On Democracy

It has become common practice to praise democracy as the best form of government; it's something that Americans don't even think about anymore.  Frankly, this is an excellent example of much of what I don't like democracy - such a large proportion of the population accepts whatever they hear as absolutely true without taking the time to step back, to think about it, to analyze it.  Another example - as a NYTimes article recently pointed out, for the last 25 years, Gallup polls have consistently shown that nearly half of the adult US population believes the world and all creatures were created by God within the last 10,000 years.  This is despite, obviously, huge amounts of evidence to the contrary.

In the world of politics, one of the results of this inability to step back and think critically is a susceptibility to being swayed by charisma and rhetoric rather than by intelligence and the issues.  This is not to say that charisma and rhetoric have no value on the world stage - they certainly do - but they play a far greater role in the election than they should.  Likewise, so many people accept the messages of negative commercials without thinking or investigating.

Since this is a democracy, though, everyone has a vote and an equal say in electing our leaders.  Moreover, time and again we see those leaders acting more to satisfy the electorate rather than in the manner they believe best serves the country - after all, that's what protects their jobs.  They are more concerned with assigning blame than fixing the problem - again, it protects their jobs (or wins them a job).  If something's going poorly, and they can be portrayed as responsible for it, they are more concerned with putting a positive spin on it than figuring out how to turn it around.

I don't mean to say that all politicians are this way, but I do think that it's a significant problem that is endemic to democracy, and it all goes back to the inability of a major portion of the voting population to think critically.  I'm also not going to put forth a solution,* because every form of government has its share of problems.  The ability to change leaders is very important in any form of government because without it there is no check against tyranny.  Unfortunately, those forms of government that are more likely to achieve an aristocracy (using the ancient Greek meaning of rule by the aristoi, the best) - monarchy and oligarchy - are also the most difficult to devise methods of changing the government and thus preventing the descent into tyranny.

* The obvious solution, of course, is better education (and I am absolutely in favor of greatly increased spending on education); I certainly hope that this would improve the problem, but I can't say that I don't have some doubts.