Sower at Sunset Van Gogh
The first step to tyranny is a logical and precise demonstration that democracy does not work.
We are viewing such a demonstration right now if the debt ceiling talks cannot come to agreement. The failure of the elected representatives is a stigma that will remain with our system for some time and lead to politics of "being above parties" which was common after World War I. There is no need for parties and for voting if the Government cannot govern.
We had another occasion of failure of democracy: the Civil War.
The people and their elected representatives could not come to any accord on slavery, and they did the unthinkable, causing widespread devastation and death. The Civil War was fought between "Preserving the Union" and "The Right of States to Leave", not between democracy and any another ideal.
Democracy had failed, and it was left to "Preserve the Union" and "Secession" to fight it out.
We seem to remember it, though, as a great moment in democracy.
I tend to doubt it. If democracy gains any credit, it was what happened after to resolve the schisms and differences and injustices remaining, some of which took more than 100 years to remedy.
A failure of democracy is not the lesson we should be teaching. If we do, we shall find we have sowed the wind with the seeds of tyranny.
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2 comments:
You’re pointing to an important truth here. My own view has long been that democracy recurs when during a cultural cycle certain conditions come to be—thus a very large majority arises with much the same view of things. Consensus. That consensus must be present first; democracy is a manifestation of it (in the same sense as you call moral weakness a manifestation). First a large yeomanry, then a middle class, the humble kind. This recurs at intervals but then also it invariably disappears. We therefore have periods of democracy, but for the overwhelming duration of history, authoritarian forms of rule prevail. Not all authoritarian forms are tyrannies; those are just the worst; I’d view direct democracy the worst form of democracy, republics the more benign kind.
I think that is exactly it, and I never really thought about it until I wrote it down. Democracy was sort of a general covering concept that colored everything that happened in the USA.
A democracy which does not function is only a "democracy" as long as our memories recall it as such.
Then, thinking further about it, direct democracy is "tyranny of the many", which explains why it may be the worst form.
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