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Are We Sure Enough that Democracy is Best?

Sunday, October 28, 2012 20:52

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Most people accept, as an article of faith, that democracy is better than dictatorship. Indeed, the U.S. spends billions trying to convert dictatorships to democracies…except, of course, the dictatorships the U.S. likes.

But is there sufficient evidence that democracy, net, is superior to dictatorship, to what Voltaire advocated: benevolent despotism. (He called it, “enlightened absolutism.”)

Examples: King Frederick the Great and Empress Catherine II of Russia incorporated many ideas of enlightened philosophies and were great advocates of tolerance and of the arts.

Of course, we can point to dictatorships that were a huge net negative: for example, Hitler, Idi Amin, and Robert Mugabe. But many democracies also do poorly, although they’re less likely to yield extreme failures because of democracy’s self-regulating nature.

The question is whether we should accept as an questioned postulate that democracy is so superior to dictatorship/benevolent despotism that there is no better way for the U.S. to spend the billions of our tax dollars it spends every year trying to convert dictatorships into democracies–often unsuccessfully.

Certainly, democracy has advantages: The citizenry is more likely to feel buy-in, ownership in the country’s laws and mores. There’s the stability that accrues from democracy’s self-regulatory nature. There’s the cosmic justice that the leaders are selected based on the collective decision-making of the electorate And the decision to elect a person represents a lot of collective wisdom: the entire electorate’s. That’s crowdsourcing on a massive scale.

That said, democracy has serious liabilities:

The electorate is manipulated by ever more sophisticated “messaging teams” so that who we vote for is heavily based, not on who’d be best at running the country, but on which candidate has the most effective propaganda machine.

The people who run for democratically elected office must run a constant four-year press-the-flesh campaign, thereby deterring many top people for considering becoming a government leader.

Democratically-derived legislation leads to tepid compromise that has been ironed out over months and years rather than bold decisions made quickly. Yes, sometimes, compromise, deliberateness, and moderation are optimal, but sometimes bold, individually derived initiatives would be wiser. Those are difficult to come by in a democracy.

This list of democracy’s and dictatorship’s pros and cons is not meant to be exhaustive but only to justify the worthiness of considering this question: Are we too blithely assuming that democracy is such a net good that, in these tight budget times, that there is no better use of the billions of dollars we taxpayers spend every year trying to get other countries to change their “misguided” ways?

I truly am not sure but am interested in your thoughts.

2012-10-28 20:43:23

Source: http://martynemko.blogspot.com/2012/10/are-we-sure-enough-that-democracy-is.html

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Comments

Total 2 comments

anonymoustache

Are We Sure Enough that Democracy is Best?

No,
dictatorships all the way!

Unless,of course,
you are one of “the unenlightened few”
who end up in the concentration camps…
or unmarked graves.

Oct 28, 2012, 9:22 pm 0 Reply
Pix

Democracy would be best, but we don’t actually have it. Democracy involves voting for every aspect of our lives and can even be down to small area having slightly different rules. Democracy is not about which candidate out of a choice of two, is going to represent as a public relations officer for the big corporations who sponsored them into power for the next term of office. Which is exactly what the USA the UK and many other countries have as their political systems and totally not a democracy.

Oct 31, 2012, 9:44 am 0 Reply

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