[Side note / example: just as the Pro-Choice and Pro-Life movements picked names that are themselves (the names) primarily rhetorical and reasonably misleading and manipulative,* the Democratic Party and the Republican Party might as well be called the American Party and the United States Party for all their names do to distinguish meaningfully between them.**]
[I'm going to color-code this next sentence in an attempt to make it easier to skip the side notes if you don't like 'em...I'd love to have footnotes within footnotes like DFW (not Dallas–Fort Worth), but Blogger ain't having none of it.]
A democracy is a state in which the power [interestingly enough, kratos descends from a word meaning hard,*** and its cousins include standard, careen, and cancer,**** gotta be some kind of poetic sense in there somewhere] is in the hands not of the wealthy (those who "overflow") [pluto-], the nobility (those who're put together the best, more or less) [aristo-], GOD (with, of course, a sacerdotal élite there to interpret for Him) [theo- again], or fæces [cacocracy...just made it up because I'm seven years old—but the good news is we all just learned that the caco- in cacophony actually does come from cacadoody!], but rather the people (those comprised by [by which I mean those who make up, are the parts of—look it up] society*****) [demo-,****** line over the e].
[That was stupid. Never again. There's gotta be a better way...]
OK, so plenty of people have talked about how democracy seems to have come to refer not to a system of government but to a set of values not even particularly centered around the concept of power in the hands of the people—for example, everyone in this country seems to want democracy to spread across the globe, and yet I think very few would agree that it's acceptable for the people of Iraq to decide that America is their arch-enemy now or anything like that (just as polls, I've heard, often show that Americans agree with the Bill of Rights if they know it's the Bill of Rights but tend to disapprove strongly if it's rephrased)—such that the cynics among us might begin to suspect that democracy is a word meaning "the American way" rather than itself being the American way (democracy is American rather than the other way around)—such that what instead of being the benevolent spreaders of a helpful ideal, we're, whoops, maybe kind of an empire all of a sudden...?
But so, OK, what is democracy? I mean, what's the point? Why democracy, I guess is what I'm trying to say. Why democracy? As the Troubled Young Knight argues in L'Attaque des clones,******* a democracy is slow and inefficient, and sometimes a firm confident hand would be at least more effective (just as the Dark Side is flashier and easier, such that it might seem to be more powerful, too, better, superior...), so why are we so hot on it? Is it that we think the people will make better decisions than an autocrat [autos = self, if you're interested]? Any autocrat? Really? The most brilliant and ethical person in the world, give that person control of all world decisions, you don't think we might be better off? O-or what if we give that power to you? You'd surely do a better job, wouldn't you?
Almost done, here.
My feeling about democracy goes a little something like this [hit it!]:
- indispensable
- infuriating
I don't believe that the people make good decisions. My father once told me (and then told me again and again and again) that "normal people have an IQ of 100 and vote for Ronald Reagan." The sort of thing that you might think would lead people to rebel against authority often seems to lead them instead into the open arms of Fascists (see Escape from Freedom). And, frankly, if God knocked on my door and said, "Hey, you know that election coming up in November? McCain or Obama, your call," I would not tell him to fuck off and let the American people decide—I don't think I'd even have to think too hard about it—because I am quite confident that McCain will be terrible for America and Obama will be good for America, and if the American people disagree, then fuck 'em. Democracy is unfriendly to civil rights—in fact, one of the main functions of our Constitution, arguably, is to limit the power of the people. Pure democracy generally ought to mean minorities get crushed or, at best, ignored. If it had been put up to a vote, the Civil Rights movement wouldn't have gotten very far.
So? Why indispensable?
I always think of that line about our judicial system, the explanation for "innocent until proven guilty" that someone gave (ah, Blackstone, it turns out), which I remember as: "Better to let 10 guilty men go free than to, you know, throw some innocent dude in jail or something." [Fine, follow the Blackstone link.] My feeling is that it is better to let the people make shitty decisions than to allow them to be oppressed. Incidentally, that's why my support for democracy is actually ultimately consistent with my skepticism about it: democracy is necessary because of the importance of human rights, so wherever democracy is in opposition to human rights, intervention is a must.
Just came up with that right now. Huh. What do you think?
I'll be goddamned if I'm going to proofread all this.
* Pro-Lifers are not opposed to choice per se; Pro-Choicers are not in favor of death.
** The -public in republic means just about what you'd think it means: basically a republic is a state in which power is held by the people, which definition you might remember when I hit you with the meaning of democracy below. Er, above.
*** Phallogocentrism, anyone?
**** Also eukaryote!—which it turns out is eu- [which itself means good if you go way back, and—yikes—is a great-great-uncle to swastika, gahhhh (pulls nervously at collar)] + karuotos [line over the second O], meaning "having nuts," HAW!
***** Compare to Hitler and friends, who (as Umberto Eco points out in an old article in The New York Review of Books that I can't link to) love to speak for the people and specifically argue that a single representative of the people, really (magically?) speaking in or as their voice, is a much better way for their will to be realized than some actual democracy or republic, which of course is bound to be all messy [see next footnote].
****** Damn, the Indo keeps hitting me with these nasty revelations: first swastika comes from good [see above], now the demo- in democracy turns out to be a cousin to the demo- in demon, which suggests that a good capital for a democracy would be Pandæmonium...which itself, once you lose the demon part and slide back down to what the word means now, is actually more or less accurate and speaks to what I'm ultimately (I hope) going to make my slow circuitous way around to...
******* which I saw about 100 times when it came out in Paris, even though it was bad, because I was lonely, OK??—and also brainwashed as a child... And while we're down here in Footnote Land, let me note too that what the T.Y.K. has to say (coming up, above) is pretty much exactly Hitler's point (as mentioned a few footnotes above)...also the Bush Republicans' point, and Kissinger's (probably), about why the president doesn't need Congress's permission to go to war.
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