America: A Republic or a Third World Democracy?

[Democles]

This is the third in a series of posts. The first two can be found here:

Were All Men Really Created Equal

Equality vs. Inequality

 

For an expanded version of this essay, refer to this page on Michael Spencer’s blog.

For the abbreviations used in the blog you can refer the Legend.

 

The FFs(Founding Fathers) had studied the Roman Republic well. (E.g. Cato was an inspiration for the American Revolution, and many amongst FFs, foremost Washington, were his admirers.) Yet, even while they hated democracy, condemned monarchy and aristocracy, and eulogized republicanism which they endeavored to achieve, the demarcation between a republic and majoritarian democracy was not drawn properly. Their inability to do so is seen in Jefferson’s party which is variously called as The Republican Party, The Democratic Party and most popularly, The Democratic-Republican Party! (I met many Americans on the net who beat their chest, “ours is not a democracy but a republic”.) This line of demarcation has not been drawn even today. Another thing to be noted is that it is very difficult to draw this line – not a simple matter. It needs work to be done on a lot of complicated items, several of them dealt with in my writing. (That demarcation consists of whether majority is allowed to violate individual’s rights or no, to what extent government intervenes in the realm of ideas, in the economy, etc. One of the important points to achieve a Republic has been mentioned previously as enumerating the do’s and the well-known evils as don’ts for a government with a provision of adding to the latter list as society goes on developing; other points are developed ahead.)

This misunderstanding about the American political system being totally different and moreover far superior to democracies and decadent monarchies of Europe is quite strongly established in American minds, so I will clarify it a bit more here. One explanation about American system is that it is a representative democracy, not a democracy of unlimited majority rule. But all said and done, it still works on the basis of majority opinion – The interpretation of majority in a democracy is somewhat fluid and varies between democracies, as per time, etc; following is meant to give idea about it, the exact definition should be in the statute books of each democracy. In a democracy, a majority is not 51% as is ordinarily assumed; it is just 50% plus one extra vote and not 1%. But even 50% + 1 has to be qualified. For example an elected representative does not require 50% + 1 votes on the voter-list, but only of the votes polled, and that too has further complication – in America it is 50%+1 of the votes polled because of two-party system. In backward countries (like India for example) a representative gets elected at state and centre (federal) levels even with votes close to 20% of the votes polled because 10 to 20 candidates may contest in one constituency (several of them financed to pull away each others’ votes based on caste, religion, particular segment of the constituency, etc.) Whether 50% + 1 of the votes polled as in America, or maximum of the votes polled as in India (which can be a very low percentage of total votes for that constituency), this is known assimplemajority for that candidate. In the assembly of members (parliament, senate etc), more than half the members (50% + 1) of the forum form a simple majority and determines a ruling party / coalition; in America the president rules, so the description for an individual representative is nearer to him. (Most decisions that he makes are in conformance with the broad viewpoint of the majority that voted for him, which is how the majority opinion affects Americans.) Though a party may form a simple majority in an assembly, in backward countries that party may have obtained very less votes, many of its candidates being elected with around 20% of the votes polled.

Absolute majority applies mainly to assemblies, but the meaning varies; some call it as more than 67% (2/3) or 75% (3/4) or 80% (4/5) of members of the house, necessary to pass crucial laws, amend constitutions etc, which cannot be done with a simple majority. Some apply these percentages directly to the entire voter-list to whom important laws / amendments etc are directly presented for ratification. Yet note the point that even absolute majority may be less than 50% of the entire voter-list, depending on how it is defined and how it operates in that democracy. (In Greece, which is the most important example of what many Americans consider as democracy, they held a referendum for every issue, which was easily possible, each city being very small). Imagine that in backward countries, with the above small numbers they can take complete rule in their hands! America sits somewhere within these considerations, some ideas applying to the president as an individual representative, some others to the state and federal assemblies. The “Inverted America” described at the very beginning, including the huge shift towards dictatorship via continuous Executive Orders, has been achieved on the basis of this above described majority only.

And about Rule of Law as part of their Republic – If one gets laws changed with the help of this 50%+1 majority, then one gets a dual advantage while inflicting injustice and carrying out plutocracies – cheat, loot and still maintain a civilized face of rule of law. Then rogues perpetrate crimes but are seen as ‘unselfish’, law-abiding, looking after welfare of society etc, while honest people become ‘selfish’ usurpers. This is explained ahead in Part II as “Achieving Sainthood, Commission and Power by Charity, but at the cost of others”. (The example of this, seen just above, is that of Obama projecting himself as “unselfish servant of society” by usurping products of “those greedy selfish internet service providers” – but all politicians aspire to play this role in democracy). In more backward democracies the suppression of citizens carried out by obtaining 20-30% votes is unbelievable.

Checks and balances become meaningless when the law itself is legally twisted.

As far as wrong definitions / ideas that lead to such misunderstanding as the above are concerned, Americans may be nurturing the notion about democracy as the one which was practiced in ancient Greece – deciding issues based on number of raised hands. But such a democracy can never be practiced in most modern countries including the original thirteen colonies simply because of the large population and the distances involved. If anyone wanted to be as close to Greek democracy as is practicable, it would exactly be like US or India, a so-called representative democracy which ultimately (in the long run) yields results similar to a democracy of unlimited majority rule. A properly defined republic would not have allowed the US to reach today’s degenerated state.

One qualification should be made at this point – Greek democracy differed from modern democracies on one score that it was not universal franchise. Only “free men” were treated as citizens and allowed to vote, so it had some features common with British aristocracy. But even there, hegemony of quantity over quality and self-help of in-groups was seen; and though unlike Rome, democracy was not the exclusive factor that led to Greece’s fall, it did erode their strength and contribute to their fall.

To give actual examples of what is going on in the US in recent times post the New Deal, apart from the sub-article on “Inverted America”, ‘too big to fail’ plutocracies etc, very recently there was a controversy about G W Bush(43) having said that “the Constitution is just a goddamned piece of paper”, which was never fully clarified. There are statements attributed to him such as “There ought to be limits on freedom”; “I care what 51 percent people think about me” etc. The last one is ‘direct democracy’. Obama was charged with using the executive order too often in his first term to side-step the Congress, undermining Rule of Law, Checks and Balances, etc.

(I have not studied fully therefore I am not able to make a definitive statement, but I have a doubt that the US government’s massive surveillance of citizens’ private lives from behind the excuse of security, gathering data of private citizens under secret programs like PRISM without society knowing the program and its purpose, planning to severely punish whistle-blowers in the wiki-leaks and NSA-PRISM leak cases, are based on twisting the constitution / law as above. Anyway even if not these two instances, yet whatever is described in the paragraph just above (including “Inverted America”) is big enough to have caused uproar – but so very paralyzed is America due to democracy that there is hardly any effective opposition to the rulers.)

For more such essays, members are urged to visit Michael Spencer’s blog and provide their comments.

[Selene]

 Evening "avatar with a sword over your head," have you introduced yourself on OL and I just missed it?

                                                                                    

 

I brought my shears...

A...