So you think you live in a democracy?

[TheBaldyMan]

from The Guardian's online section 'Comment is Free...', The holder of the Bentham chair in Law at University College London,, Professor Ronald Dworkin discusses his latest book "Is Democracy Possible Here?" examining whether the US and the UK meet the criteria of a democracy.

here's is an extract from http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/ronald_dworkin/2007/03/is_democracy_possible_here.html">the full article

Democracy doesn't mean just majority rule. There is no intrinsic value in the bare fact that more people favour one particular party or policy than another. Democracy is a value worth fighting for - it makes power legitimate - only when it means government through the majority on behalf of and for all the citizens. In a new book I argue that the conditions of genuine democracy are far from met in the US, the UK and other mature self-styled democracies.

These conditions can easily be set out in very abstract terms. Government must respect human rights, it must respect religious freedom and other forms of freedom of conscience, it must distribute its wealth so as to give everyone a fair stake in its economy and, above all, it must conduct its elections and other political procedures argumentatively so that each citizen is treated as someone worth convincing not just outvoting.

The United States fails by all these standards, and Britain does not do much better. We fail most dramatically in the character of our politics. Our politicians treat us as ignorant consumers; they entertain us with slogans and sound bites rather than arguments. In America, a very pessimistic explanation of this degraded politics is now fashionable. Americans are supposedly divided into two radically opposed cultures: the red culture that wants its religion public, drinks beer, lives in the middle, and votes Republican, and the blue culture that keeps its religion (if any) private, drinks white wine, lives on the coasts and votes Democratic. Genuine argument requires some common ground from which argument can start, and the conventional wisdom now holds that these two cultures are so fundamentally divided, in every respect, that there is no common ground. Politics is doomed to be war by other means.

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His essay continues, mainly to give examples of actions that would help to reverse his assertions, he poses these charges rhetorically rather than with great conviction. He doesn't really believe his gloomy assessment of the situation is completely right or irreversible. Even if there is something rotten in the state of Denmark, there is nothing that can't be remedied.

The medicine against the malaise is , according to Prof. Dworkin, raising the standard of political discussion. The current standard is abysmal in both our cultures and needs to return to all our lives.