This is an excellent piece. It’s worth remembering that myth-making around the historic role of certain states as champions of world democracy is mostly a relic of justifying WWI ex post facto, with self-determination for the nations remaining after the fall of the Habsburg, Romanov and German Empires presented as a noble cause for the brutal slaughter of industrialised warfare.
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I don’t know, lately I feel like the New ThingTM is to make rebuttals such incoherent non-sequiturs that they’re impossible to counter.
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Are you trying to say that farcical aquatic ceremonies are no way to derive supreme executive power?
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It’s not undemocratic, it’s a system of checks and balances that isolates presidential power against the legislature and the judiciary. As a US voter, you are voting (and have always voted) for that system, not just one part of it.
Be that as it may, I’d say Doctorow’s thesis here is typical of the sorry state of our relationship to leaders and being led. If he’s interested in democracy, Doctorow is looking at entirely the wrong (and frankly utterly irrelevant) issue. We end up supporting and re-enforcing massively undemocratic phenomena by concentrating on individuals in power, whether they are “good” or “bad” or “elected” or what they had for dinner, or did they have sex with the wrong person, etc. etc. and ignoring the real issue: that the purpose of such discourse encourages us to hand those individuals our collective power on a plate. Poor little us, we go away thinking, we can never measure up to some super-human Obama god or Bush satan so here, make my decisions for me while I worry about your wife’s hair or your tie.
It’s about time we considered the fact that Nelson Mandela himself was not the ANC. John Dube, Sol Plaatje and many many thousands of others - were they democratically elected? No, and what does that matter? So why is it we always hear about one man in connection with the fall of apartheid and the construction of the new South Africa?
That, I would say, is what the phenomenon of Mandela should make us think about.
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Personally, I don’t think “democratic” is a binary value. It is a spectrum and some systems are “more democratic” and others are “less democratic”. For example, following Cory’s analysis in a Canadian context, Harper may be more democratically elected than Pearson was (because of the extension of the voting franchise to aboriginal people. At the same time Pearson was more democratically elected than MacDonald, because of the extension of votes to women. And MacDonald was more democratically elected than the Governor General, who wasn’t (and isn’t) elected at all.
And that is only one spectrum. Different voting systems may be considered “more democratic or less democratic”. Many in Canada are concerned about the current “first past the post” system of electing our representatives which can see leaders and parties running majority governments with minority support among the voting population. Perhaps in the future, if we move to a system that better reflects the preferences of the public these leaders will be viewed as “illegitimately elected by an undemocratic system”.
There has also been a lot of talk about the effects of party or candidate financing, not just on elections, but on the activities and positions of representatives once elected. Do some systems of regulating political financing make for a polity that is more or less democratic?
It would be nice if everything was clear cut and binary and all of our leaders were either “democratically elected” or “not democratically elected”, but I don’t think it is that simple.
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The world could learn a lot from Mandela - he did consider using sabotage, terrorism and promoting outright civil war before he was jailed - though he realised that his aims were best served by pursuing a peaceful ending to Apartheid - a side-effect of being a political prisoner was that he was distanced from the few genuine acts of terrorism that took place against Apartheid and he was an even more legitimate leader on his release.
Read this speech that he gave in response to the murder of Chris Hani and you realise he could equally have called for an uprising.
"The cries of our nation are heard from old men who bury their sons and daughters, wives who weep for their husbands, communities who endlessly bury young and old, infants and pregnant women.
[W]e must not permit ourselves to be provoked by those who seek to deny us the very freedom Chris Hani gave his life for. Let us respond with dignity and in a disciplined fashion. We shall lay to rest the mortal remains of Comrade Chris Hani in a manner befitting a hero of our people. No one will desecrate his memory by rash and irresponsible actions."
Where is the Mandela of Palestine that can end the Israeli apartheid?
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Cory, I would absolutely love to see that whole other post about children and voting. Just sayin’.
We don’t need to look back. We already look on many of them with horror.
No incarceration without representation.
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Democracy does not mean totally unrestricted voting. In every democratic political system, there have ALWAYS been restrictions on who is allowed to vote. Even in ancient Greece, where (as far as we can tell) voting was invented, some people were not allowed to vote - slaves, certain classes of criminals, etc.
There is no such thing as perfection in human affairs. If you think there should be, enjoy your ability to have such beautiful dreams. If you think there can be, change your brand of opium - what you’re smoking now is too strong for you.
That is why the upper class in this country has been working so dedicately for decades to destroy the public schools of this country. They want a population of dullards who have never learned to actually think, who are just barely literate enough to read the little stickers that tell them how to run the forklift. Such people are easily fooled and will vote for whatever is biggest and shiniest.
So you’re advocating we stop enforcing laws so that we can have more votes cast? And exactly how good will be the thinking about choosing lawmakers among a group of people who have demonstrated they are not able or willing to make good decisions about obeying laws?
Democracy isn’t something you just get, it’s something you have to seek. Of course, if everyone decided to stay at home during an election and only one person voted in the government, it would hardly be representative. But that’s a failure of the electorate.
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They won’t need to fight, we’ll already be on our knees begging for mercy.
In 2009, the US imprisoned 743 out of every 100,000 people. In Canada, it’s closer to 114 out of every 100,000 people. It’s too damn high.
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True, but there’s also something to be said against ignoring people in past times who were racist when others around them were not. Washington and Jefferson, for starters, were racist slaveowners who definitely heard many arguments of their day against slavery.
Just because the times were different doesn’t mean that people back then didn’t have clearly optional beliefs and practices available – more just and humane beliefs and practices that were widely bruited about at the time.
I think that you need to read your Plato. What does a just man do when presented with an unjust law?
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And where is the de Klerk of Israel who will work with the Mandela of Palestine?
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You can call it whatever you like, but that doesn’t change the fact that it’s undemocratic. Neither the will nor the very backgrounds of the population are represented. We’re a multicultural, URBAN society where a minority of non-urban white voters hold as much, or more sway than the rest of us thanks to a regressive system. The U.S. isn’t represented by rural America, by Iowa or by New Hampshire. This system is regressive and protects an existing American hierarchy.
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It’s important to remember that democracy wasn’t something the US suddenly did upon drafting the Article of Confederation, it’s something that each state and city had been doing for decades prior. Legitimate democracy? Maybe not, but a start is a start, and you can’t hope for things to change overnight because they never ever do. Positive change takes a lot of work.
