Is democracy all that we would wish it to be - how is it that politicians preach democracy and then, once in power, do whatever they wish and to hell with the electorate?
Have our politicians let us down?
Why does Obama speak of the ‘Audacity of Hope’, and why does Brown speak of his ‘Vision’?
Does the ‘Establishment’ really run our countries, thus, making a sham of democracy?
Denocracy?
Is this harking back to Denis Thatcher? 
Don’t you wish we could edit topic titles?
I can and did - pdf27
What does any of us expect of politicians?
I’ll be serious about them for a change.
I don’t doubt that a good many start out with good intentions, at local community levels and working up through local councils and state or provincial government to national government.
But by the time they get to be a politician of influence, they’ve sold themselves out so many times to get on that they’ve compromised or lost whatever good intentions they started out with.
Electoral committees, run by a bunch of party drones happily free of the popular electoral process for which they select candidates, don’t want to hear the truth. They want to hear the party line, as determined by the rigid party bureaucracy which selected them and keeps them in office. So the party line is what you have to spout to be a candidate. Then to be a parliamentary secretary. Then a minister. Then even a prime minister.
I’ve had the grand misfortune to see the junior politicians of both of our major parties at close range for the past 18 years. Occasionally there’s one who’s not a congenital turd, but most of them aren’t worth the steam off my piss. I’ve seen them get on in local council, state, and a few now feeding into federal politics.
It was different, even thirty years ago, when party members were more driven by ideology and the desire to see their vision of the best world implemented. Now, apart from the often disappointing celebrity candidates, they’re just party hacks of little talent and modest intelligence who’ve sucked arses long and hard enough to rise in the ranks.
So we end up with boneheads surrounded by spin doctors who know how to help their bosses work the press, but it’s all puff and fluff.
The major parties are still ideological powerhouses, but the problem is that their ideology comes from party headquarters rather then the members and the electorate that used to inform them rather better, when politics was about a bit more than blow waved hair and a good television sound bite.
It’s still a far better system than anything else I can think of, but as far as democracy representing the notion that the people determine government policy goes, that’s nonsense. We just get to choose from two or three sets of carefully manufactured bullshit that evaporates as soon as the pricks are elected. Witness this cynical core versus non-core approach http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=non-core+promise
There’s a famous line in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s ‘The Great Gatsby’:
“The rich are different from you and me.”
So are politicians.
How many ordinary, decent, worthwhile people do you know who want to be politicians?
Exactly.
I’m not denying that there are some bloody good and decent people in politics, but they’re usually independents, minor party members, or rogues in a major party.
Any politician of influence, in the sense of being a parliamentary secretary, minister or party numbers man, is invariably a turd. And they’re the people who run the parliamentary parties.
[No dobut eye’ve got a typoo or too, abouve, so go yore hardest slagginng me for it. :D]
Just a little Christmas chear - hic!
Now could we have your less serious response please?
Should not politicians, then, be obligated to take an oath somewhat akin to Noblesse oblige
Definition: Benevolent, honorable behavior considered to be the responsibility of persons of high birth or rank.
Yeah.
Dubya gets the crabs from Fat Hitler.
And that’s another fine mess Dubya’s got us into.
No.
The bastards don’t honour anything, let alone an oath.
Just make them subject to what I think in the UK was once called something like the Trade Descriptions law. Usual consumer protection laws. Don’t get what was advertised, the consumer’s remedies are compensation for the loss or compelling the supplier to perform.
I rather like the idea of our little sawn off runt who buggered the nation for the past eleven years being ordered to go into deepest Iraq and find the weapons of mass thingy that he assured us were there. All by himself, the man dubbed the Man of Steel by Dubya. A man of steel could do it, easy.
After all, politicians are forever passing laws about how every other occupation has to perform, while carefully avoiding subjecting themselves to the same standards.
They’re just another business, so why not make them subject to the usual business laws about truth in advertising etc?
I was on a pub-crawl in London, with a few (about forty) regualr officers from my old regiment. As the afternoon wore on and we were discussing which would be our next port of call, in walks Doctor and Mrs John Reid http://iaindale.blogspot.com/2006/05/strange-case-of-dr-john-reids-phd.html
for a quick pint.
Needless to say, he wasn’t among friends as the political leanings of the company were somewhat more than slightly right of centre. However, John (he said to call him that - as opposed to what he might have been called) stood and held his own ground. So much so that the company were insisting on buying him drinks. Personally, after the first few minutes of alcohol induced waffle, I took to a neutral corner and had a chat with his wife (very nice lady).
Thread title fixed once and for all…
So, is democracy a load of cobblers and, if so, is it right and proper that we go about the world forcing it on others, either through economic coersion, military might etc?
Bit self-contradictory isn’t it, forcing democracy onto people by any means?
First problem is, what do we mean by democracy?
A rather large variation between, say, the USA and the Deutsche Demokratische Republik, although both claimed to be both democratic and republics.
Well, I wouldn’t argue with that. However, others might argue that democracies are delivering freedom to those that are controlled by tyrants, taking the power from the tyrant and placing it in the hands of the people.
We have an example of this on Chevans thread regarding Kosavo (which I don’t seem able to locate just now).
Demos Cratos - I believe the ancient Greeks called it - People Power.
Unworkable in modern states with huge populations.
Representative Government - I believe we call it - of which there are many variations as you have pointed out, each of them appear flawed.
You have made some colourful, yet relevant comments regarding politicians, but what about the civil servants? Do they not advise the poiticians? Do they not manipulate the politians?
Should we be referring to representative governmant as democracy, as it seems to be more of an unobtainable ideal and an emotive, rather than pragmatic, one at that, which serves to prevent criticism of governments (by many but not all) as criticism is considered unpatriotic in some quarters? Governments appear to be able to do anything they wish providing they label it “Democratic”.
A comment by Ben Franklin which I’m reminded of time and again was something in the vein of:
“Democracy is all very well, but who’ll protect the minority from the majority?”
By today’s standards, it didn’t work too well at source in Athens, either. Only adult males who’d done their military service could vote, as long as they hadn’t done something to have their right to vote suspended.
The classical Athenian democracy bears no relation to whatever it is that we mean by that shifting, subjectively defined term today. Leaving aside the narrow enfrahchisement, the Athenians had no problem with keeping slaves, which I think most people now would think offends the notions of liberty bound up with democracy.
Our modern conceptions of democracy go way beyond mechanisms for electing and controlling governments. They embrace a whole range of personal liberties and rights. But there is no agreement on what all those things are. Witness America where ‘libertarians’ are routinely derided by the conservatives, and vice versa, although both claim to be upholding the finest traditions of their constitution and republic.
Not any more, at least here, at state or federal level. Sir Humphrey Appleby has been replaced by carefully selected yes men and yes women who tender the advice the government wants to hear, often filtered through ministerial advisers who are party hacks whose principal qualification for the job is that they are party hacks blindly loyal to the party, or at least to the faction of which their minister is a member.
The politicisation of our public services has been one of the least recognised threats to our form of democracy. Even a few decades ago we had public servants who gave advice without fear or favour, and who maintained continuity of administration between changes of government. It doesn’t mean they were totally apolitical, but they weren’t the disgusting little toadies that infest the higher levels of all our bureaucracies now.
Of greatest concern to me is the way the heads of our national police, security and prosecution authorities have jumped on various government bandwagons to pursue the recently ousted federal government’s prejudices and fantasies, hounding individuals and breaking the law. Our greatest protection against their excesses is their demonstrated level of unbelieveable incompetence.
Of slightly less concern is the way governments have become much more secretive and tried to censor everything they don’t like. It’s got to the stage that there’s a consortium of our major press corporations actively agitating against the goverment. It must be serious, because no less that Rupert Murdoch’s press, an entrenched booster of the neo-cons, is fully behind it.
The regimentation of the major parties had reached into the senior levels of the public service, which is now seen as an appendage of the party rather than an appendage of the government. We used to have the Commonwealth government and the state governments, but now it’s all personalised like the government is the personal property of some dictator or executive president. Thus ‘the Howard government’ stood for what used to be the Commonwealth government, and the same in the states. it applies whichever party is in.
I think representative government is just one component of whatever a democratic state is. To qualify as a ‘true’ democratic state, whatever that is, requires substance as well as form. For example, Zimbabwe is in form a democratic state with a representative government, but in substance it is everything but.
In the end, democracy is something that means different things to different people, and its necessary elements change over time and with circumstance (e.g. what we’d accept in a democratic nation during peace time is different to what we’d accept during total war).
It’s like fairness and justice. Nobody can define them adequately and objectively, but everybody knows what’s fair and just according to their standards and feelings. But not everybody has the same standards and feelings.
A comment by Ben Franklin which I’m reminded of time and again was something in the vein of:
Particularly when the minority is the majority, as often happens here because our preferential voting and separate electoral district system can see a party with a primary vote in the low 40% get elected to government where they’d lose on a national, or state, proportional voting system. So much of the time we’re governed by a government that up to 60% of the people didn’t want. Bearing in mind that almost everybody votes here under our compulsory voting system, it’s very different situation to countries with a low voter turn out.
Many of us try to balance that out by voting for one party in the lower house and another in the upper house, so that the upper house acts as a brake on the government in the lower house.
I can’t think of any example which was done on a purely, or even largely, altruistic basis.
It’s usually a case of being forced to (e.g. Germany and Japan in WWII, US etc in Afghanistan currently ) or some other motive, such as oil and strategic postioning in Iraq.
Democracies are quite happy to stand by and even support tyrants, as they did with Saddam and do with Saudi Arabia, until it’s not in their interests to do so.
Democracies quite happily support the suppression of the democratic rights and aspirations of people in other countries when it’s in their interests, such as pre-revolutionary Iran, the French in Algeria, the Americans in Chile, and the whole sorry history of European colonial powers trying to hang onto their colonies after WWII.
I don’t know that a democratic nation can always place power in the hands of the people. It’s not working in Iraq or Afghanistan, because the divisions among the people and the government supported by the invaders are such that it’s creating more problems than it’s solving.
There’s also the politically incorrect possibility, I think reality, that some peoples don’t want or are incapable of operating as a democracy because its alien to everything in their culture, which is why much of black and Arab Africa, the Middle East, Asia and the Pacific which have attempted democratic government have failed at it.
Now that is what I call a good response. If ever I need a lawyer…?
Seriously, I think you’ve argued my case well on most points. I would disagree with your comments regarding ‘Humphrey’ I never was a fan of that. My curiosity was first aroused regarding interfering civil servants and the ‘Establishment’ when I first came accross this as a schoolboy:
Enter the ARCHBISHOP OF CANTERBURY, and the BISHOP OF ELY
CANTERBURY
My lord, I’ll tell you; that self bill is urged,
Which in the eleventh year of the last king’s reign
Was like, and had indeed against us pass’d,
But that the scambling and unquiet time
Did push it out of farther question.ELY
But how, my lord, shall we resist it now?CANTERBURY
It must be thought on. If it pass against us,
We lose the better half of our possession:
For all the temporal lands which men devout
By testament have given to the church
Would they strip from us; being valued thus:
As much as would maintain, to the king’s honour,
Full fifteen earls and fifteen hundred knights,
Six thousand and two hundred good esquires;
And, to relief of lazars and weak age,
Of indigent faint souls past corporal toil.
A hundred almshouses right well supplied;
And to the coffers of the king beside,
A thousand pounds by the year: thus runs the bill.ELY
This would drink deep.CANTERBURY
'Twould drink the cup and all.ELY
But what prevention?CANTERBURY
The king is full of grace and fair regard.ELY
And a true lover of the holy church.CANTERBURY
The courses of his youth promised it not.
The breath no sooner left his father’s body,
But that his wildness, mortified in him,
Seem’d to die too; yea, at that very moment
Consideration, like an angel, came
And whipp’d the offending Adam out of him,
Leaving his body as a paradise,
To envelop and contain celestial spirits.
Never was such a sudden scholar made;
Never came reformation in a flood,
With such a heady currance, scouring faults
Nor never Hydra-headed wilfulness
So soon did lose his seat and all at once
As in this king.ELY
We are blessed in the change.CANTERBURY
Hear him but reason in divinity,
And all-admiring with an inward wish
You would desire the king were made a prelate:
Hear him debate of commonwealth affairs,
You would say it hath been all in all his study:
List his discourse of war, and you shall hear
A fearful battle render’d you in music:
Turn him to any cause of policy,
The Gordian knot of it he will unloose,
Familiar as his garter: that, when he speaks,
The air, a charter’d libertine, is still,
And the mute wonder lurketh in men’s ears,
To steal his sweet and honey’d sentences;
So that the art and practic part of life
Must be the mistress to this theoric:
Which is a wonder how his grace should glean it,
Since his addiction was to courses vain,
His companies unletter’d, rude and shallow,
His hours fill’d up with riots, banquets, sports,
And never noted in him any study,
Any retirement, any sequestration
From open haunts and popularity.ELY
The strawberry grows underneath the nettle
And wholesome berries thrive and ripen best
Neighbour’d by fruit of baser quality:
And so the prince obscured his contemplation
Under the veil of wildness; which, no doubt,
Grew like the summer grass, fastest by night,
Unseen, yet crescive in his faculty.CANTERBURY
It must be so; for miracles are ceased;
And therefore we must needs admit the means
How things are perfected.[b]ELY
But, my good lord,
How now for mitigation of this bill
Urged by the commons? Doth his majesty
Incline to it, or no?CANTERBURY
He seems indifferent,
Or rather swaying more upon our part
Than cherishing the exhibiters against us;
For I have made an offer to his majesty,
Upon our spiritual convocation
And in regard of causes now in hand,
Which I have open’d to his grace at large,
As touching France, to give a greater sum
Than ever at one time the clergy yet
Did to his predecessors part withal.ELY
How did this offer seem received, my lord?CANTERBURY
With good acceptance of his majesty;
Save that there was not time enough to hear,
As I perceived his grace would fain have done,
The severals and unhidden passages
Of his true titles to some certain dukedoms
And generally to the crown and seat of France
Derived from Edward, his great-grandfather.ELY
What was the impediment that broke this off?CANTERBURY
The French ambassador upon that instant
Craved audience; and the hour, I think, is come
To give him hearing: is it four o’clock?ELY
It is.CANTERBURY
Then go we in, to know his embassy;
Which I could with a ready guess declare,
Before the Frenchman speak a word of it.ELY
I’ll wait upon you, and I long to hear it.Exeunt[/b] (my bold -32B
Harold Wilson’s sudden resignation in the mid-seventies rekindled my imaginings. A better protrayal, and far more entertaining TV drama series, than the Humphry thingie, was that of A Very Britsh Coup, about twenty five years or so ago. No, I think the Establishment is alive and kicking, in the UK, anyway, and I would add that the media has become a part of that.
I must get some shut-eye now, but will continue anon.
Democracy isn’t just a political system. It is an outgrowth of culture and tradition, and evolutionary process not a revolutionary one. The precedent is that new democracies tend to be rather violent and unstable before they reach some form of societal accord.
Democracy also is problematic in a nation-state that is multi-ethnic. Aside from Iraq, look at the strife in post-colonial multinational-states like Kenya, where tribal mistrust filters its way into a political system. Democracy outside a homogeneous state, with a long tradition of predemocratic political plurality, is extremely difficult to achieve without bloodshed and strife, and the democratic process faces an ever existential threat in most places. Even in the places like Kenya that enjoy a decent economy, because of the ever present corruption…
Democracies that evolved from internal overthrow of other regimes, primarily monarchies, are generally a lot stronger than ones that had it forced upon them by, say, a departing colonial power imposing Westminster government on a semi-tribal culture where family and clan obligations take priority over any concepts of a nation.
This suggests that democracies work best if they emanate from popular support (Surprise! Surprise!), whether by evolution or revolution, rather than by conquest, although examples like West Germany sit somewhere between the two.
When travelling in Egypt, recently, I was chatting about this topic with an Egyptian christian (Coptic?). He pointed out that Nasser had offered the Sudan the opportunity to remain with Egypt, or go it alone with a democratic regime. They chose the latter and ended up with various warring factions vying for power as they do today. No, he said, we are not yet ready or democracy.
By the way, was it not the French that first coined ‘Democracy’ to describe their post-revolution government, and the Americans later jumped on the idea as if it was theirs?
More priestly meddling:
“It has served us well, this myth of Christ!”
Pope Benedict VI