From the comments I see here so far, I don't see evidence that people have read the article (which is a transcript of part one of a radio talk that just went out over the air on the UK's Radio 4). It seems people are responding to the title.<p>Here are some quotes:<p>The totalitarian system, I learned, endures not simply by getting rid of democratic elections and imposing a one-party state. It endures by abolishing the distinction between civil society and the state, and by allowing nothing significant to occur which is not controlled by the Party.<p>...<p>In the underground universities of communist Europe, my friends and colleagues studied those things, and prepared themselves for the hoped-for day when the Communist Party, having starved itself of every rational input, would finally give up the ghost. And the lessons that they learned need to be learned again today, as our politicians lead us forth under the banner of democracy, without pausing to examine what democracy actually requires.
"<i>Western nations have acted upon the assumption that democracy is the solution to political conflict and that the ultimate goal of foreign policy must be to encourage the emergence of democracy..</i><p><i>.. three ideas - democracy, freedom and human rights - are spoken of in one breath</i>"<p>Ironically, thing that current liberal-democratic ideologies should have inherited from Marxism is the emphasis on influencing the people. Democrats of the last few decades give the general public's attitude and political culture a ridiculously strong presumption of innocence. The problems in autocratic countries are assumed to be institutional: bad systems, bad leaders. The People want peace, freedom and human rights. I think that's why human rights are expected to follow democratic elections.<p>In the middle east right now we have seen this fail in a similar way in several places. Democratic elections bringing to power strongly non "democratic" candidates. Confessionalists, nationalists & theocrats.<p>A more Marxist-like approach would worry more about spreading the ideology among the general public. In Eastern Europe (especially East Germany) "like Western Europe" was enough. In the middle east "<i>lets be more western</i>" is not going to work. We're understandably hesitant to start pushing a "little book of ideology" into the hands of 16 year olds around the world given our 20th century experience with such books. I don't know what the answer is to that. What I am pretty certain about is that if you want to see "democracy" in Syria or Egypt, you have more than just an institutional problem to fix.
All systems put <i>their</i> form of rule on a pedestal worshiping it, saying: "there is none like it".<p>It will fall apart as all the other systems have and be considered "silly compared to our knew awesome form of rule"
I'm glad to see this comment from a Brit, because it's exactly what I was telling to the Western friends for some time: formal procedures do not make democracy. (I think Iraq and Afganistan are clear examples.) It's a whole culture of participation of citizens and accountability from those who take the power, and those cultures are mutually dependent.<p>We had all formal procedures in USSR & Russia in 1988-1991, but the citizens did not know what to do with them, and then they were gradually taken away. Democracy is a grassroots phoenomenon, it grows ground-up.
From Wikipedia:<p>"<i>Democracy [...] encompasses social, economic and cultural conditions that enable the free and equal practice of political self-determination.</i>"<p>This article is not alone in having a very narrow and technical conception of democracy as solely a method of election and legislation. That this in itself is not sufficient for a flourishing and liberated society seems obvious.<p>The real issue seems to be how to encourage actual, real, functioning democracy, instead of installing a thin veneer of technical democracy on top of a society whose deeper currents are undemocratic.<p>For some reason I'm thinking about the story of how the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia has historical roots in the Communist suppression of Zappa-influenced psychedelic rock band The Plastic People of the Universe. Maybe the world just needs more psychedelic rock.
No system of government really works that well because most people "defect" in the sense of the prisoners dilemma. So instead of working for the public good, the government ultimately becomes a means of exploiting the public good for powerful individuals' advantage.<p>Pretty much everyone government ultimately devolves into a form of "mafia" -- a relatively tight network of powerful individuals united by some fairly strong bond such as familial/ethnic ties. This network can count on each other to "cooperate" and not "defect", while the public/masses just can't coordinate and cooperate enough to oppose them.
I think the real problem is we don't really have democracy: once every four years we are allowed to pick between Coke or Pepsi and then we hand over all our power to a bunch of people until the next election.
Is he talking about democracy as an ideal or democracy as commonly implemented? These are two very different things..<p>The ideal is to give everyone the same say in what laws should govern the society. In my view, that ideal isn't overrated. It's just basic fairness.<p>If you have two kids, that argue for a toy, what do you do? You force them each to have it for half a time, fairly.<p>The societies that evolved the ability to implement such fairness spend less resources warring about who should get how much power (arguing about the toy), and so spend more resources on productive activities (playing with the toy).
Not quite what the article was talking about, but what worries me about modern democracies is where the responsibility of government decisions lies. In theory the voters should bear it, since they chose the government. But in practice they just shrug "rotten politicians" and move on with their lives as their country wages war on millions of innocents. The politicians themselves rarely get their comeuppance, because hey, the people chose them!<p>Democracy only works with a politically active population. And frankly, most people don't give a shit.
This reminds me of Pope John Paul II's reply when asked why the church was not more democratic:<p><i>The church is not a democracy and truth is not established by a show of hands</i>
I would say, yes. Theoretically, an all-knowing Philosopher King would be the best form of government. In reality, that's extremely hard to achieve. Modern day democracies, like in the US, are intentionally designed to move slowly, so that no single person or group of people can radically change how it affects it's citizens. That also means it is slow to reform.
It's worth remembering that there are ways of achieving democracy that don't involve voting. For example, creating a Government from a randomly-selected group of citizens every few years.<p>In my opinion that's a vastly superior approach to having everyone vote for one a bunch of - for the most part - crooks, thieves and liars.
Disambiguation is called for in respect to what <i>democracy</i> actually is...<p><a href="http://www.diffen.com/difference/Democracy_vs_Republic" rel="nofollow">http://www.diffen.com/difference/Democracy_vs_Republic</a><p>Black's Law Dictionary says that the difference between a democracy and a republic is that sovereignty is retained by the individual within a republic. (USA is a Constitutional Republic)<p>The article fails to note that democracy does not preclude communism, and the DPRK (<a href="http://www.korea-dpr.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.korea-dpr.com/</a>) is a classic democratic communist nation in which the people have no individual sovereignty in lieu of that sovereignty being relegated to the collective in the name of the greater good <i>for the nation.</i>
Real democracy doesn't exists in any country. Except from e-democracy experiments like in Rio Grande do Sul(Brasil). Instead we are in a tight controlled Particracy.<p>Thanks to internet we are getting closer to a new Era where citizens will have direct control on the governments. This is yet to be achieved but there are already thousands of people working silently on this.<p>We will have the first real democracy in Europe at the end of 2015 and it will spread quickly.<p>We are citizens, we are real democracy.
Yes! (But also no)<p>The problem is that in the "western world" there are complex systems designed to preserve both widespread individual liberty as well as consensual governance (for convenience I'll call these "free systems"). However, we tend to merely label these systems as "democracy" even though many other systems that have popular voting can exist which do not offer the same protections of liberty and consensual governance. This terminology and modeling problem makes it more difficult to spread the aforementioned "free systems" of government because it's very much more difficult to elucidate all of the factors behind such systems, some of which are socio-cultural and economic.<p>One common pattern in "unfree" countries that have experienced bouts of democracy is for there to be a popular vote that brings in a government that then ends all of the democratic institutions. This has happened routinely for well over a century. Another problem is that you have a corrupt group in power with few checks on their authority and they simply rig every election in one way or another.<p>I think it's mistaken to believe that it takes generations for a country to be ready for freedom and effective democracy merely because naive attempts to set up democracies can easily fail. I think it's also a mistake to assume that countries with long histories of democratic institutions and liberty are comparatively immune to collapses of those institutions.<p>Much like the situation with economics we tend to live within political systems which rest on foundations that are not widely well understood, if at all, and rarely even discussed in depth at an abstract foundational level.<p>It's no wonder it's so difficult for countries to try to bootstrap their way to democracy and it's a bit of a shock that our own systems of government in the "free" world work as well as they do.
> Is democracy overrated?<p>No.<p>It's just that we haven't gotten through to eliminating the corrupting elements and anchoring this legally, yet.<p>Why? Because corruption (= ultimately money) protects itself.