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The Paradox of Elections in Democracy

A democracy is nothing more than mob rule, where fifty-one percent of the people may take away the rights of the other forty-nine.

Thomas Jefferson

I’ve seen plenty of posters identifying our American system with the Athenian’s democracy. When defining democracy, or what type of government we have, people tend to get a little confused.

For example, people think that voting makes a country a democracy, when in fact voting was considered undemocratic in the ancient world, as it is considered “mob rule,” or ochlocracy, which is the opposite of democracy. Rather, voting is characteristic of a republic.

In Athens, rather than elections, every eligable candidate put his name in an urn, from which one was selected. It was the Romans who had elections for important public offices, and theirs were notoriously stacked. Elections there were held once a year, so that people from the countryside, large estates mostly owned by the senatus turned nobilitas , and manned by slaves, or farmers who rarely came in, even though their vote comprised the largest percentage of the comitia. Citizens of the city, although numbering about one million, had less representative votes. The 51 states are divided unevenly in the senate, like the comitia. Contrary to popular belief the United States was not founded to be a democracy, but a republic.

An Athenian urn

An Athenian urn

“In ancient democracy, as now, wealth made a difference to elections; people without money or family connections almost never won elective office in Athens. Because the Athenians wanted to curb the power of wealth, they severely restricted the powers of those who held elected office. So the representative bodies in Athens were filled not by elections, but by a lottery that drew from a large panel of citizens who had met certain conditions, and were drawn equally from the ten tribes (Paul Woodruff. First Democracy: The Challenge of an Ancient Idea. Oxford UP: New York, 2005.).”

In their “Cycle of Governmental Decay,” Polybius, like his amicus, the great republican statesman Cicero, defines a republic as a mixed constitutional system. Composed of three parts, each part left to itself would decay into its opposite. Kingship into tyranny, oligarchy into aristocracy, and democracy into mob rule. Anarchy, or a power vacuuum, just leads to another king, and so the cycle continues…unless, at some fortuitious moment, it is formed into a republic.

In addition to as Plato, both men considered the republic to be the most evolved and ideal form of government – not democracy. Our government demonstrates the same agreement between the three branches of government as did the Magna Carta and our own constitution. Even in Athens, which we consider a top example of a democratic city (besides Rousseau’s mountaintop villages) a number of notable Greeks, including philosophers like Socrates, who disagreed with the Athenian system, proponed a republic as the more ideal system.

However, a republic has many enemies. Foremost, corruption. It is like decay, the anti-republic. Caused by money, corruption can be encouraged by ignorance in the voting populace. In a mixed-constitutional system, where the republic is for the people, by the people, ignorance among the people allows corruption into the republic, encouraging avarice into the senate, and can cause the republic to fall.

Even as our collective consciousness continues to evolve, we have hardly begun to comprehend our own systems.

“It is her spirit, customs and constitution that we are bound first to learn, both because she is the motherland of all of us, and because we must needs hold that wisdom as perfect went to the Establishment of her laws as to the acquisition of the vast might of her empire.” -Cicero, De Oratore, I. xliv. 196

Originally posted 2007-05-16 12:18:19. Republished by Old Post Promoter

What is the Fourth Estate?

Any with a voice to speak is a member of their government.” -Cicero

If you flip to the BBC, you can still find thriving radio programming: the like which has not existed in the US since TV first hit the airwaves. Taxpayer-supported media of Britain means that older forms of media – including newspapers – will continue to be supported. But with no such system in place in the U.S., what does the future hold for our Fourth Estate?

The Fifth Estate has always been clearly figured in the British collective conscious. Edmund Burke, who coined the term, was a British politician.

"Burke said that there were three Estates in Parliament, but in the Reporters Gallery yonder, there sat a fourth Estate more important far than they all."
This historical recognition, in England, of the press as a branch of the government led to the British Broadcasting Network, a nationalized media system.

In England, citizens support the BBC with a tax, and so the media is beholden to the taxpayers. American media is beholden not to the people, but to advertisers.

No doubt these taxpayers will continue to support England’s newspapers, as they supported the radio. Meanwhile in the U.S., while we had Burke’s quote, we also had advertisers paying the bills, and no one seemed inclined to nationalize the media system in the United States until it was on the verge of collapse.

We lacked the British conscious of this topic. The discussion of the fourth estate in Britain is so complex and vibrant it makes the writhings of our press look like children’s play. Is a similiar situation how the BBC started?

We could place the blame on our own media for not standing up to this system they griped under, but it seems unfair given their impending fate. Does the discussion include freedom of the press as the root of their “fiscal” independence? Perhaps the media feared a propaganda state, or lacked the momentum to create a nationwide movement of the press.Nonetheless, the American press did have an opportunity to move the nation away from advertising-funded media.

Having failed/by this fluke, the unique opportunity is created to have journalist citizenry in the United States, to have – in effect – a fourth estate. Actually, Steven D. Cooper calls bloggers the fifth estate. We’ll see if the fourth line of defense hold. Either way, if citizens of the world take to the streets with their camera phones and see it as their duty to report on local news, it would be a triumph for the press. We could be looking at an evolutionary phase in the media.

Originally posted 2007-12-05 22:31:42. Republished by Old Post Promoter

Hysteron Proteron

The current question for debate seems to be how to pull out of Iraq. With the Democrats poised to take control of the Senate, all parties race to be most innovative in their planning of what to do about state of affairs at home in the United States.

When the Democrats fail, a new question will arise. Poised in a tremulous state, querilous cries will rise in the face of the future, as people wonder what to do next and where to turn.

by ChiragpungaliyaNow is the future. Once the old system crumbles, we’ll need to project new models and systems of reality. We need to reanalyze our form of government – but most will try to look at the current state of affairs to project the future, rather than looking again to the past and seeing where our own model deviated from the ideal.

As the Greek Sophist Gorgias said, “If everyone had recollection of the past, knowledge of the present, and foreknowledge of the future, the power of speech would not be so great.

“But as it is, when men can neither remember the past nor observe the present nor prophesy the future, deception is easy; so that most men offer opinion as advice to the soul. But opinion, being unreliable, involves those who accept it in qually uncertain fortunes.”

Originally posted 2007-01-07 09:21:51. Republished by Old Post Promoter