{"id":90020,"date":"2013-05-12T18:55:56","date_gmt":"2013-05-13T00:55:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/dyspepsiageneration.com\/?p=90020"},"modified":"2013-05-12T18:55:56","modified_gmt":"2013-05-13T00:55:56","slug":"consuming-democracy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dyspepsiageneration.com\/?p=90020","title":{"rendered":"Consuming Democracy"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com\/2012\/12\/consuming-democracy.html\" target=\"_blank\">Read it.<\/a><\/p>\n<blockquote><p>One of the lessons of history is that peoples with nearly identical economic arrangements can have radically different political institutions, affording them equally varied access to civil liberties and influence on the decisions that shape their lives.\u00a0 Thus it\u2019s reasonable and, I think, necessary to talk about the factors that will help define the political dimension of America\u2019s post-imperial future\u2014and in particular, the prospects for democracy in the wake of imperial collapse.<\/p>\n<p>There are at least two barriers to that important conversation.\u00a0 The first is the weird but widespread notion that the word \u201cdemocracy\u201d\u2014or, if you will, \u201creal democracy\u201d\u2014stands for a political system in which people somehow don\u2019t do the things they do in every other political system, such as using unfair advantages of various kinds to influence the political process.\u00a0 Let\u2019s start with the obvious example.\u00a0 How often, dear reader, have you heard a pundit or protester contrasting vote fraud, say, or bribery of public officials with \u201creal democracy\u201d?<\/p>\n<p>Yet real democracy, meaning the sort of democracy that is capable of existing in the real world, is always plagued with corruption. If you give people the right to dispose of their vote however they wish, after all, a fair number of them will wish to sell that vote to the highest bidder in as direct a fashion as the local laws allow.\u00a0 If you give public officials the responsibility to make decisions, a fair number of them will make those decisions for their own private benefit.\u00a0 If you give voters the right to choose public officials, in turn, and give candidates for public office the chance to convince the public to choose them, you\u2019ve guaranteed that a good many plausible rascals will be elected to office, because that\u2019s who the people will choose.\u00a0 That can\u2019t be avoided without abandoning democracy altogether.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Read it. One of the lessons of history is that peoples with nearly identical economic arrangements can have radically different political institutions, affording them equally varied access to civil liberties and influence on the decisions that shape their lives.\u00a0 Thus it\u2019s reasonable and, I think, necessary to talk about the factors that will help define [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-90020","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-think-about-it"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dyspepsiageneration.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/90020","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dyspepsiageneration.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dyspepsiageneration.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dyspepsiageneration.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dyspepsiageneration.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=90020"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/dyspepsiageneration.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/90020\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":90022,"href":"https:\/\/dyspepsiageneration.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/90020\/revisions\/90022"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dyspepsiageneration.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=90020"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dyspepsiageneration.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=90020"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dyspepsiageneration.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=90020"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}