Subject: Public discontent with democracies growing!
Date: Wed, 12 Jul 2000 06:31:34 +0300
Public discontent with democracies growing
LONDON: There is now broad agreement throughout the West on the role of the state in economic life. Everyone, perhaps excluding the Americans, buys some variant on the social market. The cold war over, defence is a non-issue. So a principal test of state performance becomes domestic social policy. But here government faces problems. One is how to satisfy a public reluctant to pay up but ever eager for benefit. The other is that most social policies, health and education included, rely as much on how well the public chooses to behave (eat veg, read books at home) as on what government spends.
This, broadly speaking, is the argument of a new collection of essays on public faith in government, just out in the US: Disaffected Democracies, edited by Susan Pharr and Robert Putnam . It is based solidly on state-of-the-art attitude surveys across western
Europe, Japan, the US an!
d Canada, tracking opinion over a quarter of a century. It follows up an apocalyptic report by Samuel Huntington, the cold war theorist, in 1975, which intellectually set the scene for the success of right-wing anti- government
parties - Thatcher and Reagan but also Kohl and Nakasone. The problem was said to be the size of the state. Less of it would make people happier.
Not as it has turned out. Public unhappiness with government and the institutions of representative democracy has continued growing. Thatcherite "no such thing as society" rhetoric may even have diminished the social capital and public trust that are vital to democracy's functioning.
In the US confidence in government ended up lower after 12 years of Republican rule. Faith in public institutions fell markedly in the UK during the 80s. Generally, political cynicism has grown during the past decade. More people agree with pollsters' questions about the self-interest of MPs or politicians being out of to!
uch.
Recent decline in public confidence in legislatures is reported as "especially severe" in the US and UK but is also present in Germany and Sweden, with only Denmark and Iceland showing modest gains. While 48 per cent expressed "quite a lot of confidence" in the British House of Commons in 1985, by 1995 that figure had halved. In Germany, the proportion professing trust in their Bundestag deputy had risen from 25 per cent in 1951 to 55 per cent in 1978; by 1992 it was down to 34 per cent. Meanwhile that other engine of representative democracy - party membership - slides. The proportion of people expressing a "partisan attachment" has fallen in 17 out of the 19 advanced countries for which data exist over time.
These figures matter. To the left they surely signal less public willingness to see the state redistribute income - which in time becomes a recipe for more inequality. To the right it ought to indicate less acceptance of the state's authority.
Source:Gaurdi!
an
Comment
The man-made system, filled with contradictions, will never be able to solve problems of mankind. Simply because it is from a person's own mind is enough to announce any policy or system's failure.
Whilst the authors of such reports do so because they are looking for a solution, they unfortunately narrow their vision so much that they miss the fundamental truth, that man's own legislation will always be contradictory, and so never lead to a just system
which will satisfy people. The past two hundred years of democracy has been one of patching up holes with after-thought legislations. The fact that the legislation changes so much in democracies should be enough to show its incorrectness. Even the
legislators themselves are acknowledging the failure of a law or policy, so the replace it. They then have great pride that they have now got it right, until next year when they replace it again.
People must look beyond democracy to see that it is the i!
nstitution itself that is the failure. As pointed out in the article above, it breeds rampant selfishness to the point that every individual is only concerned for himself and so the society suffers or
collapses. To gain confidence in the system, the government rely upon short-lived unifying measures such as patrotic projects, like the UK's millenium dome exhibition, moralistic family values or just plain nationalism. No patchwork measures will solve this, as freedom is inherently selfish and individualistic. All of this built upon one thought, the desire for self benefit, is man made and so is bound to fail, as it already has.
Islam gave a system from the creator which satisfies the people. Man's relationship with his creator is acknowledged and a system is put to regulate it. Man's relationship with himself is regulated and also man's relationship with others. People are not left to
feel there is a contradiction between thier interests and those of society, nor are t!
hey told that their interests are only the society. Allah (swt) gave a just system which dealt with the human being as a human being and which understands his true nature.
Insha'Allah the Khilafah will soon return to offer those disaffected with democracy a better system to live under and to embrace Islam, Insha'Allah.
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