The Flaws of Democracy - Part 1
- and the alternatives
Our generation has been indoctrinated and convinced beyond any doubt that it is “democracy” or bust. This has in turn allowed modern day tyrants to assume a so-called “democratic mandate” to oppress, torment, ridicule and repress we the people.
The Jeffersonian democracy that was revealed to the world with the birth of the American nation in the late 18th century represented the high-point, the pinnacle of the democratic ideal. And I do not wish in this essay, to take anything away from those miraculous few years of the founding of the American Republic and the beauty and majesty of the founding documents that were produced by (often self-taught) frontiersmen of the new nation. Indeed, I paid tribute to those miraculous years in an earlier essay.
Jefferson and the founders assumed that there could always be a movement upward of an ever more refined, more principled, more participatory and more compassionate system of government - or, as they said in the preamble, a continuous improvement “to form a more perfect union.”
But Jeffersonian democracy was conceived and spawned in a nation where what I have called the “Christian consensus” prevailed and ruled supreme. By Christian consensus, I do not mean that everyone in the early days of the Republic went to Church or even that everyone believed in God - but undoubtedly, even secular historians will agree that public life and morals in that time were guided and directed by the Christian consensus.
I do not believe the founders of the Republic could have foreseen the descent to pagan Rome (or pagan Greece) that now constitutes Western civilization. The tragic march downward of the Western decades and centuries in the last two hundred and fifty years have proved beyond any doubt, I believe, that Jeffersonian democracy has outlived its time and has been manipulated and twisted beyond recognition.
The election of President Trump was hailed as a triumph of democracy - and to the degree that it show cased the people rising up to try and take back control, it was. And I am still full of hope for the Trump Presidency and the chance it has given America to come back to its Christian roots.
But the Trump Presidency is already being stifled by judges who have flouted and intentionally abandoned the separation of powers that Jeffersonian democracy had assumed for the Republic. The suggestion has therefore been made, that President Trump should ignore the courts and go “full steam ahead, damn the torpedoes.” Or, in other words, rule like a dictator.
And what if the mid-term elections brings a Democratic party house and senate to power? Or the next Presidential election brings in another Biden-like figure? Would the people of the United States have spoken? Or would Jeffersonian democracy have failed the American people?
I wrote a poem several years ago, about the flaws of democracy, which was published in my first book of poems. Here are some of the flaws I pointed out (and my readers will no doubt think of many more). Excerpts from my poem:
You say that every vote that is cast
by every human being that walks
up to vote, has a voice of its own
talks in its own unique way, a cry upon the vast
and craggy shore, of the human lot -
And I say what about the vote
clutched close to breast
and cast with ALL her heart
And against this, two, three, ten
perhaps a thousand
or ten thousand
cast by those
who thought no more
than this -
that it was their duty
to vote?
If the scales of justice should swing
how many votes will it have swinging wild
upon the scales for her? And the filed results
Will they reflect Truth? Bring her remedy
against votes cast half in doubt?
If a thousand should vote
one way, and one thousand and one
another, the will of the latter
is taken to be the “will of the people.”
And this though the thousand
cast their vote with feeling
and heart
and soul.
And do you believe
the will of the people is changeless
as the stars, or even
as the daisy bud that from
promise to splendour lives out
her given day?
But do you see how the fickle reed of opinion
(not Truth mind, but opinion)
can sway with every wind
of oratorial rhetoric until
primed like snowman
on voting day
the vote is cast
and the white garment melts?
Sir Winston Churchill’s was probably (naively) contemplating the many flaws of democracy when he wrote, “indeed it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.”
To which, Mahatma Gandhi would no doubt reply as he did in 1942, “what difference does it make to the dead, the orphans and the homeless whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or the holy name of liberty or democracy?”
And now I must ask the inevitable question - are there better ideas for humanity? What about a benevolent dictatorship? Or a Godly Monarch or Tsar? What do you my readers think?
I look forward to writing Part-2 of my essay - and to your comments.
Democratic Republic was the concept. Not Democracy tyranny of the masses.
Submission to God’s divine order is the only hope.
John Adams said, “Our constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”
Loved your thoughts, and the use of poetry for reflection. (That is how those who spoke for God (נביימ, προφεται) formed their speech to the people.)
Their God is preparing a government of men and women, who have proven pure and reliable and trustworthy to reconcile and lead the nations to life. Sons (i.e. heirs) of God they will be called, men and women of all peoples and tribes and ages together with the Beloved One who is the Son of Man, the Anointed, to create with them new heavens and earth, freedom and justice and welfare and peace, by the might of a good God, Father of the Ages, all things present, past, and future.