The limitations of modern democracy:

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

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

Comments

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[badlydrawnjeff.livejournal.com]

Of all the topics I would think we'd have common ground on, I never thought this would be one of them. I'm on board with most of this and your take is...mostly correct, I think, but I have to point out a few miconceptions here.

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.

That you line up the Tea Party as "neo-fascists" is troubling and uncompelling, not to mention nonsensical. The French Nationalists saw immigration as a cancer because they view diversity as a cancer, as opposed to the issues of crime and dependency that illegal immigration is believed to be the root of in the United States. There are serious contextual points you're failing to acknowledge as to why the sort of closed border protectionism has any sort of popularity in the mainstream in France, and it's not exactly the best move to equate that to "no amnesty" in the United States.

Furthermore, the French Nationalists are extremely authoritarian, in contrast to the Tea Party which was formed in part to reduce the governmental authority in favor of a more Constitutional republic. The French Nationalists are extremely protectionist economically while the American Tea Party is a fairly standard conservative free market ideological group.

You're only weakening your argument by appealing to this sort of comparison. There's no "nationalism" to speak of in the Tea Party movement, just a lot of patriotism. It's incorrect and ahistorical to compare the two.

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[badlydrawnjeff.livejournal.com]

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.

Are we more of a police state than many are willing to admit? I think that's clear, and, more to the point, I think many are coming around on this particular issue. Are the results disproportionate? Yes, but the question is not so much the results as much as the causes. If the crime is being disproportionately handed out by a specific group, so too would the results.

At the end of the day, though, most of our prison problem is rooted in the drug war. Until we solve that problem, we're not going to really have a good grasp as to who is doing what and how different crimes root themselves in illicit drug trading and usage. And until we solve that drug war, it means we're still going to be "tolerating" more and more police militarization to combat a plague of the government's own creation, leading to people going to jail for longer and longer times for "crimes."

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?

There is no law on the books anywhere that I'm aware of that would create harsher sentences and more felonies simply because of the race of the criminal. The issue here, again, goes back to a firm hand on drug laws and three strikes laws that keep people in jail for things that don't deserve that much jail time. Those laws are considered successes, unfortunately, so it's a sea change in public opinion that must occur to get there.

You can, however, get someone out of jail. You can overturn their sentences, you can release them, and you can change the laws to ensure that it doesn't happen again. That does not make it some sort of de facto and/or modern "genocide," which means you're outright cleansing a group never to return - we can reverse this trend, and quickly. Nor is it disenfranchising any specific group. Even if we're willing to say "the poor have no other choice," that goes against very basic principles we know about human beings in general, and that's really a much broader psychological discussion that may not really be on topic for this.

As is typically the case, the issue here goes back to the government. The government creates more and more policies that result in increased difficulty to leave your own class. The government then criminalizes things that shouldn't be criminalized. Then the government punishes the poorest for engaging in the former in an attempt to deal with the latter, and instead of addressing the problems at hand, we instead ignore the role of government and class in favor of more comfortable racial narratives. Why? Well, no one talking about these things is racist so there's no culpability on a personal level and we can blame X group for the problem instead. Talking about it in terms of government or class creates a culpability issue, however, since the same people who want to blame race probably voted for that politician that raised taxes or increased welfare spending, or supports laws that reduce individual rights and responsibilities.

What's the answer to "The New Jim Crow," in other words? The same as the answer to the old Jim Crow, laws passed by the government to create a racial underclass. The answer today is to get rid of the laws that are creating a perpetual economic underclass. This means more sane drug laws and more promotion of the individual. It means making it easier to be an entrepreneur. It means making it harder to remain on state assistance until the end of your days. And it means starting to own what your beliefs create in society on a whole.

[foolsguinea.livejournal.com]

"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,"

Er, what? I'm not really in disagreement with your larger point, but this seems like a wildly inaccurate sentence.

Of course there was the Tulsa race riot in May of 1921, and numerous other small purges. But if you mean nation-scale pogroms and purges, then you must be defining "democracy" differently from the rest of us.

I don't recall any ethnic massacres in the UK in that period--well, outside of Northern Ireland? And while France did some horribly misguided things to hold onto Algeria, the French Republic as such seems to have expressed its racism more through imperial projection (outside of the collaboration with the Nazis). On the other hand, there were infamous massacres of religious minorities a couple of times in the centuries of the French monarchy.

In any case, the USA has been more likely to massacre their citizens than our European cousins, since 1900. The World Wars were international.

And if you somehow are counting the UK and and France as massacre-happy (?!) another counter: If there were any major ethnic massacres in the Nordic States in that period, I'd like to know about it.

[404.livejournal.com]

Hmm... LJ goofed. The comment I made here was not towards this OP.

But I'll leave it at this about democracy, recalling Churchill's quote:
"Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time."