Democracy is awesome. Better than communism, monarchy, theocracy and definitely better than whatever Iran has (theocratic democracy?). Lucky for us Americans, we don’t live under a dictatorship like Iraq under Saddam. We get to vote! Our voices are heard by our government.
In the name of democracy, President Bush proclaimed, did we invade Iraq. In the name of democracy did we prevent dominoes from falling into the abyss of totalitarian communism.
In the name of democracy, are we self-righteously better, at least politically, than fellow human beings who have the bad luck to be born into oppression.
For example, in 1989, thousands of Chinese youth made a statue called the lady of democracy in Tiananmen Square to protest the yoke of communism and demand reform.
Well, better to be lucky than good, right? Because what exactly is good about democracy? What exactly should we be exalting and promoting?
Sure, we get to vote every four years. We get the right to give a billion dollars to two political parties to represent us. We get the right to write letters to our congressman or woman. We get the right to express our disapproval to Gallup. We even get the right to let our money count as free speech in the name of change.
Sounds about right. Sounds like our democracy is governed by two things: money and self-righteousness. When was the last time you saw all your views represented in a political decision?
Is anyone here totally satisfied with the current health care debate/debacle? If you’re a tea partier, are you actually influencing policy or just feeding Glenn Beck’s ratings?
Political deliberation has been usurped by feigned outrage. And that’s the worst aspect of democracy: its fragility.
But how can there be a worst aspect of democracy? Isn’t democracy the unquestioned good since the end of the Cold War? Isn’t democracy the end of history?
Democracy is supposed to be the final end of human progress and civilization, but we don’t even know what the word means.
We think it’s just voting every four years for a president and a justification for a militarized foreign policy. Sounds great, but what is it really?
Democracy is a cliché.
We’ve let democracy become a trite phrase to toss out when we need moral justification. It has the same meaning as “take some time to smell the roses.”
Clichés have an odd way of substituting themselves for our own voices because we have learned when it’s the right time to utter a cliché.
When somebody is judgmental, say, “Dude, don’t judge.” When somebody asks how you are, say, “I’m good, you?”
When your society gets questioned say, “But at least we’re democratic.” We all believe abstractly that democracy is the best system of governance: but do we mean it? Do we live our day-to-day lives believing it, or will we not think about it until it’s November 2012?
Democracy really is just a word, kind of like the words love or cool. It’s in our vocabulary to toss out at the right moments, like in politics class.
Like all words that have fallen into our toolbox, democracy has lost its meaning. We like it when we read about it, but we don’t actually enact it.
We have institutions and practices locally to provide us avenues to be democratic. Local city council meetings. Even the vaunted Associated Students of Whitman College is a body dedicated to representing you.
All these meetings are public. Go and see what your representatives are up to because the status quo is an outsourcing of democracy. For democracy to be a meaningful word, we have to renew it.