Re: Democracy
- From: "Jerry Okamura" <okamuraj005@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sat, 25 Feb 2006 19:41:10 GMT
"Islander" <nospam@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:--qdndRJZdhNEZ3ZRVn-iQ@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Jerry Okamura wrote:
As I was listening to the news, I heard about the turmoil in theA Bill of Rights to protect the minority from the tyranny of the majority.
Philippine's. and was thinking about Bush's idea that democracy is the
way to solve some of our world's problems, I thought, what are the
conditions that have to exist for a democracy to work best. We see who
the people of Venezuela voted for. We see what the Palestinians did when
they had a chance to elect who should represent them, and it seemed to
me, any objective evaluation of who the people voted for, cannot be
viewed as a success. So, it seems obvious to me, that there is something
else that is needed for the concept to work. But I do not know what that
is..
What are the missing ingredients?
Other elements of our government that address this are the different rules
for composition of the House and Senate. Also, checks and balances
between the three major branches of government. Democracy is not just
about majority rules.
Good points. Do the three countries I mentioned have such a protection? Do
all successful democraies have such protections?
See http://www.garlikov.com/philosophy/majorityrule.htm for a good
discussion of this topic.
Interesting link. The one thing I did pick up on was the section, "However,
the Constitution did not solve the problem of majorities' imposing
tyrannical laws, or imposing unnecessary and unfair or unreasonable laws
tyrannically without attending to the needs of the minority. (A case can be
made that the American Civil War resulted because of that, and I will return
to this point later.) And because the problem of the tyranny of the majority
is still not resolved today, nor even generally understood, it needs to be
addressed as much as ever.". While that is true, we do have a pretty good
functioning form of government it would seem to me. Perhaps it goes back to
my thought that it is not possible to achive perfection....
Thought also of the section, "Madison had thought that the greatest
safeguard against the tyranny of the majority was the large number of sects
and divergences of interests and opinions that divided people in ways that
made it virtually impossible for coalitions to form stable majorities. While
that is often the case, historical divisions have arisen over
characteristics that have brought about numerical minorities which have been
more than temporarily placed in that status. (The phrase often used is
"permanent minorities", but "permanent" is too strong because the problem is
not that one is in a permanent minority, but that one is in a minority with
no likely possibility to be in the majority in the near future or within
even a few generations.) Race, ethnicity, color are such characteristics in
many societies today, but there are philosophical and other kinds of
minorities as well. Moreover, majorities in any legislature often merely
impose their will on those numerical minorities with opposing philosophies
for as long as they are able, which means at least one election cycle, if
not many. In some of these cases, the minority viewpoint may be
"represented" in the legislature, but it is not attended to by the majority,
and is therefore not what might be called "effectively represented.". But
as I think of Japan, which by all standards is doing a pretty good job,
racial minorities seem to have a pretty hard time....or am I talking about
chickens rather than eggs.
.
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- From: Jerry Okamura
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