- Derb at Takimag: So where are we with this democracy business?
- From The Anglo-Catholic: Good news for the ordinariates. Their Mass will be more Tridentine than Prayer Book or Novus Ordo. Fr C: Would Pope Francis approve of such a thing? We are no longer in the heady days of Benedict XVI!
- LRC picks:
- Боже, храни Россию. Pat Buchanan: Not another Cold War. Talking sense about Russia. My tribute to the place.
- How Ron Paul changed a heart and mind about war.
- From RR:
- Snowden’s secure email provider Lavabit shuts down under gag order.
- Justin Raimondo: Russia is the Anglo-American media’s favorite bogeyman. Still.
- The U.S. empire provokes terrorism. By 9/11, LRC had taught me that so I wasn’t that surprised.
- From The New American: NYT: NSA is searching Americans’ email.
Don't apologize for things you didn't do, to people who don't believe in forgiveness or redemption.
Friday, August 09, 2013
Is democracy’s sun setting?
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Democracy in its modern form- the form mandated with an almost religious fervor as perfect for the entire world for the rest of history- is barely more than 150 years old, even in the countries that have had it longest. Most of the world's democracies date back no earlier than 1945. By "Democracy", I mean a one-man, one-vote unitary state.
ReplyDeleteThese are important qualifications- while proponents of modern democracy like to cite older precedents, nearly all "democratic" countries prior to about 1830 were oligarchic, with extensive property qualifications and other inegalitarian restrictions (these were enough to condemn Rhodesia as "undemocratic" in the '70s), and frequently were heavily decentralized and federated in a very inegalitarian way, like the early United States (this didn't finally die completely in the US until 1964, with SCOTUS' disastrous ruling in Reynolds v. Sims). A pure unitary democracy can probably never work well with a population of more than 10,000 or so. Is it any wonder that most of the men who wrote the Constitution hated and feared anything that might be called "Democracy"?