The limitations of modern democracy:
Since this is Minority Issues Month, I figured I'd look at one elephant in the room when it comes to minority and racial issues: nationalism. Specifically, what nationalism means for people who do not fit the arbitrary and entirely invented categories that fit into the 'nation' as such.
In http://www.amazon.com/The-Dark-Side-Democracy-Explaining/dp/0521538548, Michael Mann made quite a compelling case that genocide is not an aberration of the democratic process, but instead is inherent to it.The reason is that in historical terms, democracy and the idea of the nation-state arose around the same time. Both esteem a fairly simple political process of a limited set of alternatives. There is the nation, and there is the national political culture of a free market of ideas, where the most rational ideas inevitably win out. The problem with that is that only India has made serious effort at a truly diverse democracy with multiple languages, races, cultures, religions, and political structures. All other democracies that are identified with that term have tended to be limited to a relatively narrow in ethnic/racial terms subset of the global population. Among the present-day societies of the 21st Century, the only democracy that hasn't massacred its largest racial minorities in the 20th Century is the United States, and it was quite willing to engage in pogroms against blacks and did commit a genocide of Native Americans in the nineteenth centuries.
Societies that truly do have a more diverse culture and/or are vast in geographical and population terms do not as a rule tend to be democratic. Russia, generally Europe's largest and most ethnically diverse society, as a rule has been autocratic in one form or another ever since the Grand Principality of Moscow emerged as the real winner of the post-Kievan contest for legitimacy. China, of course, has invariably been dictatorial and autocratic since the Battle of Gaixia over 2,000 years ago. It might be a monarchy, or a modern one-party state, but either way the rather diverse Chinese political system has not been one in practice interested in the principles of liberal democracy. So, too, with most of the large empires of the past that existed on continental or global scales. Ruling many peoples, in short, is associated not with freedom and equality, but instead with either tax farming and autocracy or with totalitarian mass execution and military despotism.
So, then, why is it that democracy and nationalism have emerged hand in glove together? This is in no small part a legacy of the French Revolution and Nineteenth Century liberal idealism. This liberalism was not democratic in any sense of the word, but next to the autocratic dynastic systems it opposed, it was indisputably the lesser evil. This idea was that a state for every nation and a nation for every state was the ideal world. Only there were major problems. Not only in Europe and in the Middle East did religions like Islam, Catholicism, and Judaism create major complications for this picture, but these societies in practice were both multi-ethnic and made up in preponderance of peasants who were a-nationalistic at best.
So how did democracies solve this problem? According to Mr. Mann, they simply slaughtered their minorities and inherited an unnaturally homogenous state unified by the blood-dimmed tide of the new ideologies, which flooded out all their rivals. The problem here is that this indicates that in the West, at least, the system was never intended to integrate in large numbers of minorities, as in fact would seem to be indicated by American genocide of Native Americans and mass pogroms against blacks, and by the European Holocaust. And even by the emergence of the Soviet Union in Russia. This is not a factor that can be handwaved or ignored, and persisting in this pattern is one reason why neo-fascist movements like that of the Le Penites and their ideological cousins in the Tea Party movement in the United States have large-scale adherents in the West.
In short, modern democracy was designed by a decided minority for the benefit of that minority. In expanding the system while refusing to recognize this factor exists, democracy opens room for the emergence of imitators of the original genocidal mentality that spawned it. India's steps in pioneering the new system are very real, but that the USA has as many prisoners as the Stalinist Gulag http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2012/01/30/120130crat_atlarge_gopnik?currentPage=all, this indicates that in the 21st Century, perhaps the line between the so-called democracies and the more authoritarian states of the past is narrowing.
It is true that the USA doesn't murder its prisoners or have work camps, but at a point where American 'democracy' disfranchises vast numbers of disproportionately minority populations in pursuit of an overzealous prison system, perhaps it's time to start questioning at what point a police state exists in practice, even if not in label. And whether or not the direct pattern of harsher sentences and many more felonies for people of color over white people isn't a return to some very unpleasant old days that should not have been in the first place, let alone again?
http://www.amazon.com/The-New-Crow-Incarceration-Colorblindness/dp/1595586431
In http://www.amazon.com/The-Dark-Side-Democracy-Explaining/dp/0521538548, Michael Mann made quite a compelling case that genocide is not an aberration of the democratic process, but instead is inherent to it.The reason is that in historical terms, democracy and the idea of the nation-state arose around the same time. Both esteem a fairly simple political process of a limited set of alternatives. There is the nation, and there is the national political culture of a free market of ideas, where the most rational ideas inevitably win out. The problem with that is that only India has made serious effort at a truly diverse democracy with multiple languages, races, cultures, religions, and political structures. All other democracies that are identified with that term have tended to be limited to a relatively narrow in ethnic/racial terms subset of the global population. Among the present-day societies of the 21st Century, the only democracy that hasn't massacred its largest racial minorities in the 20th Century is the United States, and it was quite willing to engage in pogroms against blacks and did commit a genocide of Native Americans in the nineteenth centuries.
Societies that truly do have a more diverse culture and/or are vast in geographical and population terms do not as a rule tend to be democratic. Russia, generally Europe's largest and most ethnically diverse society, as a rule has been autocratic in one form or another ever since the Grand Principality of Moscow emerged as the real winner of the post-Kievan contest for legitimacy. China, of course, has invariably been dictatorial and autocratic since the Battle of Gaixia over 2,000 years ago. It might be a monarchy, or a modern one-party state, but either way the rather diverse Chinese political system has not been one in practice interested in the principles of liberal democracy. So, too, with most of the large empires of the past that existed on continental or global scales. Ruling many peoples, in short, is associated not with freedom and equality, but instead with either tax farming and autocracy or with totalitarian mass execution and military despotism.
So, then, why is it that democracy and nationalism have emerged hand in glove together? This is in no small part a legacy of the French Revolution and Nineteenth Century liberal idealism. This liberalism was not democratic in any sense of the word, but next to the autocratic dynastic systems it opposed, it was indisputably the lesser evil. This idea was that a state for every nation and a nation for every state was the ideal world. Only there were major problems. Not only in Europe and in the Middle East did religions like Islam, Catholicism, and Judaism create major complications for this picture, but these societies in practice were both multi-ethnic and made up in preponderance of peasants who were a-nationalistic at best.
So how did democracies solve this problem? According to Mr. Mann, they simply slaughtered their minorities and inherited an unnaturally homogenous state unified by the blood-dimmed tide of the new ideologies, which flooded out all their rivals. The problem here is that this indicates that in the West, at least, the system was never intended to integrate in large numbers of minorities, as in fact would seem to be indicated by American genocide of Native Americans and mass pogroms against blacks, and by the European Holocaust. And even by the emergence of the Soviet Union in Russia. This is not a factor that can be handwaved or ignored, and persisting in this pattern is one reason why neo-fascist movements like that of the Le Penites and their ideological cousins in the Tea Party movement in the United States have large-scale adherents in the West.
In short, modern democracy was designed by a decided minority for the benefit of that minority. In expanding the system while refusing to recognize this factor exists, democracy opens room for the emergence of imitators of the original genocidal mentality that spawned it. India's steps in pioneering the new system are very real, but that the USA has as many prisoners as the Stalinist Gulag http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2012/01/30/120130crat_atlarge_gopnik?currentPage=all, this indicates that in the 21st Century, perhaps the line between the so-called democracies and the more authoritarian states of the past is narrowing.
It is true that the USA doesn't murder its prisoners or have work camps, but at a point where American 'democracy' disfranchises vast numbers of disproportionately minority populations in pursuit of an overzealous prison system, perhaps it's time to start questioning at what point a police state exists in practice, even if not in label. And whether or not the direct pattern of harsher sentences and many more felonies for people of color over white people isn't a return to some very unpleasant old days that should not have been in the first place, let alone again?
http://www.amazon.com/The-New-Crow-Incarceration-Colorblindness/dp/1595586431