouldn’t have killed just as many or more. A dictator rises to power through accident of birth or through exercise of might at his command, and, as long as his immediate military is loyal to him, has nothing to lose by putting his personal interest or whims ahead of those of the populace he rules, and has everything to gain by suppressing all dissent in as brutal a manner as necessary.
Commissar has some unusual political views.
But even conceding that it’s possible for a democratically elected regime to oppress a minority (although that actually happens less often than not) that still makes democracies better than non-democracies because a non-democratic regime can oppress a majority. Yes, a country where 49% of the people are oppressed is bad - but it’s still better than a country where 99% of the people are oppressed.
These people appear to have a hardon for something other than Democracy:
I understand the allure of this urban legend; unfortunately, it also fails to survive the real-world test. You see, the fatal flaw is that you assume a well-informed, intelligent voting populace, and this is little but wishful thinking.
Studies have shown that most people tend to prioritize minor short-term gains over more significant long-term benefits. Given the choice between a meager tax cut and a comprehensive social program, most voters would take the tax cut. This is clearly irrational, but it works thanks to the fact that there is no shortage of idiocy in this world. Just look at the Teabaggers; you really think that this movement is a good idea that will leave US society better off?
Perhaps more importantly, where is your supporting data? If democracies are great in that they empower the people to vote the bastards out, what are some examples of this actually happening? Give me some names. In my experience, the politicians that make the worst decisions tend to enjoy the greatest support. Why? Fear and fanaticism appeal to the average idiot. Take little Bush as an example: his entire first term was defined by an illegal, irresponsible, personal vendetta against Iraq. His actions, based on lies and misrepresentations, killed thousands and bankrupted the nation. This is pretty much as bad as a leader can get. Did the voters respond by depriving him of a mandate to rule? Or did the idiots elect him to a second term, just so he could continue raping his nation’s bleeding corpse? I submit that it was the latter…
The only point I was making with that hypothetical is that we should not have a knee-jerk reaction in favor of democracy. This is a complex and difficult question, and not one that we can resolve simply by stating, “Democracy good!”
Thank you for actually addressing my original point, instead of getting into this pointless bickering of democracy versus fascism that this thread seems to be doomed.
I mostly agree, I think most of this talk about how democracy is so great serves two purposes: 1) it’s a convenient political excuse and 2) it reinforces a nationalistic identity, regardless of the system’s true virtues or features. I’m not actually sure what to think about Bush’s wars in the Middle East, whether they were truly intentioned to spread an ideology of ‘Democracy worked for us over 200 years, so it’ll work for you too’ or whether it was merely part of a fabric of excuses to justify another political agenda. Even Obama’s State of the Union tonight made several references to the superiority of American Democracy, but I’m inclined to believe it was mostly a rhetorical device to appeal to bipartisan audience.
I feel like I’m beating a dead horse at this point, as you’re trying to debate me when I have no intention of discussing the virtues of any particular political system, when I really want to discuss the concept of democracy as a subject of rhetoric. Secondly, you present a set of false choices, when there is a wide array of successful governmental systems which rely on gradations and degrees of popular consent and cannot truthfully be considered to be democratic in any real sense.