Aristotle, a long-dead thinker from a Mediterranean world, Alexander the Great's private tutor and the medieval Christian world's most important thinker, still has much to say to us sophisticates of the 21st century. He suggested that democracy is not always the best form of government. He stated that when it was an "appropriate" form of government for the people and their circumstances that it would be the best of governments, but that when it was NOT appropriate to the circumstances, it would be the worst. A bad democracy behaves like an angry mob ("demos" is Greek for mob). For examples of democracy gone tragically bad, we need look no further back in history than Nazi Germany. Or to the United States of the 1800's and 1900's if you were a man or woman of the wrong (non-white) color. Looking at Iran today, or Iraq, or any nation with a dominant Muslim population, or a nation of warring tribes with modern weapons, and you can easily see examples of "bad" democracies.
So when George W Bush extols the absolute virtues of elective democracies as a tonic to the world's ills, he is merely showing off his ignorance, to an audience that is as ignorant as he expects them to be, the US electorate.
I am not the only person who suggests that the USA is losing her right to be considered appropriate for democracy. Aristotle was clear as to when circumstances were ripe for democracy: given an economically dominant middle-class with very few fabulously wealthy or abysmally poor people, given universal literacy, given a citizen's sense of access to power, and given a homogeneity of culture that would not cause perpetual strife, you had a recipe for a successful democracy. Unhappily, recent American history shows an increasingly powerful movement toward a religious Christian government within a very heterogeneous society, an increasing alienation from the need for education, an overwhelming sense of powerlessness, an increasing fabulously wealthy class atop spreading homelessness and a lack of economic well-being, and you have a recipe for a democracy doomed to fail.
Looking at Aristotle's time, it was highly free and democratic, for its "citizens." Full citizens were free, they owned land and they were male. Its citizens governed themselves, and their government has been a model for democracy for two-thousand years. I suggest that the biggest obstacle to our having a working democracy in this country is our need to include everyone. If we only count the landed, the well-educated, the economically-thriving and the powerful, then the democracy in the USA is a wonder of the history of civilization. Read this paragraph again.
But if we count everyone -- if we look at the plight of the poor, the non-white, the non-straight, the non-male, the undereducated and the just plain stupid or ugly -- then the so-called democracy in the USA is seen as the sham it really is, for much more than half its people are dispossessed, whether they know it or not, whether they care or not.
But I have a proposal, not a solution but a step toward a solution.
An adequate cultural and political literacy makes one capable of self-government, or of appropriate participation in that worthy endeavor. I say "let those who are capable of self-rule govern themselves."
Here.
Immigrants to the USA may become citizens if they live here, legally, long enough, and if they show competency to vote in our elections. They show this citizenship competency by passing a political literacy test. Any American over the age of ten ought to be able to score 95% in these tests, they are not hard. (see Sample 100 Questions for Citizenship). But we allow into the voting booth tens of millions of citizens who would not pass an easy citizenship test; they are allowed to vote merely because they were born to parents who were citizens, who themselves may have been as ignorant. Decades ago, the Supreme Court over-ruled literacy testing in the Southern states as discriminatory. They were not discriminatory because many blacks failed these tests, they were discriminatory because they were administered only to those who had never registered to vote, and blacks in the South were routinely kept from registering.
But citizens who are permitted to vote ought to be qualified to vote. If you can't read English, as all new citizens must, you can't vote. If you can't pass the same test that new citizens must pass, you can't vote. But this new need must be applied to everyone, even men and women who have voted for a half-century.
For one thing, this will raise the level of the political debate because politicians will now be talking only to folks who understand what they are saying (even if they are lying). So they will have fewer voters whose ignorance and failure to comprehend they will be able to count on.
This idea does have a danger though. It will create a two-tier citizenship reality. Second tier citizens will be malcontent but they will have no power to do anything about it. Voting has not proved a reliable to way to have these people heard because they nearly always vote against their own interests. Because they are easily manipulated, particularly by religious charlatans with TV shows. If you think I'm being coy here, no way. There is nothing more dangerous to the proper working of a democracy than those who truly believe they know the will of God and are ignorant of science and history and citizenship's obligations as a consequence.
The danger is the perpetuation and expansion of this underclass. The solution to this p[roblem is not hard. First, there must be dis-incentives to remaining second-tier citizens besides not having the right to vote. Second, those empowered to vote -- first-tier citizens -- will have to pay a special tax, for as long as it takes, for training classes to bring second-tier citizens to the first-tier. If these intentionally burdensome taxes do not have the desired end of delivering all citizens to the first-tier, then the tax rate will continue to be increased until NO ONE IS LEFT BEHIND. The money will not go to the second-tier citizen, it will go into training classes and into the general treasury.
Viva democracy.