schweblog

Before you ask, no, I have not been reading much of Plato’s Republic or Machiavelli. I have, however, been observing the general state of our democracy for quite some time. Ever since 2004, I’ve had a difficult time accepting the idea that democracy has inherent value. No, I’m not talking about the re-election of Bush–that was just the icing on the cake. I’m talking about the fact that several states banned gay marriage by referendum which, for all intents and purposes, essentially translated to something James Madison deeply feared: a tyranny of the majority.

It could have just been America, though, right? We all remember the over-arching message of “Bowling for Columbine”: America is just an anamolous place, seemingly out of touch with any sense of humanity or decency. We’re just weird, I thought. Humanity can still remain intact and people essentially good, right? Right. Just not here, in America.

Then, with this week’s victory of Hamas by a landslide in Palestine, all my hope slipped away. With the elections and overwhelming victory of the Hamas party, Palestinians effectively endorsed a group that is explicitly anti-Semitic and pro-terror. This is the same party whose founder denounced the Holocaust as a fraud as recently as 2004. Ideology is one thing, but outright irrationality is an entirely different animal.

While it was nice to see that Bush’s absurd theorem of “democracy = peace” dashed to all hell, I’m still dismayed by the democratic results. With wiretapping and other human rights abuses at our own backdoor, I can’t really help but give up on it. What is “it”? Democracy. Human nature. People in general. All of humanity.

In a way, this shouldn’t be any surprise. Governments, we are told, are historical mechanisms that provided the groundwork for societies. Why were these governments necessary in the first place, though? Because in a state of nature, man will rip his fellow species limb-from-limb without a second thought. It comes as no surprise that a method of government purportedly reflecting the “will of the people” lets us actualize that very same thing, if only in a much more civilized way.

Filed under: politics by Jesse