The Partisan Divide on Issues

[Bob Butler 54]

(01-15-2022, 02:30 PM)Eric the Green Wrote:

(01-15-2022, 07:00 AM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote: My proposition is that in the Information Age cultures can be altered through protest and legislation, as the suffragettes, Gandhi and Martin Luther King demonstrated.  That seems to be holding true.  

It's not so clear. 

In the USA, a reactionary minority is able to decide policy, restrict voting, block reforms and threaten or attempt violent coups. They support the police and vigilantes who shoot and kill unarmed young people and protesters without cause. Outside the wealthy countries of Europe, Japan and the Anglosphere, and some countries in the Americas like Chile, brutal, ruthless dictators without any conscience are able to stamp out huge protest and people-power movements. The dictators have the weapons and the people are powerless. In some other large developing countries, such as The Phillipines, Brazil and India, democracy is tenuous and current leaders are seeking to monopolize power or use violence for control. In Eastern Europe, in countries such as Turkey, Poland, Hungary and Slovakia, the people themselves have voted in tyrants who have manipulated the system to assume authoritarian rule, so that the people no longer have any power.

To be clear there is a difference between autocratic and democratic cultures.  The suffragettes, Gandhi and Martin Luther King did their stuff where democracy was taken seriously.  Things are a bit different in autocratic cultures.  The government and elites can attempt to ignore the people, so the process can be quite different.

The collapse of the Soviet Union is one example of how you might transition from autocratic to democratic.  Of course that transition was partial or reversed.  China is also having economic troubles at the moment.  While they are into confrontation, censorship and bluff, they are attempting capitalism without democracy with dubious results.  They may or may not be able to sustain it.  In the Middle East, a lot of the people who favor democracy just left, immigrated to democratic cultures.  You have to look at the process as varying highly depending on where your culture is at.