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Another Failure of Democracy
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| Arbiter |
Lao Tzu wrote, in his brilliant Tao Te Ching, on what seperated a bad leader, from a fair leader, from a brilliant one. The poor leader, he wrote, was one who was despised or feared. The decent leader was the one who was loved and praised. The brilliant leader, on the other hand, was the one who is barely known to those he leads.
It is the bad, rather than the good, which attracts the attention of men, especially the masses. It follows then, that the leader who is despised and feared is the one who is the bad or fails to overcome the bad. The leader who is loved and praised is the one who is thought to deal well with the bad. The leader who is unknown is the leader under whom there is no bad, presumably because the leader capably deals with problems before they manifest themselves in harmful ways.
In a democracy, however, the leader who is barely known to those he leads will never be elected. Rather, it is the second sort of leader, the average leader, who will rise to prominence. Certainly, democracy outstrips many forms of government in this regard - those which uphold the first and basest type of men as leaders. And yet, while it is far from the worst, it still falls short of that which is most desirable.
If there are any doubts that this is the case, simply observe the present political landscape of the United States. Suppose 9/11 had never happened. Bush would likely be in dire straits. In the absence of any icon around which to rally support for a war, the most prominent issue in the minds of the American populace would undoubtedly be our flaccid economy, which despite his efforts has failed to improve meaningfully since its plummet near the beginning of his term.
So, one could surely say that while 9/11 may have been a tragedy, it was hardly a tragedy for Bush's chances at a second term! Hopefully this example makes obvious the following paradigm: in a democracy, a ruler profits from problems, so long as he can create the image of having dealt with them in a productive way. As a result, democracy gives rise to leaders under whom problems occur.
If we believe democracy to be the ultimate political system then we are believing it is impossible to create a system in which the best kind of men are made leaders. The believers are many, but I do not share their pessimism. I can only hope I live to see the day when democracy goes the way of monarchy. |
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| sifntj0r |
good post :)
"Suppose 9/11 had never happened. Bush would likely be in dire straits. In the absence of any icon around which to rally support for a war"
If 9/11 didnt happen, then would bush have gone to war? And if yes, then would it have been easier or harder to rally support? Was 9/11 somewhat of a catalyst in beginning of the wide-spread dislike of the US? In the way that it brought the issue to the fore, making itself heard and somehow encouraging others to air their opinions of anti-american sentiment.
i'm getting to something, i just can't remember what.
feel free to shoot it down, no pun intended :\ |
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| rupert |
| quote: | | As a result, democracy gives rise to leaders under whom problems occur. |
Not being democratic enough gives rise to leaders under whom problems occur. |
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| CortexBomb |
| quote: | Originally posted by Arbiter
If there are any doubts that this is the case, simply observe the present political landscape of the United States. Suppose 9/11 had never happened. Bush would likely be in dire straits. In the absence of any icon around which to rally support for a war, the most prominent issue in the minds of the American populace would undoubtedly be our flaccid economy, which despite his efforts has failed to improve meaningfully since its plummet near the beginning of his term. |
Agree with a lot of what you're saying here, but I think the present war would have happened regardless of the terrorist attack situation. Whether or not Bush would be enjoying the insane amount of popularity that he is now without the 11th of September attacks, well, that's another issue entirely.
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So, one could surely say that while 9/11 may have been a tragedy, it was hardly a tragedy for Bush's chances at a second term! Hopefully this example makes obvious the following paradigm: in a democracy, a ruler profits from problems, so long as he can create the image of having dealt with them in a productive way. As a result, democracy gives rise to leaders under whom problems occur.
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Definitely, I said this in the immediate aftermath. Bush was a pariah when he first hit office, he wasn't well-liked, and he was looking like a 1 and out man all the way...
Then, the attacks occur, and suddenly he's the golden boy and can do no wrong.
Incidentally, the immediate surge of popularity for the NYC Mayor also irked me...no matter what anyone on here wants to say, was doing *nothing* out of the ordinary. I don't understand why he was touted as some superhero for his speeches and appearances, what else was he supposed to do? Sit at home?! |
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| DrUg_Tit0 |
I'd say there would be a war regardless of the 11.9. occurance.
Anyway, as far as leadership goes, I agree with most of what you are saying. The problem is, do you have a better alternative? |
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| Alccode |
Ugh..people... for the last time, the US government/society/whatever-the-damn-term-is-being-applied-to-anymore is not a democracy!! It is (in theory) supposed to be a republic a la Machiavelli/Locke/Montesquieu/Rousseau/Federalist authors. However it's not even that anymore.
Do you think there is democracy in America? Do you even know what "democracy" means, instead of just spewing out what everyone else (and incidentally the gov't) says?
Equality of rights is not democracy. It is Enlightenment Thinking.
Democracy is rule by the people. And that does not exist in America.
Arbiter, your post is very good - the problem is that the kind of government the US has in place now thrives, like you said, on problems. And not democracy. Incidentally democracy can be a very good kind of government in small states (a la ancient Athens). |
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| occrider |
| quote: | Originally posted by Alccode
Ugh..people... for the last time, the US government/society/whatever-the-damn-term-is-being-applied-to-anymore is not a democracy!! It is (in theory) supposed to be a republic a la Machiavelli/Locke/Montesquieu/Rousseau/Federalist authors. However it's not even that anymore.
Do you think there is democracy in America? Do you even know what "democracy" means, instead of just spewing out what everyone else (and incidentally the gov't) says?
Equality of rights is not democracy. It is Enlightenment Thinking.
Democracy is rule by the people. And that does not exist in America.
Arbiter, your post is very good - the problem is that the kind of government the US has in place now thrives, like you said, on problems. And not democracy. Incidentally democracy can be a very good kind of government in small states (a la ancient Athens). |
And no other country is a true democracy in similar respects.
And out of curiosity, what notable problems kept Clinton in office? Are you insinuating that if no problems occrurred during his term he would have been voted out of office? Of course you can say that the system is biased towards leaders who successfully manage problems because problems occurr in EVERY term of office.
Differentiate the US from any other European country whith respects to how the leadership is picked in response to problems. |
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| occrider |
While we're on the topic of failures of democracy ...
"EU blueprint spells demise of democracy
anatole kaletsky
The European Union is arguably the most successful political entity ever created. In less than 50 years, its territorial expansion and accretion of state powers has exceeded the wildest ambitions of the Roman, British or Napoleonic Empires. It has helped to bring permanent peace to a continent which has never known anything but warfare. It has spread prosperity and democracy to impoverished and benighted regions from Iberia to the Balkans. And it has done all this without coercion, let alone bloodshed. Even the United States of America, the only remotely comparable experiment in creating a universal political civilisation, could not boast such achievements after just 46 years of existence.
Why, then, is the EU so widely despised and resented, especially by European citizens themselves? And why do the prospects for a flowering of Europe’s political and economic culture seem gloomier today than at any time in the past 50 years?
Some answers to these questions can be found in the draft constitution for a new Union of European States, published on Monday by the Convention on the Future of Europe. This is a document of monumental importance which Tony Blair has, as usual, tried to drive out of public consciousness. Initially he refused to acknowledge that the convention was even drafting a new constitution. Now, aided and abetted by the British media, ministers are trying to distract attention from the real issues by focusing on trivia. Will the EU change its name to “United States of Europe”? Will it agree to administer common powers on a “federal” basis? Who cares?
What matters is not the name of the new Europe, but its new purposes and powers. As the EU has developed, mutating from a free-trade area into a single market, then a monetary zone, then an economic government and now into a geopolitical, defence and judicial entity with all the main attributes of a nation state, it has acquired more and more power over the lives of its citizens.
The two crucial questions before the Constitution Convention in Brussels are exactly the same as the ones facing the American founding fathers in Philadelphia in 1787: how should powers be divided between the new federation and its member states? And how should these powers be democratically controlled?
Most of the debate in Brussels has focused on the first question, yet the second matters more. If we look at the US Constitution, in contrast to the European draft, the former document is devoted almost entirely to the detailed procedures for electing a President and Congress and appointing the Supreme Court. The list of federal competences and powers (Section 8 of the US Constitution) consists of only about 300 words, one fifth of the length of this article. This has not prevented the US federal Government becoming enormously powerful. But it has ensured that the steady shift of power from the State to the centre, which is inevitable in any federal system, has enjoyed political legitimacy, has been subject to judicial checks and balances and has been driven by democracy, rather than bureaucracy.
In the European constitutional debate, by contrast, the issue of legitimacy and the conflict between bureaucracy and democracy, which is really at the heart of the present political and economic malaise across Europe, has been trivialised or swept aside. European politicians ritually bewail the “democratic deficit” in EU institutions, but in practice they show absolutely no interest in political legitimacy. In fact, the institutional changes required to make European institutions more democratic have scarcely figured in the debates in Brussels, still less in the draft constitution.
The way power is shifting in Europe can be clearly seen from the outline constitution. All imply major shifts in favour of the Union. The new constitution accelerates the accretion of EU powers which have made foreign policy, defence and justice, as well as economic and social policy, matters of “Union competence”. But it then goes much further than any previous official document by suggesting that even powers remaining at the national level should be governed by a new “obligation of loyal co-operation”.
Some of the practical consequence can be imagined from recent news events. Britain’s pursuit of an independent policy on Iraq would clearly conflict with the principle of loyal co-operation. But so would the French Government’s decision to cut taxes to fulfil its electoral promises, even though this has fatally “impaired the effectiveness” of the eurozone Stability Pact, one of the pivotal policies of the EU. The import of the new constitution, therefore, is that national governments must give priority to Union objectives, even in areas of policy which have not been transferred to the EU. But what if these Union objectives conflict with national political priorities, especially if these priorities have been democratically confirmed by a strong electoral mandate, as in the case of the French tax cuts?
This leads back to the real crux of the constitutional issue in Europe — the question of democratic control. The Blair Government has a simple answer. According to Jack Straw, nation states must remain the “primary source of political legitimacy” in Europe and Britain’s main objective in the Constitutional Convention is to ensure this. France also seems sympathetic to this view. The way to deal with the democratic deficit in Europe is to make sure that EU institutions are ultimately controlled by national leaders, through their weighted votes on the European Council and their power to appoint the European Commission. Since the national leaders who sit on the Council and appoint the Commission are all elected by voters, EU institutions ultimately controlled by these two bodies are, by definition, democratically legitimate.
But these Anglo-French slogans about an “inter-governmental” Europe are incompatible with democracy. The fact is that voters have no real influence over the European Council, still less the European Commission, because neither is a government which can be voted out. The individual members of the Council can, of course, be punished by their national voters. But national leaders usually deny responsibility for European decisions, maintaining that they were outvoted by other nations. Without pan-European political parties and coalitions, national voters have no way of affecting the decisions of the Council as a whole.
The absence of democratic legitimacy in a collegiate body like the European Council will be hugely aggravated if Europe continues to grow in size and scope. Lack of legitimacy might have been tolerable while the EU’s decisions were mostly confined to technocratic issues such as trade regulation, and when there were few enough members for lines of responsibility to individual leaders to be reasonably clearly drawn. But what will happen when the EU insists on higher taxes, when soldiers are sent to their deaths and when such decisions are shared by an amorphous group of 25 or more national leaders, each of whom can dodge responsibility for what the EU has done?
This raises what I think are the really interesting and important question about the future of Europe. Is the neglect of democracy in the new European constitution merely a cynical omission by national politicians and bureaucrats whose primary aim is preserving as much of their powers as possible? Or does it reflect a much deeper problem – the fact that Europe is simply too large and diverse ever to be governable in a genuinely democratic manner?
I suspect that the failure to come up with a constitution which would improve the democratic legitimacy of Europe has much more to do with the absence of a European “demos”, than with the selfishness and cynicism of European bureaucrats and politicians. That is why the idea of transferring real power to the European Parliament has so little support anywhere in Europe, while direct election of a European president is dismissed as absurd.
But if there is really no such thing as a European political consciousness, if pan-European political parties are impossible, if an elected president is inconceivable – and if such manifestations of democracy become even more fantastical as Europe continues its eastward enlargement — can the Union’s past successes justify further transfers of sovereignty from the democratic nations of Europe to the bureaucratic centre? That is the crucial question for the Constitutional Convention to answer. So far, there has been deafening silence.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/articl...-464421,00.html
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| Alccode |
| quote: | Originally posted by occrider
And no other country is a true democracy in similar respects.
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Of course. I'm not an advocate of this "true democracy," so it's not like I'm saying that it doesn't exist in the U.S. but magically exists somewhere else. In fact, elsewhere, the governments are usually worse.
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And out of curiosity, what notable problems kept Clinton in office? Are you insinuating that if no problems occrurred during his term he would have been voted out of office? Of course you can say that the system is biased towards leaders who successfully manage problems because problems occurr in EVERY term of office.
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:haha: I laughed when I read that... imagine the scene, "Sorry, Mr. Clinton, but it seems that the United States has seen nothing but smooth sailing since you have entered your term as President. Consequently, you are expelled from office..." :haha:
But seriously, I think what Arbiter was getting at, and what I am supporting here, is that if there are problems during a President's term, all that he has to do is to create an image that he has dealt with the problem, to boost his popularity and hence get him re-elected. I.e. his actual merits do not matter. Now, you might say, "Egads man, you are mad! If he has dealt with the problem then has he not shown his own merit??" But the key is "create an image." In essence, although the Iraq war may have been a "success" from an American standpoint (it was arguably a failure from every other standpoint), the other problems have been glossed over. Like the US economy (I don't know what I'm talking about here, but from what I last heard, there are problems?) and from the fact that anti-US sentiment is at an all-time high, worldwide. OK, maybe these aren't that bad of problems as far as the US itself is concerned (if we totally disregard the rest of the world as is apparently the custom in US foreign relations...), but in any case I would not be surprised if Bush got re-elected, because it looked to his supporters as if he "dealt" with a "problematic situation" effectively, which is in fact ludicrous considering he was the one who engineered the situation in the first place!! :haha:
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Differentiate the US from any other European country whith respects to how the leadership is picked in response to problems. |
Haha, to tell you the truth, I'm not an expert in European politics. They just don't draw my attention as much. :haha:
BTW occrider, great article you posted there! I didn't even know half of the stuff in it was even occuring! :toothless As far as the EU is concerned, I don't think it will succeed the way it's going, if what they're trying to do is make a unified state a la the United States of America. No way. There are just too many differences for it to work. But maybe I'm wrong. We'll just have to see. |
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| occrider |
| quote: | Originally posted by Alccode
:haha: I laughed when I read that... imagine the scene, "Sorry, Mr. Clinton, but it seems that the United States has seen nothing but smooth sailing since you have entered your term as President. Consequently, you are expelled from office..." :haha:
But seriously, I think what Arbiter was getting at, and what I am supporting here, is that if there are problems during a President's term, all that he has to do is to create an image that he has dealt with the problem, to boost his popularity and hence get him re-elected. I.e. his actual merits do not matter. Now, you might say, "Egads man, you are mad! If he has dealt with the problem then has he not shown his own merit??" But the key is "create an image." In essence, although the Iraq war may have been a "success" from an American standpoint (it was arguably a failure from every other standpoint), the other problems have been glossed over. Like the US economy (I don't know what I'm talking about here, but from what I last heard, there are problems?) and from the fact that anti-US sentiment is at an all-time high, worldwide. OK, maybe these aren't that bad of problems as far as the US itself is concerned (if we totally disregard the rest of the world as is apparently the custom in US foreign relations...), but in any case I would not be surprised if Bush got re-elected, because it looked to his supporters as if he "dealt" with a "problematic situation" effectively, which is in fact ludicrous considering he was the one who engineered the situation in the first place!! :haha:
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I agree with that then ... I'm not sure if it's a problem inherent with US democracy so much as it is a problem inherent in politics in general though. With regards to Bush getting re-elected because of his image as a result of this war, keep in mind Bush Sr. had an approval rating of 90% (more than bush jr.) following the first gulf war and yet he did not get reelected because he ignored the domestic problems. If Bush jr. does not deal with the problems of the economy my guess is that he will get the similar boot. |
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| Alccode |
| quote: | Originally posted by occrider
I agree with that then ... I'm not sure if it's a problem inherent with US democracy so much as it is a problem inherent in politics in general though. With regards to Bush getting re-elected because of his image as a result of this war, keep in mind Bush Sr. had an approval rating of 90% (more than bush jr.) following the first gulf war and yet he did not get reelected because he ignored the domestic problems. If Bush jr. does not deal with the problems of the economy my guess is that he will get the similar boot. |
Hmm...you're right. I think this thread should be re-named, "Another Failure of Politics." :D |
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