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"See My Blog Entries for my Top 500 Most Important USA Cities"
(set 8 days ago)
Location: Harrisburg, PA
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Democracy is the best form of government. But it does have limitations:
1. Biggest one: elections could be held in an unfair manner, or have the appearance of unfairness. How can this be prevented, and what is the recourse for unfairness?
2. Uneducated, uninformed voters
3. Lack of voter participation. Take an extreme example: what if only one person voted, would you want that to be the outcome?
4. Currently as a voter there is no way to verify your vote was accurately recorded, accepted, and included in the total
5. No way to ensure all voters were legal, and could include illegal votes (non-citizen, underage, deceased, multiple votes)
6. Another big one: Democracy is a slow process, elections are held every so many years, therefore it will be a long time to correct mistakes, even if the majority of the population changed their mind shortly after an election.
7. What is the correct manner: electoral college, giant pool of candidates where top winner takes all, or bracket-style election where 1 round is held and then the top 2 are a second election
8. What constitutes a legal election? Could a rouge leader hold a snap election, or postpone an election due to some manufactured crises?
All that being said, I think democracy does have its many strong points, which I am not going to list all of them. Importantly democracy allows citizens an indirect say, no matter how small, in the selection of their representatives. This is in contrast to dictatorships or authoritarian governments which do not allow their citizens this right or privilege. Citizens in those countries seem almost powerless to change the course of their country's future. For example, if you lived in China, in order to make a difference I believe you would have to be selected by the ruling
Chinese Communist party, which probably is completely biased in who they select and maintain in power. However, in a democracy, since elections are held every so many years, voters have the freedom to vote out unsatisfactory leaders. I truly believe democracy is what makes the USA and many other countries so great, and I would never want to lose this right/privilege to vote ever.
Location: By the sea, by the sea, by the beautiful sea
68,329 posts, read 54,373,658 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by c charlie
Well, Socrates didn't support democracy.He thought leaders should be trained. If you haven't done so, I recommend reading" The Republic". It's in the public domain ,so will be available free online
Winston Churchill said the "best argument against democracy is to spend 10 minutes speaking with the average voter'
He also said "Our system of government is the worst in the world, except for all the others" .
I agree with both statements. I'd add a corollary; a strong argument against democracy is to have a good look at the assortment of incompetents, crooks, drongos, mentally challenged and nut jobs who continue to get elected everywhere there are honest-ish elections.
What's even more alarming is that I'm becoming convinced that a country truly does get the government it deserves. As proof of this claim I invite you to have a look at the incumbent showers in the US, UK and Australian political administrations.
Our system of government is not a democracy so there's that.
Our representative republic would be just fine if we were not so eager to label the other as evil.
When did compromise become a bad thing to do?
The opinions of our citizens go from far right to far left.
Nobody will ever get what they want. Finding middle ground that we can all live with is important. Too bad most would poison the well when their team does not win.
This is really a politics issue at heart although psychology and politics are totally intertwined. [Moderator note: thread moved to P&OC.]
I work with a guy in his 50's that grew up in Red China, was a student at the time of the Tienanmen square incident. He has been a US citizen for 25 years, and has some interesting views on this topic.
The China view is that ultimately democracy does not work. The mindset is that stability lies in granting power to a "strong leader". Never question authority. When you look at thousands of years of history of China you can see why they have this mindset.
Um, China is just recently emerging from centuries of abuse, failure and woefully under-performing their abilities.
The "one strong leader" model works great. Not being sarcastic. However, then you get a bad one. A brutal one with grand ideas like Mao for example and they can set you back a century.
Imagine our own country right now under their model.
Here's the issue. Like no other place on the planet the USA has a different system that was supposed to address these issues. It's called STATE'S RIGHTS. That means every state can have different laws that appeal to people. Those people then were supposed to move to those states. What it has become though is something entirely different where the people want to move to a different state then make it exactly like the one they left. For some reason people today, especially the younger generations don't think State's Rights are important. They'd rather have a pure Democracy where everything is ruled from the top down in a uniform fashion making every state the exact same. That way the "mob" of moochers who were promised money from the Treasury will get to pick the leaders who will then give them their free stuff. That's when the Republic is lost and we have approached that tipping point. Just listen to all the Left Wing politicians promising free stuff. THEY want mob rule because it keeps them in office to retain their power and keep getting richer and more powerful.
Other posters and myself were talking about democracy and there was nothing about Trump or white guys until there was you.
I agree the rich and the corporations play the democracy like a fiddle and who is going to stop them? Surely will not be the ignorant unwashed masses or the leaders they elect.
Other posters and myself were talking about democracy and there was nothing about Trump or white guys until there was you.
And I didn't get into those details until you asked for 'em.
You know - a political forum and all that.
Quote:
I agree the rich and the corporations play the democracy like a fiddle and who is going to stop them? Surely will not be the ignorant unwashed masses or the leaders they elect.
Educated, involved masses could stop them.
And that's exactly why the corporatist right leads their hate radio/Fox News followers to see education, public schools and colleges as evil bastions of socialist degeneracy.
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The older I get the more I feel democracy does not work
I'm happy to give you some splainin' Swing...
