U.S. Democracy and Elections (56602)
ôDemocracy is a form of government that substitutes election by the incompetent many for appointment by the corrupt few.ö - George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) (groups.msn.com)
For generations American politicians, media, and high school social studies teachers have trumpeted our form of government as the epitome of democracy. Words like ôfreedomö, ôdemocracyö, and ôlibertyö have been thrown like a blizzard of self-righteous spears at any other countries' methods of governance that diverge from ours û particularly those societies who fail to reflexively add ôand the free enterprise systemö immediately following the epithets above.
But the purportedly democratic ship of state of the United States has run aground recently, and surprise û it begins to look a lot more like those supposedly ôtotalitarianö or ôundemocraticö regimes we were taught to scorn in high school. Were it not for the lingering psychic power that American triumphalism holds on the minds of the mostly misinformed many, our citizens would be rallying to the ringing justifications for insurrection provided in the Declaration of Independence stating that governmental legitimacy is only derived from the people's will, and would tar and feather those who have stolen our democracy from us. Let us take a brief step backward to see what came before the corrupted and almost certainly stolen U.S. national elections of 2000 and 2004 to see how true our claims of democracy have ever been.
The Athens of Pericles is regarded by many historians as the first emergence of democracy in human history. But the right to vote was limited to male land-owning members of the aristocracy, which was a small percentage of the population. The majority consisted of women, the poor, and slaves, who were all disenfranchised. Reading Thucidides' Peloponnesian Wars, which described the loss of democracy to tyranny and the decline of Athens as...