"The Neocon Misunderstanding of Democracy and Why....

[Jade Fox]

It Will Undo Them" by Philip Slater

This guy is great.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/philip-slater/the-neocon-misunderstand_b_18995.html

The Bush administration talks a lot about democracy, but it doesn't seem to have a clue what it's really about--why it's more efficient in today's world. The neo-cons don't see democracy as a system of de-centralized organization. For the neo-cons it's just a way of selecting a dictator by plebescite. But democracy hasn't been spreading throughout the world because some woolly idealists thought it would be a sweet thing to do.


Decentralization is a way of speeding up adaptation to changing conditions. Authoritarian systems are too slow, rigid, and clumsy. People in the field need to be able to make decisions quickly without referring everything up the line to people who know less than they do about what's going on. It's why--as Dan Baum reported from Iraq--junior officers there created their own web site to exchange knowledge and ideas, since by the time their questions had gone up through the army hierarchy and the advice or information had come back down again, what they got back was usually dated, ignorant, and irrelevant.

<snip>

The inefficiency of authoritarian systems is the reason the Soviet Union collapsed--Warren Bennis and I predicted that collapse in 1964, in an article in the Harvard Business Review called "Democracy Is Inevitable.

<snip>

But inefficiency isn't the worst defect of authoritarian systems. The truly fatal flaw is their tendency to insulate their leaders from negative feedback. Yesmen are rewarded, and anyone who suggests that the ship of state's current course is on target for an iceberg is considered "disloyal".
When Liu Shaoki told Chairman Mao that the Great Leap Forward was leaping backward he was regarded as an enemy. And anyone who--like Chief White House Economic Adviser Lawrence Lindsey or Army Chief of Staff General Eric Shinseki--suggested to Bush that invading and rebuilding Iraq might not be a slam dunk was fired or marginalized. Bush created, as Ron Suskind observed, "an echo chamber of his own making".

[Demeter]

1. The Problem With Dictatorships Is Only One Man Is REALLY Happy.

and the rest want to off him. And rightly so!

[tulsakatz]

4. and that's why.....

Governments should be afraid of the people!!

[HysteryDiagnosis]

2. Would shrub like freedom fries with his distorted version of

democracy??? That echo chamber is just his head with a few cogent thoughts bouncing around looking for the many that have long since flown the coup.

[BlueEyedSon]

3. "democracy" is a codeword for "unregulated capitalism"

frequently the neocons use another term - "freedom" - but it means the same thing and does not refer to personal civic freedoms