Was American Democracy Always Doomed?

[xchrom]

http://www.alternet.org/civil-liberties/was-american-democracy-always-doomed



In the glory days of the anti-globalization movement, circa the “Battle in Seattle” of 1999, there was an oft-repeated street scene some of you will remember. A group of protesters would seize an intersection or a block for a little while, likely because the police were otherwise occupied or couldn’t be bothered or didn’t want to bust heads while the cameras were watching. The ragtag band would haul out the drums and noisemakers, climb the lampposts and newspaper boxes with colorful banners, and send out an exuberant chant: “This is what democracy looks like!” (Contrary to what you may have heard, smashing the Starbucks windows was not required, and not all that common.)

It’s easy to snark all over that from this historical distance: If democracy looks like a noisy street party involving white people with dreadlocks dressed as sea turtles, count me out! But the philosophy behind that radical-activist moment was not nearly as naive as it might look from here, and much of the problem lies in that troublesome noun: democracy. In those post-Communist, pre-9/11 days, the era of the “end of history,” democracy in its liberal-capitalist formulation was assumed to be the natural fulfillment of human society. It was the essential nutrient-rich medium for the growth of all good things: Pizza Hut, parliamentary elections, knockoff designer clothes and broadband Internet, not to mention all the wonderful gizmos that were about to be invented. Even anti-capitalist protesters were compelled to embrace the rhetoric of democracy, if only to suggest (as Gandhi did about “Western civilization”) that it was a great idea but we hadn’t gotten there yet.

A decade and a half later, democracy remains officially unopposed on the world stage, yet it faces an unexpected existential crisis. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, American-style liberal-capitalist democracy has presented itself to the world as “the only legitimate form of expression or decision-making power” and “the necessary first condition of freedom.” (I’m quoting an anarchist critique by Moxie Marlinspike and Windy Hart, which is well worth reading.) But it has abruptly and spectacularly stopped working as advertised: The broken American political system has become a global laughingstock, and numerous other Western countries that modeled their systems on ours are in chronic crisis mode.

This is what democracy looks like: grotesque inequality, delusional Tea Party obstructionism, a vast secret national-security state, overseas wars we’re never even told about and a total inability to address the global climate crisis, a failure for which our descendants will never forgive us, and never should. Maybe I’ll take the turtle costumes after all. The aura of democratic legitimacy is fading fast in an era when financial and political capital are increasingly consolidated in a few thousand people, a fact we already knew but whose implications French insta-celebrity Thomas Piketty and the political scientists Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page (of the “oligarchy study”) have forcefully driven home. Libertarian thinker Bryan Caplan sees the same pattern, as Michael Lind recently wrote in Salon, but thinks it’s a good thing. In America, democracy offers the choice between one political party that has embraced a combination of corporate bootlicking, poorly veiled racism, anti-government paranoia and a wholesale rejection of science, and another whose cosmopolitan veneer sits atop secret drone warfare, Wall Street cronyism and the all-seeing Panopticon of high-tech surveillance. You don’t have to conclude that noted climate-change expert Marco Rubio and Establishment mega-hawk Hillary Clinton are interchangeable or identical to conclude that it isn’t much of a choice.

[RKP5637]

1. Democracy will be doomed in a capitalistic society by the lack of effective controls on the

accumulation of absurd wealth. It's very hard IMO to consider a democracy exists when absurd wealth rules the country for their specific interests.

[reformist2]

5. Democracy is one fix away from success - that fix is getting money out of politics!

Obviously no system will ever be perfect, but just imagine the free-wheeling debates we'll have when Big Money isn't rigging the process!

[RKP5637]

6. Yes, extremely true. That, is the core problem! n/t

[Fumesucker]

7. You might as well try to remove gravity from mass as take money out of politics

"Money doesn't talk, it screams" -Bob Dylan

[reformist2]

9. And yet it is the one thing we must do - without it, no money-related reform is possible.

[Fumesucker]

11. The problem is really mostly cultural I think

Politicians don't hang with poor people and the disadvantaged, culturally they are part of the 1% whether they have big money or not (and they mostly do, if not before taking office certainly afterward).

The 99% to them are some vaguely defined "other" that they tut tut about at the latest DC dinner party by and for the 1%.

[pampango]

2. Is democracy doomed everywhere? Is so, what takes it place? A return to kings and emperors?

If the concept of democracy is judged to be just too idealistic (perhaps like real communism?) due to weaknesses in human nature - selfishness, love of personal power, hatred of 'others', etc. - that would certainly represent a sea change in the goals that liberals work for.

If the citizens are inherently unable to make a democracy function as it should because human nature dictates that the elite in any society use their position to accumulate more and more power and money, what can we hope for? An enlightened king or emperor? Since citizens would not have any say in the selection of the king or emperor, it would be kind of a crap shoot whether you were getting the next Kim or an enlightened leader. An once he is there, you are stuck with him until death do us part.

[Donald Ian Rankin]

3. Ultimately, the sun will expand and swallow the earth.

[Fumesucker]

8. Depends on whether the Earth gets moved or not

Not even that difficult to do in theory..

http://io9.com/5923828/dont-worry-people--nasa-has-a-plan-for-moving-the-earth

[KG]

4. too many in this country allowed themselves to be talked out of it.

[Bluenorthwest]

10. Democracy is and always has been an objective and a process.

It has never been and never will be a thing we have perfected, it must be always a thing we are creating and expanding.

[AverageJoe90]

14. Very true. And this has been the case since the beginning. n/t.

[struggle4progress]

12. The question is not whether we have lost some ideal state we once had

(for, in fact, our ideals never really existed in any material sense), nor is the question whether we can obtain some ideal state we might imagine -- for our imaginations are not excellent enough to conceive accurately what we might possibly do

No, the real question is always something smaller and better: it is whether we can identify particular problems and whether we can form relationships with other people to address those problems

But whenever people have the freedom to organize to solve problems, some of the problems they identify will be matters of their own self-interest, and when they organize successfully around such matters, there will be other persons whose own self-interests may suffer as a result: under these conditions, politics becomes unavoidable

The promised land is not merely "somewhere beyond the horizon" -- it is an unreachable abstract point-at-infinity: the question is never how we can reach the promised land but rather whether we can take a single step in that direction -- and then whether we can take another step. Since our condition will always be less-than-ideal, our prospects for progress cannot be gauged against an ideal: if guided by our stars, we must still examine step-by-step where we plant our feet

[muriel_volestrangler]

13. " No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. ...

... Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time."

A true Winston Churchill quote, and basically right IMO.

[pscot]

15. We're the people Benjamin Franklin

warned us about.

[Tierra_y_Libertad]

16. It was doomed when we decided to elect "leaders" rather than representatives.