Democracy fails...

[Anomalocaris]

Democracy itself is a term you can play fast and loose with. I mean we can bracket out direct and representative for brevity and just stick with representative. But democracy doesn't exist in a vacuum; (liberal) democracies are arguably the most globalised and inclusive in the world and have adaptive legislative, executive and judicial structures that adapt as best they can with this. As someone else on here said, 'democracy' has the potential to become a puppet of the majority but that's precisely why there are political safeguards that augment and restrict the general operations of the tiers of structures (and agents) that exist within it (one obvious and easy example being, say, secularism).

There's so much political, social, psychological and economic discourse that goes into running and assessing an entity as confusing and multifaceted as a democracy that simply saying 'it's failed' is parsimonious to the level of being lunacy.

The word you are looking for is pluralistic.

[Fidel_Castronaut]

Maybe. Pluralism defines an ideal and a reality, but doesn't do a good job of defining a methodology as to how governmental structures would have to be arranged as to acommodate a pluralist society.

But in terms of the reality that most liberal democracies exist in, then pluralism would certainly fit the Bill. I don't see democracies creaking at the seams because of it either.

[abaris]

I don't see democracies creaking at the seams because of it either.

It creaks at the seams because we're quietly allowing for more and more civil liberties to be taken away within the last decade.

[Anomalocaris]

Maybe. Pluralism defines an ideal and a reality, but doesn't do a good job of defining a methodology as to how governmental structures would have to be arranged as to acommodate a pluralist society.

But in terms of the reality that most liberal democracies exist in, then pluralism would certainly fit the Bill. I don't see democracies creaking at the seams because of it either.

Israel.

[Fidel_Castronaut]

You mean by using diversity for an excuse for that erosion? Perhaps yeah.

I'm not so doom and gloom about it. I'd say freedom of expression in many areas around the world has probably gone up and not down in recent years, whether through official or clandestine methods of communication, though naturally there are always points for contention (racial and religious hatred act here in the UK is one pet gripe I have). Depends on the country, and the legislation, and of course the propensity to accept what is imposed.

Overall I'd say legal oversite of legislation and its implementation here in the UK at least is fairly robust though not immune. But nothing is perfect, and I still don't see democracy as failing.

[Fidel_Castronaut]

Maybe. Pluralism defines an ideal and a reality, but doesn't do a good job of defining a methodology as to how governmental structures would have to be arranged as to acommodate a pluralist society.

But in terms of the reality that most liberal democracies exist in, then pluralism would certainly fit the Bill. I don't see democracies creaking at the seams because of it either.

Israel.

Never been.

[Anomalocaris]

About as close as many other recognized "democracies". If anything, slightly more so due to proportional representation, and as a result more disfunctional than most.

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

Power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely.

And God is absolutely powerful. Funny how that bears out the aphorism.

Boru

[Thumpalumpacus]

And on the other hand, when Churchill was visiting the White House shortly after Pearl Harbor, FDR entered into Churchill's quarters when the latter was fully nude. FDR Immediately apologized and made to leave, where upon Churchill said, "I have nothing to hide from the President of the United States."

While Churchill deserve considerable credit for keeping Great Britain fighting during WWI, his own total unscrupulousness, conceit, and a somewhat concealed but brutal sense of racism certainly makes it difficult to regard him as any sort of hero. The death toll from of callous and vindictively racist policies he followed in the aftermath h of the great Indian femine of 1943, which were swept under the rug in post war accounts, would rank him as one of the great butchers of 20th century. Not quite on the same scale as hitler, stalin and Mao, but certainly just one class below and way ahead of pol pot and other small to mid scale killers.

One could argue even the credit he deserve for keeping britain fighting and thus ultimately emerging on the winning side in WWII is seriously offset by the fact that his own antics in WWI contributed a great deal to the profligate squandering of britain's wealth and resources, lengtheneded of the war, and serious wrong footing of Britain in being able to deal with any serious threat to her after WWI in the first place.

While he was certainly riddled with imperfections comparing him to even Pol Pot seems a bit of a stretch. He was a twat about India, no doubt, but I don't think his death toll there after Baldwin's mission failed is anywhere near that of the Khmer Rouge, nor as whimsically deadly.

His advocacy of Gallipoli, which is surely his greatest military failure, was not what took apart the British Empire; that was accomplished by the post-WW One assumption of so many foreign security obligations in the face of a huge war debt owed to the US -- which was only put paid in the 1990s, if I remember correctly. The British Empire was already overstretched before 1914, and was already in the process of being eclipsed by both Germany and America in key economic indices.

I freely admit that as a writer myself, one of the reasons I hold ole Winnie dear as I do is that when the shit hit the fan, he mustered and deployed his best weapons, language and rhetoric, to a degree unmastered by any other speaker of the English language -- and that's no mean feat. I confess my bias, even as I admit his flaws. And I cannot imagine any other man speaking to the British spirit so ably as he did in 1940.