🚀 go-pugleaf

On Sat, 02 Nov 1996 08:47:58 -0600, Rob Aldrich <raldrich@tulsa.com> posted:
>THERE IS NO AMERICAN DEMOCRACY IN THIS COUNTRY!! Please read Article IV,
>Section 4 of the U.S. Constituiton and the pages referenced in the
>Federalist Papers index under "democracy" particularly those pages which
>"distinguish" a democracy from the American government, and thoses
>stating the "troubles of" a democracy.  Anyone with a second grade
>education can learn in five minutes that the founders abhored
>democracies as the evil form of government it is.

>Lets see, Democracy...if 50.1 percent of the people vote that African-
>Americans can't live in the US we can have the military deport them. 
>50.1% can outlaw gays, 50.1% can outlaw condoms, 50.1% can outlaw a
>woman's right to vote, 50.1 can outlaw anything.  Now there's a system
>to be fighting for, huh?  To the extent that a democracy has overthrown
>our government it deserves to be "dismantled."

The cruel way to describe democracy is as "Rule of the Mob." Which most
people vigorously disagree with any time they hear it described that way.
More kindly is to call it the "Tyranny of the Majority."

Indeed democracy offers lots of opportunity to turn into its own form of
tyranny.

The problem is that the "American system" needs to have two components:
a) A government that is somehow representative, and
b) People that can represent themselves.

The *government* needs to be run in some democratic-like fashion, so that
"The People" influence it.  

*Somebody* is going to run it, and if it's not controlled by citizens in
general, then it'll be run by some subset of citizens, and become
increasingly tyrannical.  (It can be argued that this is presently the
case.)

But that's only half of the story.  People individually need to have some
level of independence to act on their own.  In a "pure" democracy,
everything would be owned communally.  (The "Communist" word comes in here
quite naturally.)

People need to have the power, indeed the "right" to not be interfered with
when they go about their own business.

The balance that is hard to master is that of having the government
interfere *responsibly* when people do things that go beyond "their own
business."

When the government's power to interfere grows, a person's ability to act
independently is impaired.  The question always is whether it's a reasonable
impairment.  It's not clear that a democratic system can decide *that*
fairly.  It's also not clear whether there is exists a generalized system
that can decide that fairly.

(All of this IMHO; people who've actually been to American schools in their
lifetime may find their milage varies.)
-- 
Christopher B. Browne, cbbrowne@unicomp.net, chris_browne@sdt.com
"When you say 'I wrote a program that crashed Windows', people just stare at
you blankly and say 'Hey, I got those with the system, *for free*" 
  - Linus Torvalds