"The Irony Of Democracy"

"The Irony Of Democracy" was written by Tom Dye... It used to be frequently used in "Political Science 101" or "Introduction To American Politics"... The title comes from his thesis that too much democracy would undermine the system where it is practiced and that the consensus we "enjoy" comes from the fact that elite groups shape our policies or opinions and tempers democracy... Or the "masses are asses"...
...

I had him as a graduate professor and he was on my committee when I was doing post grad work in Government at Florida State University back in the eighties...


We used to have some lively discussions about his thesis and separating the emperical from the normative... He would say he was describing our system... It's up to others to judge if it's good or not...

The flaw's in the communication of information. Who gets to do that? Oh yes, the government (to the few among us who visit government websites) and above all the corporate media.

The tragedy is that the masses are smart. But the information (nowadays more like infotainment) they're fed is mostly dumb. Wars, fearmongering and hysteria about the "enemy within" (liberals, gays, vegans) sell news, while the right tends to tax corporations less... I wonder if there could be any bias in this wonderful system?

Too much democracy would be too much diversity, which would undermine the system of consensus. There would be too much conflict, too much competition. That's why corporations buy out competitors and merge with others. That's why for America to even exist today, westward expansion had to take out whatever stood in the way. That's why there had to be a civil war. That's why all the great empires of the 20th century had to eventually go to war, multiple wars if needed, to find out which consensus would win. That's why those empires ever existed in the first place.

Why are they fewer wars today than before? I would say it's not because we're some type of advanced culture, but because of the wars that destroyed diversity, thus creating a consensus. Without war, we don't have the world we have today. Certainly there would be no countries. There would be no economics of any kind. There couldn't be a UN as an example, as the process that created America would've been illegal. No America, no UN. No UN, America is able to exist.

It's an interesting notion. But without diversity, democracy's meaningless. Competing perceptions and ideologies are the lifeblood of intellectual progress. The problem with war is that it tends to impose not consensus but one model of progress. And with ever-expanding military reach the model becomes ever less appropriate to conditions on the ground. That's why those mighty empires fragmented.

The US didn't create the UN - indeed successive US Administrations have been the greatest menace to the UN's international standing with their funding boycotts and strongarming of fellow members: even that wasn't good enough in March 2003: the UN is now morally moribund in consequence of ruthless imposition of bipartisan US policy.

"But without diversity, democracy's meaningless."

Yup.

"Competing perceptions and ideologies are the lifeblood of intellectual progress. The problem with war is that it tends to impose not consensus but one model of progress."

Competing perceptions are basically the cause of war though. At least conflict anyway. War is more of a consensus against consensus(organized, large scale).

Don't we pretty much have one model of progress today?

"And with ever-expanding military reach the model becomes ever less appropriate to conditions on the ground. That's why those mighty empires fragmented."

No question about it. Fragmentation then leads to greater diversity, which leads to greater conflict when those diverse thoughts/ideas/people come together, and the same process repeats again and again. Today the world is a global empire of sorts, more along the lines of production than any single state leading the way(Rome, Britain, etc, etc).

An interesting thing will be what happens when a global empire fragments. Is an even larger empire possible? I guess it could be, since we're not quite in an actual global empire just yet. You'd need more of a single governing body(not the black helicopter kind, just your normal run of the mill government).

"The US didn't create the UN"

Not completely, but we had a major say.

The problem with the UN as a functioning body is that nobody listens to it without the US military backing it up. If the US military goes against the UN, the whole system falls apart. The other countries around the world no longer have any real military power(they don't need it, they don't have to secure their own resources, so they can spend their tax money on social programs). The UN has no real force of its own either. Even with the US military on its side, the UN sanctions against Iraq hurt everyone but their intended target, and that was with us in Iraq militarily for basically the entire decade of the 90's.

But yeah, to use your phrase again, war is the implementation of consensus. To the victor go the spoils. History is written by the winner. English, for now, is the global language of commerce. Capitalism is, for the most part, the economic system of the planet. Fewer and fewer people represent more and more people(each member of Congress represents, on average, 3 million and 600,000-700,000 people, respectively).

For better or worse...

As an aside, the old Labour leader, Tony Benn, makes an interesting point in "Sicko" that "democracy" replaces the market with the ballot... That's an interesting concept but if "simple" majories can make economic decisions for us can they make one personal ones too...

That nomuinal sovereignty's our last inadequate guarantee of diversity. It's when the most powerful abuse their position (U.S. v Yemen, 1990) that we end up with the nightmare of Iraq's 17-year rape.

The problem with democracy v. the market is that 99% of decisions are taken in the market. Voting is just another shopping choice. And if I'm shopping for a demented war on anyone who I may imagine the slightest grounds to fear, I'll vote GOP any day. Happily that's not my consumer preference.

I'd say that conflict is essential to progress - we've seen it throughout history, the "old" versus the new. The challenge is to make that conflict peaceful - the conflict of ideas, of ways of making our world a better place.

That's where war fails: it may bring the triumph of the stronger party, but it's a poor mechanism for advance unless progress is just a matter of churning out more lethal armaments for bigger armies.

So yes, war may establish retrospective "consensus". But as you say, it's more a matter of history (and everything else) being written by the victors. I think we're past the tipping-point where it's outlived any use it may have had.

But people who feel that government can intervene in a person's economic affairs but not his personal ones have the same intellectual dilemma that a person who feels a government can intervene in a person's personal affair but not his economic ones...

Thise dilemmas are what politics is for. Government invariably intervenes in both. Politics is about determining where to intervene. The irony is that the more we accept laissez-faire in domestic life, the keener we seem to throw our collective weight about in the international arena even as our ability to project rational policy erodes. It's not a happy mix.

"Who gets what , when , and how"

I prefer that politics is "the rational and deliberate pursuit of the good life"

I was always curious to learn who used that textbook...

Tom Dye was really a nice guy but then most of my professors were...

The Constitution blunts democracy to a great extent. It's usually held to uphold it, and it does that, too. But the democracy it seems to set up is a *liberal* democracy, not just a democracy.

A pure democracy would mean that tomorrow 51% of the population could vote to enslave the other 49%. It could decide that anybody with blond hair is stripped of the right to vote.

Now, the liberal democracy set up had flaws, to be sure. But note that many of the "progressive" bits in the last 50 years have been accomplished precisely by an elite--legislators acting not in accordance with the electorate, or judges that have no constituent base. Desegregation was unpopular, for instance.

Note that had we just had majoritarian democracy--something that many seem to like in principle but would absolutely loathe in practice--we would probably never have had conditions created for school desegration or equal rights.

Democracy needs limits to prevent its being rule by a very, very large mob.

The Founding Fathers were liberal democrats not majoritarian democrats... Many of the rights we enjoy today we would not enjoy if they were subject to a plebiscite... I shudder to think what rights a "simple" majority would give up in the name of fighting terrorism...

I know there was talk awhile back about ratifying the Constution at a second Constitutional Convention...I am ashamed to say I forgot the mechanism in the Constitution of how that would be accomplished but I shudder at the prospect given the power of some special interest groups...

In his textbook he would cite examples where the American people or at least "simple" majorities were alternatively isolationist and jingoistic, as well as racist, xenophobic, et cetera...

He also makes a convincing argument that all our presidents , even FDR and Andrew Jackson, were beholden to elites and didn't shake up the consensus as much as we think...