On: Wed, 17 Sep 2008 16:51:38 +0200, <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> I've heard this argument (or arguments like it) in american politics
> before. Is this for real? I mean is this something you say just to
> promote the Republican party (over the democrats), or do you really
> think that democracy is somewhat unimportant? That beeing a republic
> (or any other aspect of your constitution) is *more* important than
> beeing a democracy?
>
> /per
>
> 2008/9/17 Brice Yokem <[log in to unmask]>:
>> That is why we are not supposed to be a democracy, but a republic.
>

Mr. Yokem's declaration simply reveals (again) his remarkable inability to
grasp the obvious and a mind caught in a web of cliches.  A republic is,
quite literally, a public thing (res publica) and the term simply means
that the form of government is generally accepted and participated in by
all citizens.  You can have a republican government with a hereditary king
or queen so long as that person is bound by the same laws as all other
people and the system requires active consent of the citizenry for that
person to assume the office. This is the case in Great Britain, Canada and
Australia.  Conversely, you can have a monarchy in all but name headed by
a "democratically" "elected" president; as in 1970s Uganda and present day
Zimbabwe.

In Europe, and their colonial successor states in North America and
Australia, the terms democracy and monarchy have long since lost any real
connection with the forms of government they originally described. A
Democracy has each and every citizen (not person mind you, but citizen)
actively engaged in public life, often with compulsion, and every citizen
votes on public matters.  The rub is that citizenship in a true Democracy
is limited to only those that can militarily defend the state, have
considerable property, and meet a host of other conditions that serve to
exclude most of the people normally resident in such societies.

A Monarchy is rule by one person, without the consent of the ruled.  The
idea of citizenship simply has no validity. Each and every person in the
dominion is the property of the Monarch.  Your life, quite literally, is
not your own.

Now, the extreme forms of Democracy or Monarchy have simply not endured in
Europe but the terms nonetheless survive in a much corrupted sense to
confuse modern political discourse.  Most, if not all, Western European
societies presently employ some form of representative government.

Whether it be called Congress, the National Assembly, Parliament, or the
Duma it is a republican form of government, obtaining its authority from
the consent of those governed and drawing its members from that same
group. None of them are democratic in the political sense implied by Mr.
Yokum's statement.  People are not compelled to serve as magistrates or as
representatives.  Every single citizen does not cast their vote on whether
to adopt the budget or not.  Democracy, in the present day sense of the
word, simply implies nearly universal suffrage and the right to select
ones political representatives without undue influence or duress.

   A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government.
   It can only exist until the voters discover that they can
   vote themselves largess from the public treasury...

   attributed to (among others) Alexander F. Tyler 18C

The problem with this statement is that it takes as given an extreme form
of Democracy as the political system under consideration.  Then it
implicitly incorporates the idea that all native born people are
automatically citizens in such a state, which is a notion that a 18C
inhabitant of England might agree with, or might not, depending on their
social status.  It is certainly not a notion that a 5C BC Athenian Hoplite
would countenance.  Finally there is the consideration that the entire
thing probably dates to no earlier than AD 2000 in a scurrilous e-mail
forming part of the U.S. presidential election campaign.

The unfortunate creature that the supposed Tyler envisages would indeed be
a poor thing, but such is unlikely to ever arise.  It is the nature of
societies to restrict access to power.  The type of mob rule that the
writer takes umbrage against could only have a brief existence, and that
only in consequence of some cataclysmic political event which shattered
the previous social order.  Something akin to the French Revolution or
American Civil War in fact, of which the writer was perhaps thinking when
he set down those words.

In practice, with rare exceptions, stable states do not devolve into
degenerate forms. What happens is that their populations simply adjust to
changing economic and social conditions and the government follows suit,
not the other way around.  The adjustment may be more or less painful for
some, England's ruling elites probably felt most keenly their nation's
loss of stature over the course of the 20C for instance. However, it can
hardly be claimed that citizens of most Western European states, Great
Britain included, are less well off today than those of 1920-1970.

-- 
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