Democracy

Democracy is the philosophical belief that the ideal form of government for a set of people is the government they collaborate to construct. Democracy is inherently amorphous, depending entirely on the will of the governed to give it form.

All governments derive their legitimacy from some source. A democracy derives its legitamacy through the will of the governed.

At the direction of the people, an amorphous democracy can take any shape. Any flavor of anarchist, socialist, facist or religious state can be chosen by the people. In a democracy, the people always maintain the absolute right to partially or completely alter or abolish the theocracy, state committee or ruling council.

The advent of sophisticated internet collaboration tools and ubiquitous access enables a practical citizen constructed constitution. This is a new development. In the past, it was impractical to have every citizen vote on the individual components of a governing system. Representitives of the people have classically been used to construct such systems.

The centralization of power has overwhelmingly resulted in political systems that do not operate as advertised. Attention is rarely paid to effective mechanisms of oversight, and such representatively constructed systems invariably divest the sovereigns power in special people, which are chosen in some manner... simple or complex, and typically given great power for some duration.

Representation is not inherently antagonistic to democracy, so long as the particular rules of representation are always under the control of the people, themselves.

Finally, a democracy is not based on a founding document. A founding document can be based on a democratic platform, but the two are not necessarily connected. The closest analogue to a democratic document is the Declaration of Independence. However, this document is simply an observation of popular sovereignty, and not the sovereignty itself.

Many political systems claim the word democracy in support of their governing systems, but the philosophy of democracy depends only on the choice of the people. If the people reasonably communicate their desire for a change such as term limits or the termination of a foreign conflict, and the government fails to immediatly comply, the term democracy is not appropriate.

Though the term democracy has been used by many governments, there are no true democracies. Most governments fail to be true democracy because they fail one of the following tests. 1. Enfranchisement - The governed must have the ability to influence the government. Athens gave the right to vote to a subset of the people governed, notably omitting slaves and non-citizens. 2. Implied Consent - A democracy emerges from the will of the governed. It cannot be a doctrine proposed by a third party and accepted for lack of objection. You cannot compel action until the governed have agreed to be so compelled. Additionally, current governments to not ratify their constitutions as new members are added to the contract. The vote of landowners in 1776 to enact a system only applies to them. Your children do not inherit your contracts. 3. Referendum - The people must have the final say, and must be able to override the actions of their government according to a process they choose. There is currently one country in the world which allows the people to have the final say, and even there, it is limited. Switzerland stands alone as the only country where the people can vote down a war. Coincidentally, perhaps, it is the only country to stay completely out of war in the 20th century.

It is common to label some form of democracy as "Democracy" and to analyze it accordingly. Democracy has NO inherent characteristics, other than the people like it best.

As an example, one hundred people walk into an ice cream shop. One guy says, "I think we should all get the same flavor of ice cream. Let's do it democratically."

The next step is not a vote on flavors. Democracy demands that the group be consulted to decide IF they wish to collectively or individually submit to some set of rules intended to benefit them. While the suggestion was intended to bring the team closer together through shared ice cream flavor... every person is free to choose until they have agreed to implement a system.

An attribute often implicitly linked with democracy is the idea of majoritarianism. The correct level of consensus for a society is the level it chooses. This can be 51%, 66%, 75%, 80% or 85%, at the pleasure of the people.

Another related attribute is exclusivity of voting. For example, when asked to choose a level of majority (51%, 75%, 80%) the preference can be collected in several ways. The status quo is to prefer exclusivity of choice. In other words, you choose ONE of the three options, with the winner being the option with the highest number of votes. Inclusive voting more correctly assesses the quality of alternatives when the field of possible choices is greater than two. In the above example, a person may choose 51% and 75%, but omit 80%. Likewise, the person could choose all three or only 80%. The result is a field of candidates with different levels of support. Hopefully, the best alternative will be acceptable to an overwhelming majority of voters.

In Democracy, The God the Failed, we can clearly see that the author is associating the previous two attributes with democracy in his overall critique. His analysis of majoritarian, exclusive selection democracy is widely respected, but neither he nor Plato explored a direct democracy absent majoritarianism and exclusive voting.