The Hindu | A simple bicycle and the complex practice of democracy The Hindu What is democracy? Abraham Lincoln's phrase that it is political rule of the people, by the people, for the people is surely a clich. But is it also a good description of democracy? Is it weightier than what we have come to suppose and ... |
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A simple bicycle and the complex practice of democracy - The Hindu
In the 2016 presidential election the Democrats never used the word republic to describe the political system and Republicans rarely used it, both preferring to use the word democracy. Most people ignorantly refer to the political system as a democracy and have to be reminded that this word is not in the Declaration of Independence, U.S. Constitution, Bill of Rights or any other document given by the Founding Fathers. The Pledge of Allegiance to the flag identifies the nations form of government as a republic.
Benjamin Franklin wrote in 1759, Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch. Liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote. A republic has seven major components.
First, the importance ofmajority rule is recognized but limited. Is the majority always right?No.Mother made this point when her teenager asked to smoke marijuana on the basis that everyone was doing it and said,If everyone jumped off a bridge would you?
Second,minority rights, registering less than 50 percent, are protected from the majority.In Franklins analogy, the lamb had the right to exist even if the majority, the wolves, said differently.A lynch mob is a democracy; everyone votes but the one being hanged.Even if caught in the act of a crime, the defendant is entitled to the protection of law, a judge, jury, witnesses for his defense and a lawyer to argue his innocence; all necessary but expensive.Later, if he is found guilty, he can be hanged.Because democracy only considers majority rule, it is much less expensive.A rope tossed over a tree limb will do.
Third, a republic isbased upon natural inalienable rightsfirst acknowledged in the Declaration of Independence.This document asserted to the world that the nation acknowledged that humans have rights from a source higher than mere man. A reference to deity is mentioned five times.If there is no God, there can be no inalienable rights coming from him, and we are left with man as God.What man is good enough?
Fourth, a republicemphasizes individual differences rather than absolute equality, as does democracy.We are not equal, even from the womb, and we never will be, if equality means sameness. One baby with a cleft palate needs three operations to live well and look normal.Some children come out of the womb with access to a laptop, others with a basketball or golf clubs.One of my first great insights in life was that everyone was better at everything than I was.The second great insight I made was that life is not fair and never will be.Free men are not equal, and equal men are not free.Genetics makes one fat, another bald and gives yet another terminal cancer in his youth.
Even economically, it is not possible to be equal.Should I give each of my students a million dollars in exchange for everything they now own, shave their heads and give them identical uniforms, that is should I approximate sameness as much as possible, before requiring that they returnin five yearswith some ledger of net worth. Would they be the same in what was left of the million?No.Why does the government try so hard to do that which is impossible?A republic looks upon peoples differences as assets decidedly not the base of democracy.
Fifth,limited governmentis also a major aspect of a republic.Centralized government is good, so long as the government remembers that when it oversteps its bounds it becomes the greatest obstacle to liberty because it pulls decision-making power away from the individual.Excessive government, as the cause of the American Revolution, is never forgotten.The Constitution as created to handcuff the government and prevent it from dominating the citizens lives, thus the powers of the federal government were listed in Article I, Section 8. The Founders understood that the more government at the top, the less at the bottom, and that was the essence of freedom.
Sixth,a republic has frequent elections with options. Frequent elections happen in some socialist countries, so this action alone does not ensure liberty.In fact, it may be somewhat deceiving as it fosters the notion that we choose and thus deserve the elected officers.It also assumes that the people are correctly informed, which assumes a free press and equal access to all information.The part of the phrase with options is the part that ensures liberty.Elections under socialism provide choices but offer no options, as all the participants are from the same party.
Seventh, a healthyfear of the emotions of the massesand of its potential to destabilize natural law upon which a republics freedom is based; as for example, the notion that someone elses wealth belonged to the masses destroyed freedom in Athens and Rome. The U.S. needs a caring, sensitive, compassionate government, but emotion must not be allowed to overwhelm reason and time-tested natural law constants.Aristotle taught that the poor will always envy the rich, and that the rich will always have contempt for the poor.A republic will not allow the poor to destroy the rich in their quest for the wealth of the rich, but does incentivize the poor to increase their wealth and become the middle class, which in time becomes the largest body.
As explained, democracy does not protect liberty. In Benjamin Franklins analogy, it would have allowed the wolves to have eaten the lamb simply because the lamb had been outvoted.No wonder the Founding Father rejected democracy in favor of a republic.
Dr.Harold Pease is a syndicated columnist and an expert on the United States Constitution. He has dedicated his career to studying the writings of the Founding Fathers and applying that knowledge to current events. He has taught history and political science from this perspective for over 30 years at Taft College. To read more of his weekly articles, visitwww.LibertyUnderFire.org.
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Democracy rejected by founders - Anza Valley Outlook
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From his hateful tweets and provocative rhetoric to his new (and now failed) executive order banning Muslims and refugees all over again, President Donald Trump is driven by the idea that Islam is a threat to what makes us American.
Trump has declared that Islam hates us. There is, he says, an unbelievable hatred. Stephen K. Bannon, one of his chief advisers, claims that we are in an outright war against ... Islam and doubts whether Muslims that are shariah-adherent can actually be part of a society where you have the rule of law and ... are a democratic republic. He believes Islam is much darker than Nazism and seems to agree with HUD Secretary Ben Carson that Islam is a religion of domination.
But Trump and his administration could learn a thing or two about American values such as freedom and equality from the religion and people they so hate.
In Islams founding story, after Muhammads death, it was unclear who would lead the nascent Muslim community. Typically, succession disputes make for great drama. This one, however, was more C-SPAN than Game of Thrones.
Rather than intrigue or bloodshed, believers pursued democracy. Only by the peoples consent, they reckoned, could a ruler justly be named and a community freely governed. They chose Abu Bakr, one of Muhammads companions. His inauguration speech, according to one of Muhammads earliest biographers Ibn Ishaq, was brief (though were not sure how big the crowd was). It went something like this: Im no better than any of you. Only obey me if I do right. Otherwise, resist me. Loyalty means speaking truth. Flattery is treason. No human, but God alone is your lord.
Abu Bakr sought to guard the people against domination by making himself accountable to them. The people obliged, securing their liberty. They could call him out at any time, and he had to listen. He even had to ask permission for new clothes.
His successor, Umar, carried the legacy forward. Publicly rebuked by a woman for overstepping the law, Umar responded: That woman is right, and I am wrong! It seems that all people have deeper wisdom and insight than me.
This spirit of accountability and liberty would become enshrined as a religious duty in Islam, though as with any tradition, these values are not always upheld. Nonetheless, every Muslim has the obligation to command right and forbid wrong, correcting and resisting any who betray justice, rulers included. That Abu Bakr and Umar are paradigms of good Islamic rule for well over 1 billion Sunni Muslims tells us something about this traditions love for freedom, whether or not its followers always live up to their ideals.
So does the 12th-century theologian al-Ghazali, one of Islams most beloved figures. In his most famous political work, an open letter to a young sultan, Ghazali famously defends a golden rule of liberty: The fundamental principle is ... treat people in a way in which, if you were subject and another were Sultan, you would deem right that you yourself be treated. Nothing a ruler would not himself endure has any place in politics. While sin against God can be forgiven, violation of this rule cannot: Anything involving injustice to mankind will not in any circumstance be overlooked at the resurrection.
Ghazali tells rulers that on judgment day, not God but the people will determine their fate: The harshest torment will be for those who rule arbitrarily. He sounds striking similar to James Madison writing in Federalist 57, for whom rulers will be compelled to anticipate the moment when their exercise of power is reviewed, and they must descend to the level from which they were raised. Only in Ghazalis vision, the tyrant descends to hell.
Of course, like their Western counterparts, many Muslim regimes fail to honor this vision of liberty. But it is women and men like Malala Yousafzai, Humayun Khan and the hopeful youths who filled Tahrir Square who are faithful to the best of Islam, not the likes of the Islamic State, al-Qaeda and Saudi princes.
For Islam and the American founders alike, freedom is about protection from arbitrary power and rule by law, not the caprices of men. Theirs is a vision where citizens stand not in slavish deference to masters but on equal terms with all. This vision animates our whole system of governance. It was this vision Lincoln endorsed when he wrote, in words that echo Ghazali: As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master. This expresses my idea of democracy. And it was this vision Sojourner Truth, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and Harvey Milk invoked when they each demanded that equality before the law be still further expanded so that it would eventually include not just straight white men but everyone.
This vision is under threat in a way it rarely has been in our history. But it is under threat not by Islam, but by Trump and his administration.
Trumps first Muslim ban was an act of brazen, unconstrained power and barely concealed animus. The second ban is more of the same. The blessing of the first was just how blatantly it betrayed our deepest values. The danger of the second is its attempt to conceal its dominating and bigoted aims. No serious observer thinks these bans make us any safer. Instead, they seek to circumvent rule of law, roll back libertys benefit and wage Bannons war with Islam. They give Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the Department of Homeland Security and other agents discretionary power to decide on a whim whether to sever families, deport refugees and detain Muslims. And they make Trump and his cronies unaccountable arbiters of who really loves the very American values the administration is busy betraying.
Trump wants to return America to its former greatness. But when it comes to freedom, Ghazali and Abu Bakr have far more in common with Madison and Lincoln than with terrorists and tyrants who claim Islams mantle. For that matter, they have far more in common with this countrys great lovers of liberty than does the current president.
So, instead of banning Muslims, Trump should listen to them: He might learn something about liberty and equality, two values he seems not to have learned to love from our own nations history or the Constitution he swore to uphold.
Decosimo teaches religion, ethics and politics at Boston University and is writing a book on freedom and domination in Christianity and Islam.
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Islam's lessons on freedom and democracy - WatertownDailyTimes.com
This year marks the 20th anniversary of Lokniti, one of the most admirable intellectual initiatives in the history of independent India. Headquartered at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies in New Delhi, Lokniti is a network of political scientists, teaching at colleges and universities across the country. It conducts surveys and opinion polls on each assembly and general election in India, which pay careful attention to voter attitudes and voter behaviour, and to cleavages of caste, class, and religion. Journalists across India, and scholars from across the world, rely massively on the vast storehouse of empirical data that Lokniti has assembled on the Indian elections.
Lokniti is remarkable for its depth of scholarship; and for the collegiality of its scholars. Most Indian academic institutions, like most Indian political parties, are dominated by a single charismatic individual. But Lokniti is run neither by an alpha male nor a high command. It is a genuinely decentralised network, which practises democracy within, even while studying democracy without.
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In the recent round of assembly elections, the pollsters of Lokniti collected field-level data from different parts of Uttar Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Goa, Manipur and Punjab. However, for Lokniti the conduct and result of elections in India is only one element of their mandate. A second, as defined by their charter, is the development of a comparative understanding of democratic polities in different historical and cultural settings.
In the first week of March, when polling was still on in Uttar Pradesh, in distant Bengaluru a group of scholars were discussing a report that Lokniti, working with collaborators in four other countries, had just produced on the State of Democracy in South Asia.
Multi-party democracy based on universal adult franchise was long considered a Western monopoly. However, the data in this new report demonstrates that electoral democracy was now strongly rooted in South Asia. Once, only Sri Lanka and India held regular elections; now, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal and even Bhutan have abandoned autocracy or monarchy for democracy.
Reading the report closely, one found that while, in a formal sense, democracy is fairly well established in South Asia, in a substantive sense there are real worries. For one thing, while a decade ago 64% of respondents were happy with democratic functioning, the figure now is closer to 55%. For another, respondents seemed to trust unelected (and unrepresentative) public bodies such as the army and the judiciary more than elected bodies such as Parliament.
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Reading this well-researched report on democracy in South Asia, I was struck by how many respondents did not seem to believe that public institutions could function on the basis of impersonal or impartial rules and procedures. 47% of those surveyed across the region believed that bribes were required to access government services. 19% believed that influence or sifarish was crucial. 9% believed that knowing a politician would help them, while 6% thought they needed a middleman instead. A mere 19% of respondents believed that they could access government services without any intervention or influence whatsoever.
Nurturing democracy in the poor, multi-ethnic, multi-religious nations of South Asia was always going to be far harder than in the richer and more homogeneous nations of Western Europe. Among the major challenges the South Asian nations face is overcoming the dangers of linguistic and religious majoritarianism. The record here is decidedly mixed, with this latest Lokniti report demonstrating that minorities across the region continue to feel insecure. At the same time, the study found that, except in Nepal, religious minorities endorsed the idea of democracy more actively than did religious majorities. An earlier Lokniti study had found that, after the demolition of the Babri Masjid in 1992, Muslims in north India began to vote in larger numbers. Harassed by the police, suspected by many members of the majority community, minorities across South Asia largely trust the impartiality of the ballot box, where each voter is equal regardless of the language she or he speaks or the religion she or he practises.
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This latest State of Democracy Report will consolidate Loknitis already high and well deserved scholarly reputation. Yet I was disappointed to see so little attention paid to questions of gender. In all the countries of South Asia, women are discriminated against in multiple ways. They remain under-represented in the legislature, the executive, and the judiciary. Working women are often paid less and offered worse service conditions than their male counterparts in identical jobs. When it comes to making personal or professional choices, boys and men are far freer than girls or women. And within the home and the village, as well as in the office and the city, the harassment of women is ubiquitous, and violence against them widespread as well. So far as the treatment of women is concerned, South Asia must surely be one of the most undemocratic parts of the world.
Ramachandra Guhas books include Gandhi Before India
Twitter: @Ram_Guha
The views expressed are personal
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The state of democracy between elections - Hindustan Times
Newser | This 'Latest Academic Craze' Is Threat to US Democracy Newser Sullivan argues that this is why protesters shouting down campus speakers they don't agree with seem to be performing a ritualistic exorcism. He concludes that this raising of ideology above facts is dangerous to democracy no matter your politics. Read ... |
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This 'Latest Academic Craze' Is Threat to US Democracy - Newser