Episode 3: Democracy Strikes Back (Democracy Shmemocracy Part 3)

I thought about those protests and something occurred to me about the people who organized/participated in them: they were fighting for democracy at a time and in a region that put them on the frontier of thinkers and actors for that region and at that time. They were ahead of their time. And that caused me also to be reminded that democracy, like anything, does not arise within a vacuum; it arises in a context. There is roughly a set of values that necessarily accompanies the rise of a concept like democracy; one that focuses on the importance of individual freedoms, of a notion of the inherent value of each person, and has a distinctly egalitarian (sometimes naively so) thrust. The further realization was that there is a significant portion of the world that has not yet hit this altitude of development, and so there is a still a significant portion of the world for whom democracy is a vital concept. 

So I absolutely cannot write off democracy as past its usefulness - that would be a profoundly ethnocentric move that I am not willing to make. In fact, a strong argument can be made for the idea that the most important work one can be engaged in on a global scale is to be working towards creating the conditions under which greater and greater portions of the world move into that altitude of development in which concepts like democracy arise and gain traction. 

One could, in fact, say that to only focus squarely on what the "politics of the future" is beyond something like democracy is to entirely miss the point. And really, who wants to miss the point (entirely or otherwise)?

To be posted at a future date: different types of democracy and where this typology might lead us.

Cheers,

sp