Tag Archives: Democracy

Elections Matter

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Kurt Eichenwald has written a rather long piece regarding the upcoming election. He says that he has voted for Republicans as often as Democrats in the past, but he forcefully argues that the Republicans must be defeated in 2012:

“In the last four years, the GOP has transmogrified into something ugly and vicious and, more important, something wedded to the politics of fantasy and ignorance. It has rushed so far from its moorings that I cannot conceive of voting for members of this party until, hopefully, they pull themselves back from the precipice of self-destruction, paranoia and delusion.”

Eichenwald cites five reasons why the Republicans deserve to suffer a crippling defeat, although the reasons boil down to four: they are liars; they are demagogues; they are economic arsonists; and they are threatening American democracy (e.g. through attempts at vote suppression).

The country might eventually recover from a Republican victory in November, but it’s more likely that President Romney and Vice President Ryan would do lasting damage.

http://kurteichenwald.com/2012/09/the-five-reasons-why-romneyryan-must-be-defeated-in-2012-and-why-conservatives-should-hope-they-are/

Religious Fundamentalism, Non-Muslim Style

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From The Party Is Over: How Republicans Went Crazy, Democrats Became Useless and the Middle Class Got Shafted by Mike Lofgren (former Republican Congressional staff member):

“Having observed politics up close and personal for most of my adult lifetime, I have come to the conclusion that the rise of politicized religious fundamentalism may have been the key ingredient in the transformation of the Republican Party. Politicized religion provides a substrate of beliefs that rationalizes—at least in the minds of its followers—all three of the GOP’s main tenets: wealth worship, war worship, and the permanent culture war.”

http://www.salon.com/2012/08/05/republicans_slouching_toward_theocracy/

It’s clear that the Democrats are often ineffective, but I‘d argue that they aren’t useless if they sometimes stop the Republicans from doing crazy things. 

In similar fashion, Avram Burg (former speaker of the Israeli parliament) argues that religious fundamentalism is destroying Israel’s democracy:

“The winds of isolation and narrowness are blowing through Israel. Rude and arrogant power brokers, some of whom hold senior positions in government, exclude non-Jews from Israeli public spaces. Graffiti in the streets demonstrates their hidden dreams: a pure Israel with ‘no Arabs’ and ‘no gentiles’. They do not notice what their exclusionary ideas are doing to Israel, to Judaism and to Jews in the diaspora. In the absence of a binding constitution, Israel has no real protection for its minorities or for their freedom of worship and expression.

If this trend continues, all vestiges of democracy will one day disappear, and Israel will become just another Middle Eastern theocracy. It will not be possible to define Israel as a democracy when a Jewish minority rules over a Palestinian majority between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea — controlling millions of people without political rights or basic legal standing.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/05/opinion/sunday/israels-fading-democracy.html?pagewanted=2&ref=opinion

The Masses

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From Thinking the Twentieth Century by Tony Judt:

“Mass democracy in an age of mass media means that on the one hand, you can reveal very quickly that Bush stole the 2000 election, but on the other hand, much of the population doesn’t care.”

Or agree. And thinks it was all for the best.

Judt argues that it would have been more difficult for the Republicans to steal the election in an era of limited suffrage, because the people eligible to participate in the election would have cared more about the outcome. He doesn’t think that this is an argument for limited democracy, but rather for democracy in which the rule of law and the separation of powers have key roles.

All of which we had in 2000, of course. Even in a mass democracy, an individual or a small group (like the Congress or Supreme Court) almost always get to decide. The nine people on the Supreme Court cared a lot about the outcome of the 2000 election. Five of them cared too much.