DemocracY

Democracy describes a system of government in which the power to make important political decisions is given directly to ThePeople? via direct vote. Exactly what "democracy" means depends on what one means by "the People," by "important political decisions," and by "direct vote." Sometimes "democracy" is used more loosely to describe RepubliC?s, as in the phrase "Western democracies" and "making the world safe for Democracy," but in careful discussions of PoliticalTheory? this usage is incorrect. Sometimes, in order to distinguish democracies from republics, the term DirectDemocracy? is used. Depending on what, exactly, one means, one can accurately say that there has never been a "true" democracy of any considerable size (but see NoTrueScotsmanFallacy?).

The traditional, and to many still compelling, objection to democracy as a form of government is that it is open to DemagoguerY?. It is (famously) for this reason that the UnitedStates was established, strictly speaking, as a RepubliC? rather than a DemocracY. Thus BenjaminFranklin?'s famous answer, to the question as to what sort of government TheFoundingFathers? had established, was: "A Republic, if you can keep it."

A cynic would point out that demagoguery and populism are two sides of the same coin. Demagoguery appeals to people's baser instincts while populism appeals to their enlightened interests. Too often, the flaws of democracy are brought up by people whose interests run counter to the public's. For example, following the victory of the Socialist Party in the French election of June 1997, North American newspaper editors explained that the problem with democracy is that it can give the "wrong" answer. This error on the part of the public occured upon the election of Salvatore Allende (a Marxist) by the impoverished people of Chile. This tragic failure of democracy prompted the UnitedStates' government to "liberate" the people of Chile by giving Generalissimo Augusto Pinochet (a former concentration camp commander) the resources to execute a coup d'etat and impose a brutal military junta on the population. And yet again, the Bolshevik's realized that when the soviets ceased supporting the Central Committee's actions then this error of democracy needed to be remedied by the suspension of free elections in the soviets and eventually the suspension of the soviets themselves. Critics of this policy were sent to the gulag.

The early Americans understood these failures of democracy and wishing to avoid them founded the UnitedStates as a Republic. The popular sentiment among the land-owning class of the time, of whom the Founding Fathers were representatives, was that "the people who own the country should govern it".

Certain failures of democracy such as racism are not of any interest to the legislators. One of the achievements of the Soviet Union was a total suppression of ethnic tensions. With the decline of Soviet power, the Balkans are back to precisely the situation they were in before the October Revolution. The ethnic tensions in the former Yugoslavia were entirely predictable.

See DirectDemocracy?; TechnoDemocracy; RepubliC?; DemocraticRepublic?; RepublicanisM?; DemagoguerY?; ThePeople?.

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