Dangers of Democracy

The Dangers of Democracy --> Originally posted on Wednesday January 9, 2008 at Faithfully Liberal

By Pastor Bob Cornwall




Having watched another election take place, it may be appropriate to stop and consider what we’re doing as a nation. When you think about it, democracy is a really flawed political system. If there was a better one, I’d quickly abandon it. But when you think about it, we entrust our lives not just to fallible and sometimes corrupt politicians, but to the voters who elect them. Voters make their choices for all kinds of reasons. They like the way a candidate speaks or even looks. They support the candidate or perhaps oppose that candidate because of gender or race. Sometimes it’s fear that drives us. At other times it is the promises made to do this or that. More often than not we vote not with others in mind, but our own selves. That is, altruism takes a back seat to me-firstism.


The disturbing thing is how easy it is for us to be swayed by misinformation – mud that is. To give you a case in point – consider the religious affiliation of Barack Obama (I will confess that I’m an Obama supporter). In this regard, I was talking to a member of my church who supports Obama. She was telling about another member who asked her how she could vote for a Muslim for President (now I personally would have no problem voting for a Muslim if that person was competent, honest, and believed in the principles of the American Constitution). She responded by telling this person that Obama isn’t a Muslim, but is in truth a member of the United Church of Christ (Click here for a very informative discussion of this topic of Obama’s faith assumptions). Unfortunately that didn’t suffice, and he continued to insist that Obama was a Muslim – a “fact” confirmed by all of those emails that keep get passed around.


Don’t you find it just a bit odd that we let people make decisions about our future, who do so on the basis of defamatory and misinformed emails? Of course, it could be worse – I suppose.


So, when we talk about spreading democracy to the far corners of the globe, do we really mean what we say? If we, who have had two-plus centuries to work on it, have difficulties with the process, why should we expect nations with no democratic history to get it right out of the gate?


Now, I don’t know of a better method of governing, but we still have a long way to go before we’ve got it perfected.

Comments

Anonymous said…
And our "democracy" is one of the least democratic: there's the long-outdated electoral college. There's the influence of money and the media interests. There are numerous ways that votes are rigged. We have huge voter apathy compared to other democracies, etc.

And since we seem reluctant to impeach a REPUBLICAN president no matter how many high crimes and misdemeanors are committed (though we will impeach a Democratic one for lying about extramarital sex!), maybe we need to institute a vote of no confidence that triggers early elections as with parliamentary systems. (In that case, Bush would be gone for over 2 years!0

Maybe we'd have more luck spreading democracy if we adopted some more of it here!

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