Over at The Conversation, five people (including me) respond to the question of whether democracy is the worst system of government except for all the others. Check out the whole thing.
My own response discusses the big advantage of democracy: that you can throw out an unpopular government peacefully. But I also emphasize the inherent fragility of democracy:
The government of the day is expected to take a psychologically unnatural attitude to its opponents.
It has to maintain, firstly, that it is objectively better at governing than its opponents, whom it is justified in criticising without mercy. But then it must accept that, if it should lose an election, it will graciously hand over control of the treasury, the military, and all the agencies and powers of the state to those same opponents.
I suspect that the conditions in which this attitude seems rational and commendable are very rare, and that they are all too easy to erode. We ought to give them more thought if we really care about preserving democracy.
No comments:
Post a Comment