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Why Does Democracy Need to be Defended?
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(09-26-2021, 06:35 PM)AspieMillennial Wrote: Here is a question of mine. Most of my generation disagrees with the way I view things and my personal beliefs and religiosity. If so, why should I support defending Democracy knowing I will just lose? Can anyone give me a rationale to do so?

...because anything undemocratic eventually becomes irresponsible, and the elite deputized to be the commanders turn their power to the service of the usual expressions of power: sybaritic indulgence for themselves, extreme deprivation for everyone else, and a brutal order of command. It never goes that way by design, but irresponsible people with absolute power invariably do that.

Ideology is not the cure. Bolsheviks could become just as exploitative and just as destructive of the human spirit as the slave-owning planters of the antebellum South. Oppression by a pretorian regime is just horrible in Pakistan as in Chile even if the soldiers are the ostensible servants of the People.

We cannot presume the certainty of the responsible behavior of those who get absolute power and make promises to act fairly and responsibly. We need checks and balances that are not inherently democratic but are necessary to have a responsible leadership. 

"It is a Republic, if you can keep it", said Benjamin Franklin in the 1780's... but it is the responsibility of the People to make demands upon  elected leaders who can lose the next election if they fail to respond appropriately. In practice, many ostensible Republics have gone bad  because somebody arrogated 'emergency powers' and either kept the emergency intact indefinitely through incompetence or design or maintained those powers after the emergency was over, because people fell for some demagogue who promised everything to everybody without considering that such entails irreconcilable contradictions, or because rich and powerful people bought the politicians.  It may still be a republic because there is no hereditary monarch, but it should be unmistakably clear that Nicholas II would have been far better than Josef Stalin. Elections can be rigged, and opposition can be annihilated.

We can't depend upon words like "republic" and "elections". Enough Americans fell for Donald Trump in 2016 that with a quirk of our political system he became President and was in a position to abuse the powers of the Presidency. You can attribute that to the lack of sophistication and astuteness of nearly half the American electorate; that is something that current and future leaders will need to address before the next ruthless demagogue has a chance of winning a Presidential election. We need to separate politics from economic power so that we do not have a plutocracy that allows wealth and bureaucratic power to become the bases of politics, in which government of the rich-and-powerful, by the rich-and-powerful, and for the rich-and-powerful entrenches itself once and for all.
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.


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RE: Why Does Democracy Need to be Defended? - by pbrower2a - 09-26-2021, 09:36 PM

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