On 12/16/2014 9:50 AM, Telmo Menezes wrote:
On Tue, Dec 16, 2014 at 3:44 PM, Bruno Marchal <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
On 15 Dec 2014, at 19:51, LizR wrote:
What is funny - as well as sad and frightening - is the number of
people here
who apparently don't believe in democracy, even in principle. Democracy
is the
idea that we can elect people to do things for everyone else (the NHS,
conservation, social security, infrastructure, regulations, police,
army science
etc etc). Yet all I can see here is people saying that it doesn't work.
I think
the truth is that it can be hijacked and THEN it doesn't work. The NHS
(despite
everything) was one of the greatest achievements of the 20th century,
after all.
And it was introduced by a government because of its beliefs and
principles.
I agree completely with you. Like academies, democracies are the worst
except for
anything else.
Many people criticize the system, and this *benefits* those who pervert the
system.
Our democracies are sick (and partially hijacked by corporatist interests),
but this
needs we must heal them, not condemn it.
This is a bit too simplistic. "Democracy" means a wide range of systems, from the
Athenian random draw to the complex representative system of modern America.
One problem with democracy is that it does not prevent tyranny.
In fact Plato and Aristotle thought that democracy necessarily led to tyranny, i.e. the
election of a tyrant. The U.S. founding fathers were well aware of this and the solution,
mainly due to Madison, was to having may competing political interests: states, merchants,
farmers, bankers,...as well as individuals.
You can still fall in the situation of the majority electing tyrants. People were
dismayed to find this happening after the Arab spring. I suspect that we are on the last
stages of a failed experiment to solve this issue: constitutions. The idea is beautiful:
start with a document that clearly states the individual rights that cannot, in any
circumstance, be voted away by the majority. The Weimar constitution did not prevent the
rise of the nazis and the American constitution did not survive the secret courts and
the re-interpretations of the XX and XXI century.
Some people are making valiant efforts to fix this, working within the system:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolf_PAC
In the US, revoking the personhood of corporations and preventing them from donating
money to politicians is the single most effective measure I can think of to returning
things to a sane balance. They are surely going to meet formidable adversaries.
My fear is this: what if they succeed and it still doesn't work? What if the supreme
court judges re-interpret whatever they write in the constitution in a way that pleases
the oligarchy, like they always seem to do these days?
That's why Jefferson said that an occasional revolution is necessary. I just hope that it
can be effected without violence, as the New Deal and Civil Rights movement were.
Brent
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