The Pessimist

I’ve been away from this site for a long time. I was on vacation for a while (nice) and when I got back I was both too busy and too disinterested to post anything. I was disinspired by the T-Shirt offered for sale at despair.com that said “More people have read this T-Shirt than have read your blog". There’s a lot of truth to that.

But it is time to talk to the wall again.

I was wondering: Why does democracy work so well here ("The West"?) and not at all elsewhere?

Is it:

• The rule of law?
• The separation of Chuch and State?
• Property rights?
• Human rights?
• All of the above?

It doesn’t work in Africa. In Africa, you give the people the vote and they vote in a tribal strong man, who then uses all of the levers of power to make sure that he never faces a fair vote again.

In the muslim world, you give the people the vote and they vote for Sharia law. The resulting theocracy then declares democracy un-Islamic, and they never vote again.

But here, governments come and governments go. The binary system in the U.S means Democrats or Republicans are in charge for 4 or 8 years. If it goes longer, the president has to change. In the parliamentary systems, majorities are formed which essentially have absolute power, but if they don’t please the people, they are replaced with a different majority or become a minority. And it all happens peacefully.

We never see here leaders declaring “why should I give up power just because the people make a mark on a piece of paper?” At least, we haven’t seen anything like that in the West in 70 years, or over 2 generations, when Germany and Italy had their little fling with Fascism.

It could never happen here, could it? Sometimes I have conspiracy night-mares of a George Bush contrived “war on whatever (enter name of diabolical entity threatening life as we know it)” requiring the suspension of elections ala FDR. While I think that possible, I don’t consider it even remotely likely.

But ThePessimist wonders … what really does bind our democratic societies in place?