Why Democracy is Overrated, Fuels War and Empowers the Bigoted and Backward
Why Democracy is Overrated, Fuels War and Empowers the Bigoted and Backward
By
David Gottfried
As Russia and Ukraine do battle, the Western media incessantly tells us that Russia is bad because it is undemocratic and that Ukraine is good because it is, allegedly, democratic. This essay will not assess the merits and demerits of the Russian and Ukrainian positions. I have done that in prior essays. I will now simply explain why democracy is not cut out to be the great geopolitical savior that its slavish adherents say it is and that, consequently, even if Putin is hostile to democracy that is no reason to deprecate Russia’s position.
Reason 1:
Democracy often means that the will of the majority prevails, but the will of the majority usually means the will of the mendacious and mediocre and the mendacious and mediocre majority is routinely bigoted and discriminatory.
In Tsarist Russia, the dumb and backward majority believed that the Jews used the blood of Christian children to make Matzah and the people routinely engaged in pogroms, or riots, in which they destroyed homes and synagogues and killed and raped Jews.
The majority in the United States were quite content to see the great mass of African Americans suffer persecution and poverty.
Throughout the world, people routinely persecute homosexuals for sport. It is considered great fun to harass, beat, bloody and kill “homos."
Democracy is far from ideal because the boorish, vulgar mob has no business lacerating the bodies and psyches of the outcasts de jour.
Reason Two:
The Very Best Aspects of the American Political System consist of our Repudiation of Democracy.
The 14th Amendment to the US constitution provides that equal protection of the laws shall be afforded to all people regardless of their race. This provision is majestically undemocratic: It provides that even if the majority of people wanted to deprive blacks of their rights, they should not be able to do it.
Likewise, the 1st amendment to the constitution provides that Congress shall not impair our freedom of speech or of assembly or of religion. This means that even if the tyrannous majority wanted us all to subscribe to the Protestant faith, such an edict would be null and void. This means even if the monstrous majority compelled Congress to enact a statute outlawing any discussion of homosexuality, socialism or vegetarianism, such a statute would contravene the liberatingly anti-Democratic constitution.
Reason 3:
When people believe that their county is democratic, they believe that they own their country. When they believe that they own their country, they tend to love their country and to despise any country that dares to offend their country. And the slaughters of the world reached unprecedented heights after the advent of democracy
Before the French Revolution, in the bad old days of the “ancien regime” when crowned and bejeweled monarchs glowered atop their garish thrones, people, by and large, did not see their nation as something that belonged to them. The country belonged to the king. Ergo, I suspect that love of country probably was much less intense.
(Besides, it wasn’t clear where loyalties belonged as loyalty to the king competed with loyalty to local feudal lords, to the Church, or to the village which was so much more visible in days of yore when neither a modern press nor an electronic media could weld together a polity spread over hundreds of miles. Also, in the days of monarchs, which of course preceded by many years psychology and psychoanalysis, people had not yet learned that their deficiencies may have been caused by their parents and much more loyalty was bestowed upon one’s parents rather than the government.)
Finally, although wars were frequent in the baroque era, they did not encompass the enthusiasm of the great mass of the citizenry because, as I said, the citizens cared less for the state as the state, in pre democratic times, was something that belonged to the King, not to them. Also, although the wars may have been frequent, they were often quickly ended though royal marriages. For example, France and Austria were often competitive and sometimes mutually antagonistic states because they both envisioned themselves the first daughter of the Catholic Church. Marriages between French and Austrian monarchs were used to nip war in the bud. Arguably, if Queen Victoria had been alive in 1914, World War One would not have happened. Since all of the royal courts of Europe were related to Queen Victoria, she, or her emissaries, or the familial linkages and unity she represented, may have been able to quash the outbreak of the unprecedented carnage.
Of course, some very aggressive and belligerent states were not the least bit democratic, e.g., Germany. However, the aggressiveness of Germany was fueled by the rising tide of nationalism and aggressiveness in France, which sparked German aggressiveness which, of course, soon by far surpassed France in belligerence and the drive to start war.
More specifically, the French Revolution made the French people see France as something which belonged to them and not to the Bourbon dynasty. This made the French relatively enthusiastic fighters in the Napoleonic Wars. Napolean’s military prowess stunned and overwhelmed Germany and galvanized German nationalism, militarism and desire for vengeance.
Indeed, in around 1812, when Napolean was vanquished, Fichte wrote “Reden A Deutsche Volk,” or his “Address to the German people.” In large measure, it was a hyper patriotic German rant advocating the augmentation of German unity and power. As I recall, some of the ideas seemed exceptionally far-fetched as well as eerily descriptive of trends in German thought more than one hundred years later.
For example, Fichte said that Germany was a superior nation because it possessed a superior language. He said that German was a superior language because it was derived from German and only German. Inferior languages, according to Fichte, were languages which were a hybrid of other tongues, such as English, which according to Fichte was an inferior language because it was not a pure language but was instead a tongue brought about by the fusion of Latin with German. Fichte’s idea that linguistic purity made a nation better is very much in accord with the Hitlerian idea that “Racial purity” made a nation better.
Reason 4:
The great mass of people is too ignorant of the problems of the day to make any worthwhile contributions to the political discourse.
This contention, obviously, offends our tender and sensitive sentiments regarding the worth of the people, of the common people, and of all those other undefinable, inchoate, gauzy touchy-feely things that make our political discourse resemble a stereotypical old woman famous for her prodigal feats of weeping.
However, one does not do good simply by wanting to do good. And just as we must dismiss the pleas of a five-year-old who does not want a penicillin shot even though he has a strep throat and a fever of 105, we must not take seriously the blabbering of an oafish fishwife, who spends her days watching reality programs and Fox News, when that fishwife has decided to orate on politics.
Just as many five years olds don’t know what microbes and antibiotics are, many fat American dullards do not know anything about a) the mutual antipathy between Iran and Iraq and hence did not realize that Bush’s demolition of Iraqi power led to the inexorable augmentation of Iranian power which, according to America, is the major threat to America in the Gulf and the Mideast today and b) don’t know anything about the relationship between budget deficits, inflation, deflation, interest rates and the money supply and, consequently, will vote for the candidate with the slickest slogans and the folksiest means of talking about the economy.
Indeed, the American people are so ignorant of political problems and how they developed that they are not even aware of their own, personal about-faces on the issues. In this regard, consider budget deficits, the tea party movement and Trump supporters.
During the Obama years, the tea party supporters railed at Obama for allegedly huge budget deficits.
The tea party supporters, by and large, became Trump supporters. As Trump supporters, they forgot all about the budget deficit even though Trump made the budget deficit much, much larger.
This proves that they have absolutely no idea what they are talking about.