Definition of Democracy
 

I've been trying to write a paper on what I believe the definition of democracy is for one of my classes. It's actually pretty difficult (for me anyway) to accept just one definition of the word.

What do you think a true democracy is?
and...
Do you think there as been a perfect example of a true democracy in action in the course of human history, i.e., the Greeks, the U.S etc.
Can or will a true democracy ever occur? Should it?

Just wondering what you all think...

I can tell you what it is not.
It is not the US.
We are not a democracy, never have been and I hope we never are.
We are a Constitutional Republic.
Long Live The Republic!
A democracy is mob rule.
"Two lions and a lamb voting on what to have for dinner".

Yeah, I've never thought the U.S was an example. Some people in my class are under that belief. But me and most of my peers are coming straight out of high school, and high school history classes pretty much teach kids that the U.S was founded with democracy in mind.

Is this true?

No. Not at all.
The ideal was always the Republic.

I think our conception of the term 'democracy' has shifted somewhat over the last hundred years or so. Rather than meaning mob-rule, it now has connotations simply of increased participation in the governance of the Nation. Republic and democracy have become more or less interchangeable, because Democracy is one of the ways in which Republic can be sought, and Republics have at their core a system of participatory governance which is democratic in nature: every citizen gets to vote in local and national elections, but every governmental decision is not put to the vote.

From Tom Paine's Rights of Man:

From Merc's link....
The Republic being much more gooder, but does become a pain in the ass, sometimes.

Is there (hypothetically, not necessarily actually happening) a such thing as a non-representative (direct) republic? A republic where the rights of the minorities are protected, the power of the majority limited - but the people directly vote and decide their fates, rather than using elected representatives?

Some Swiss Cantons have regular (maybe quarterly) mass meetings where the enfranchised population all get together and have a show of hands on various issues. They still have representatives though.
Matter of fact I think I saw this in an IOTD a while back.
The Athenians, Spartans and many small ancient Greek city-states had a similar system: a big mass assembly that met occasionally, a small council that met regularly, and usually a designated war leader.
Try reading Herodotus or Plutarch for examples, if you have time.
Hope this helps.

PS Plato's "Republic" has a poorly translated title. "Raes Publica" should be "On the Constitution".

however, the greek democracy did NOT protect minority rights.

What in the American system of democracy protects minority rights. Whereas we do pass laws to protect minoriites, where does our election process and Constitution specifically protect minorities from the will of the majority? We have laws that do this but where does the 'democratic system' protect minorities?

The rights granted in the Constitution apply to all.

the bill of rights? especially the first.

The very structure of the american system is meant to keep the majority from imposing their will on the minority.
Whether or not it's entirely successful... is another matter

Just because you have the bill of rights and a constitution does not mean that your minorities are any better protected than minority groups in countries like Australia or the UK.

I don't see where minorities are more opressed in Australia than they are in the US for example.

I thought I had replied to this but it isn't here... hmmm :dunce:

To retype:

Touche'. Maybe you could have a look at the swiss system then.

Although, non-voters generally had some rights in most Greek cities. Even slaves had certain protections.

But, "minorities"? Once you subtract women, children, slaves, resident foreigners, paupers, and others banned for various reasons, the voting citizens were a minority, often 10 to 20 %. And boy they protected their rights quite well thank you. :reaper:
I know you don't mean "any group less than 50% of the population". Maybe you're talking about protecting the disadvantaged? the disenfranchised? the vulnerable?

Don't expect to solve any of these issues in a single paper. I did a PhD in philosophy and have watched colleagues wrestle with them for years.

The First Amendment is "freedom of religion". How does that protect minorities? IOW it does protect the population, in general, from government. But where, specifically, does the Constitution or Amendments protect minorities from the majority.

Oh, you mean other than and aside from the freedom to peaceably assemble, print whatever they like, say whatever they want, own arms for their protection, and the granting equal status under all law, how are they protected?

I don't know. Do they need some sort of protecting beyond that?

I don't know, either. But I can't help but think of the plight of Afro-Americans in the South as recently as the 60's. They often couldn't vote, were segregated into inadequate schools, etc. Most of the above rights in the Constitution were supposedly in force then, and much good they did.

That 'perspective' is the question. I don't regard that as protection only of minorities. I regard that as protection of all from government.

But again, is that what is being called 'protection of a minority from a majority'? If not, then I don't understand details behind this 'minority protection'; why our minorities are protected and other democratic minorities are not.

Implied is that government represents the majority. Well it may have been when elected. Does Musharraf of Pakistan represent the majority? Does Mugabe of Zimbabwe represent the majority? Under the American system of democracy, both the majority and minority would require protection from such governments. IOW I do not understand what protection protects the minority from the majority. I see protection of all from government.

Popular speech doesn't need protection; unpopular speech does. Popular groups don't worry about cops breaking up their meeting; only unpopular groups do. Constitutional rights protect the minority harder.

The majority can only do to minorities what is allowed under the law. The government is only involved with managing the law.

It's imperfect, because we are imperfect.

But again you assume government is 'owned' by the majority. Unpopular speech can come from the majority - Vietnam antiwar. And the majority needed protection from government. Currently government even suspended writ of Habeas Corpus from everyone - including the majority. So who need protection from whom? UT - you assume majority and government are same. They are not. We are discussing three different parties - the majority, minorities, and government.

The question is how minorities are protected from the majority; not how minorities (and majorities) are protected from government.

I have heard it said often - our democracy is setup to protect minorities from the majority. Well maybe in laws. But how do the Constitution and its amendments do that? Not protect everyone from government. How does it protect minorities from a majority? I do not understand what is meant by (the perspective of) that statement.

The point is that if a minority group says something that the majority don't like, the government will protect the minority because they are not strong enough to protect themselves from the majority. That's what it has to do with the government.

I will add again though, that just because you have a constitution in the US, doesn't mean it's very different, if at all in any other western country.

Its true, we have done a great job at protecting gays and blacks over the past two centuries...

Well, I don't think it works that way in practice necessarily, but from my understanding, that's the way it's supposed to work.

Yes, you can never fully protect a hated minority.

I suspected that is closer to what others really meant. It would not really be about protecting a minority from a majority. It would be protecting any persons from unjustified (illegal) attacks by any other persons.

No, we have not done a great job of protecting minorites (blacks, gays) from the majority. At least we have made some progress in laws and in prosecuting those laws. I don't see, for example, any Constitutional guarantees from discrimination based on gender, race, creed, color of skin, or sexual preferences. Those might be regarded as minority protection. The closest we have is, maybe, equal protection of the laws as provided by the 15th(?) amendment. But that is protection of any person from attacks by any other (or a government).

Tw, where those protections are found is in what is called the system of checks and balances -- the minority spoken of being the minority political view rather than anything demographical. The Founding Fathers rightly figured that a chief wellspring of armed strife and suchlike commotions and ructions would be political division. The Constitution is designed to arrange that such division would not produce civil war -- at least not at every second occasion.

And blacks were forbidden arms, sometimes de jure, more often de facto. It's difficult lynching anybody who can gutshoot you -- and remedially instructive in humanity if he does.

This is the kind of fun you can get if you are forbidden killing tools. None too civilized, is it? Are you listening, Spexxvet?

Complicity in this is still a stain upon the record of the Democratic Party. The Dixiecrats might not have had the prolonged and quite regrettable influence they had on American politics had the Republican black population retained arms in full measure. This would have brought balance and diversity to the electorate in the Southern states.

(N.B. for our British & Commonwealth readers: this Southern region of the US is those States from Tennessee south to the Gulf and east from Arkansas, Louisiana and Texas to the Atlantic, plus in some sense some of Missouri. Known between 1860-1865 as the Confederacy, it survived as a political entity only during those Civil War years, but remains as a distinct cultural region to this day. It's not been redesignated as "the Southeast" or anything like that. The state of West Virginia owes its origin to the Civil War, having previously been a separate corner of Virginia. West Virginia stayed Union, while Virginia went Confederate and contained the Confederacy's capital of Richmond. That DC and Richmond are about an hour and a half apart by modern highway explains a lot about the campaigns and battles of the American Civil War.)

For the record, we may have been part of the Confederacy, but nowadays most Texans resoundingly consider ourselves part of the Southwest culture (i.e. Arizona, New Mexico, sometimes Oklahoma and Southern California) rather than the South. The south is genteel, we are frontiersmen.

Wow. Now I get it. To have rights, one must have a gun. King, Ghandi, and Mandella all got it wrong!

As soon as I held a gun to my head, then suddenly everything Urbane Guerrilla posted makes complete sense. Silly me. Guns solve everything.

There are methods you can use when you know the other guys are going to play by the rules, and you understand them. And then there are methods you use when the other guys know no rules at all.

Unenlightened as usual, I see. To enforce and secure rights regardless of the situation, you need the means to do so.

It would be invidious of me to suggest you make this a frequent and regular practice.

I'm glad i don't live in a society where one must carry a gun to feel one has rights.

Actually, they made it possible to own guns.

Yeph. Both are even defined in the simplest of military doctrine. It's called talking. Amazing how everything can be solved without using guns. Amazing how a minority (described as 'big dics') don't understand. Amazing how that minority so fears as to always need a gun.

Unenlightened as usual - just like King, Ghandi, and Mandella. Not that I expect one enthralled by power and Cheney to understand such complex men. But is does explain the blind support for George Jr and contempt for the American soldier.

It's hardly a case of "must," Aliantha, but it does help. It is after all the expression of the proper distribution of power in a Republic.

I disagree with that UG, but I'm not getting into a gun debate again. I've said my piece on it. If you want to see my arguments, you can just look up my old posts. ;)

Page 446 of most editions of Gandhi's biography includes a remark, noted by the biographer as a Gandhian effort at having it both ways, to the effect of "Among the worst crimes of the British Raj on the Indian people was denying them guns." The quote and the page number come up in the sigline rotation in the Cellar.

And my views haven't altered since that time, either: an armed people is a free people, and that is the only sure path of freedom.

Have you ever seen the looney tunes cartoon where one character takes out his fists, so the other takes out bigger ones, then they move to axes then handguns then machine guns then a bomb? It all happens in about 5 seconds flat, but that's how I see this race to have an armed public.

I've got a gun and it's bigger than yours. Why do you have to have a bigger gun to feel safer?

I have no guns and I feel safe. My father has a dozen or more and he feels safe too.

Of course I've seen it; Warner Bros. cartoons are my favorite of the old school -- funnier and smarter than everyone else's.

The "public arms race" is really just a boogieman and it's the kind of scare story the hoplophobic try and keep current. It's sufficient to alarm the ignorant, but that's about it. A truly scary arms race requires government-size funding of government-size weaponry. What's the man in the street packing, if it's more lethal than a cell phone? It ain't no MP5 submachine gun, I'll tell you that. All said and done, it's still just pistols, was pistols before us, and isn't likely to be anything but pistols in future times. Limited lethality, high convenience compared with the weight and size of an Uzi or MP5.

the government is the man in the street UG.

Yes. And so long as the electorate can turf the government's staffers out by any means effectual, that state remains a republic, and its government the servant of the people.

You know UG, sometimes I think that if brains were dynamite you wouldn't have enough to blow the wax out of your ears.

I mean that in the friendliest way possible of course. ;)

Doesn't seem to work in Iraq. Perhaps humanity is more complex than a simple logical single premise-single conclusion.

UT, how can you possibly come to that conclusion? Those people are now a LOT freer than ever they were under Saddam. While free isn't automatically either happy or peaceful, for they have some few troublemakers to get rid of, the situation is not at all without hope, except for the naysayers who've never been comfortable with America's role as a striker-off of a people's chains.

Look to the Kurds in the north: are they unfree now? And they are most certainly armed. Eventually, the idiots elsewhere in Iraq will have grown tired of cutting each other's throats and all of Iraq will settle down and behave a lot more like Iraqi Kurdistan.

Certain fundamentals are indeed simple. A full understanding of them requires that the implications and ramifications arising from those fundamentals be known as well. I think I manage such understanding pretty passably, thank you. I can't say the same of certain of my opposition.

Exactly... now they are not getting snatched out of their homes in the middle of the night, home searched while their families are held in the front yard with no rights, then toted off to some hidden prison with no explanation, questioned without representation or rights, not tortured, nope... not now!

Yep, the same way the Israelis and the Palestinians grew ti... er, the same way the filipinos and the seperatists grew tire... um, the same way the...

UG, remove your blinders, your confirmation bias, and take a moment out of your self-aggrandizement that makes everybody puke.

1. Your proposition is that guns keep people free.
2. Iraq is lousy with AK-47s now AND was lousy with them while Hussein was in power.
3. But the people were not free.

The Kurds were armed. The Kurds were gassed. It took no-fly zones to keep them from being annihilated.

Freer people: unarmed Brits, or armed Iraqis under Saddam?

The Brits are in chronic danger of becoming slaves of Parliament. They will not escape that danger until their populace rearms. That is what an understanding of the historic prevalence of human cussedness tells the objective observer. If it hasn't told you as much, are you even paying attention?

My proposition is much better phrased as "a free people can't stay free without arms, especially private arms."

I can't make head nor tail of "your confirmation bias." What is this?

Ibram: seventeen going on eighteen, and you have no optimism, no hope? What, just because we, the United States, are trying to do something about all this? Jay-zus, kid. I'm fifty-one. Am I pessimistic? And if not, why not?

Zen: one thing they are not doing is starving, as agriculture took off when Saddam, Uday, and Qusay all headed for parts unknown -- the Fertile Crescent is fertile yet, and look what happens when you take oppression's dead hand off. One thing they have now is cell phones and satellite dishes -- connectivity with the world's Functioning Economic Core, which they did not enjoy under the previous management.

Yeah, Zen, there's a civil war on -- in that war are the seeds of favorable change that will bring Iraq out of the Non-Integrating Gap (where it would have remained under Saddam, as is not open to dispute even between Cellarites) and develop it towards the globe's Functioning Core, to borrow two terms from Barnett's ideas.

It's very difficult to impeach me on matters of fact, as you've noticed, and so the opposition resorts to complaints about my style -- as if that might be a rebuttal of any weight! It just means I've been less than insinuating -- overt, in a word. The people who are puking -- well, their minds are made ill by being too far left, their values a pismire's weight, their cultural assumptions all a-crumble, under the weight of more careful scrutiny than they've given, themselves. Naturally, they are upset, and their stomachs upset along with them. The thing is, they are wrong to be upset. The question is, how much purging will they need to be rid of these toxins?

Hope does not make for smart foreign policy.

"Think of it as evolution in action."* I do.

And despair is an improved basis how...?

*Jerry Pournelle

Its realism. The world's problem's can't be solved by "well maybe they'll get tired of fighting for centuries on end, and everyone will live happily ever after".

I might point out that the Palestinians and Israelis have not been allowed to get tired of it to the point where all parties will end the thing in good faith. The thing about that is how leashed to foreign sponsors both parties are -- the battle's never been taken a` outrance.

It's circular logic, is what it is.

People who have guns are free!

Well some people don't have guns and seem free, while other people have guns and clearly aren't free. How do you know if a people are free?

I define free people as... those who have guns!

By the way, may I just give you a hint and note that "slippery slope" arguments don't work for me. They are usually a form of logical fallacy. Predicting the future is not a form of proof. It's sloppy thinking.

Say what?

The difference is that there is usually good reason to do such searches. Their families know where they are. Many of them are returned to their families. In the previous administration the individuals would just disapear. You can find their bodies amonst the numerous mass graves uncovered in the deserts around Bagdad.

..and Haditha. You can call it deliberate revenge killing or you can call it a tragic case of collateral damage, but the end result is the same

From here:

I won't go into rules of engagement, but I will ask a few questions.

Did anyone in these houses vote to be liberated from Saddam?
Is there any indication that anyone in these houses was sheltering insurgents (no weapons found) other than that a bomb went off in proximity to the houses?
If a soldier shoots and kills a 1-year-old, does that make him or her a 'baby killer', or does there need to be proof of premeditated intent?
Is anyone going to serve any serious time for killing all of these people?
If you were a relative of one of these people, who would you blame? Who would you have a right to blame?
If the Iraq war is really about liberation and justice, why is the effect on morale of a guilty verdict even being brought up instead of purely focusing on actual guilt?

Even if the soldiers actions can be defended as justified under rules of engagement and the deaths brushed aside as 'collateral damage', the question remains as to whether Iraqis haven't simply traded one kind of horror for another. When little girls are killed in American cities in the crossfire between drug dealers, and in cases where the killer is caught, the defense inevitably boils down to the fact that the killer did not deliberately shoot the little girl and was engaged in self defense. This defense usually falls flat.

There will be no jail time for anyone who shot these people. The defense will be that they had the right to defend themselves and that they could not be expected to put the safety of civilians above their own lives. This is the true difference between police and soldiers, and the end result of a military rather than police solution to the 'war on terror'. Soldiers are trained mostly to kill, sometimes to pacify and occupy, and not to 'protect and serve'. Each civilian death at the hands of soldiers undoes thousands of hours of community service, negotiations with local leaders, etc.

It will probably be decided that there is no compelling evidence to convict, but this will just compound the error. The soldiers who shot those civilians played into the hands of the insurgent who planted the roadside bomb. It wasn't liberals, the press, lawmakers, or anyone else who failed to suppress the story in the US who can be blamed for this, because the Iraqis knew what happened. The only people in the dark were in the United States.

There will always be a justification for killing civilians. A car was traveling too fast or too close and might contain a car bomb. A man or woman did not stop or raise their hands fast enough, so they might be a suicide bomber. These can be reasonable explanations for people fighting an insurgency and who value their own lives above those of the people whose country they are occupying. Except that if the insurgents have gotten us to the point where we are shooting civilians, then the insurgents have found a winning strategy.

They say that one of the reasons we are in this war was because our president did not have personal experience with war. So maybe we should choose our next president more carefully. Maybe we should find and elect a 'baby killer', someone who did shoot an unarmed kid, or woman in a car, or who ran over a kid in the middle of the road because that's how insurgents stop convoys. Someone who wakes up every other night screaming and knows how very dirty this kind of war is, what it takes to win it, and how very much it is worth to avoid it. Someone who will plan beyond the carrier photo op and realize that occupation means more than catching flowers riding in parades.

So, we're just mostly like them, LOL!

Unless they are rendered to some Eastern Bloc country.

Urbane, Liverpool soccer fans can beat up and beat down the entire English Parliament, and the monarchy, if they feel like doing so.