Democracy viewed as archaic and obsolete

@CountPeter

Sorry, I'm hitting the hey for tonight. I'll make sure to write a response tomorrow morning or when you're probably still sleeping since time zones and all. I am enjoying our discussion and I wish you well. Your points are rather interesting to me and make me think of things I've never thought of before.

See you later ;)
Thanks, and likewise :) I might suggest we take this to the radical left thread however as in hindsight we have somewhat derailed this thread :L
 
In other derailments...

The Founders despised democracy as it lead to tyranny of the many against the few.They were well educated men who read the works of the Greeks and Romans and saw the danger of democracy as a governing principle. That is why they based our country on a group of free states where no matter how small those free states were they would have a voice. That begot the Electoral College. No small free state would join in a union of states where the larger states could run rough shod over them by size of population.That is the reason I state that democracy has already been a proven failure and antiqued idea for governing.

Basically what you have here is a No True Scotsman pseudo-definition of "democracy" designed to both polemically attack it and also define it as a pointlessly limited and impractical thing, when in reality any reasonable person can see that a very large democratic element has been incorporated into the newfangled types of republics of the liberal-industrial age. Would you seriously claim the town meetings of New England were not democratic?

Yes, indeed, a great many of the more well off and socially dominant people we call the Founders of the USA were nervous about having too much democracy. (Others however spoke very highly of having more of it. Perhaps you might dismiss such a provocative speaker on its behalf as say Thomas Jefferson as hypocritical, maybe. But consider such figures as Sam Adams, and then repeat that the Founders despised democracy to a man).

But you are quite off base to suggest they regarded it as an unmitigated evil. Bailyn's Ideological Sources of the American Revolution discusses many relevant points here, such as the fact that the conventional wisdom about what made the "British constitution" so strong commonplace among the colonial leaders long before they became revolutionaries included the Commons as a vital democratic element, serving a function in mutually checking and assisting the virtues of the aristocratic and monarchial elements; until the colonial elites who became Patriots lost all faith in Britain it was an article of faith among themselves (and many people of their classes and higher and lower too, back in Britain) that the democratic element was as essential to the realm's political vitality and balance as the others. And then they made their revolution, having concluded that Britain was degenerating into tyranny and would have dragged them down into servitude in the declining system, and found they had totally failed to provide themselves with either a monarch or aristocrats and had nothing to fall back on but democracy. And by golly, they never did get around to developing a formal aristocracy, nor have many Americans simply rolled over and accepted the idea that society properly requires that most of us kowtow to some bunch of people who are for some mystical and irrational reason deemed "better" somehow.

I suppose you could make the case we do fawn and kowtow and pragmatically, no matter what our feelings in the matter may be, obey people who own a lot more wealth than we do. But I do think that the failure of society to provide much of an apologetic for that, and the large number of people who would bridle at the suggestion that is what they are doing, indicates unintegrated values and does not stand as final proof either that aristocracy is vital to good government and society or that the American republic is not still fundamentally democratic. We may be a democracy in the process of final failure, and perhaps final, irretrievable failure happened a while back though I think such a diagnosis is premature. We're not quite dead yet.

When Lincoln spoke at Gettysburg of "government of the people, by the people, for the people" what better label could you give either what he was saying or the realities he was alluding to than "democracy?" That it has republican complexities does not make it undemocratic, and that you happen to think democracy is some kind of evil does not make you correct.

Your hoary old Great Compromise lesson, as though we've never heard of that apparently, is particularly off base. The fact is, while this armchair red herring "small states versus large" bugaboo was indeed much talked of, in reality in the subsequent political history of the USA, no major controversy or issue or politically salient movement ever revolved around large states oppressing small ones. In all the political divisions or tumults that the USA has been through, you'd find that the mix of states leaning one way or the other in each was a pretty eclectic and balanced mix of large states and small states.

Tell me, if your definition of democracy is so narrow it excludes not just the USA as a whole but such deeply democratic components of it as say Massachusetts or 19th century Wyoming (the first state to enfranchise women) who exactly are the people you think tried democracy and failed with it, to prove democracy is impossible and bad? If the USA does not count, if say the modern French 5th Republic does not count, if Australia does not count and neither does say Sweden or Denmark, who and where and when were these failed democrats?
 
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