11-21-2018, 08:36 AM
(11-21-2018, 06:42 AM)Bill the Piper Wrote:(11-21-2018, 01:18 AM)pbrower2a Wrote: Republican forms but some serious lack (lack of competition, free choice, or universal franchise... or preset results) indicate the absence of democracy.
Are you thinking of the lack of viable third party candidates in the US, restricting the choice to Republicans vs Democrats?
The UK, Canada, etc. don't have this problem. So do you consider them democratic?
Universal franchise has existed in the US and other Western countries for long time.
It is clear that we can discount that a political system that gets '100% of eligible voters to give 100% of their vote to the list of the Workers' Party of (North) Korea' is at all democratic. The word republic has been so cheapened to imply that the political order has no hereditary monarch, even if a figurehead. Canada, for example, does not call itself a republic.
A Presidential system like that of the United States favors a two-party system which makes alternatives less than viable.
Democracy is possible in a two-Party system so long as both Parties are committed to liberal democracy. If one Party is firmly democratic and the other is anti-democratic (typically a fascist, Communist, or theocratic Party), then democracy depends upon majorities for the democratic party. One party that has room for practically everyone? Think of South Africa today.
A democratic order in which the two most powerful Parties are a fascist party and a Communist Party -- think of Germany in 1932 -- is doomed.
Less than universal franchise? South Africa under Apartheid.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.