{"id":18263,"date":"2014-09-24T12:59:39","date_gmt":"2014-09-24T16:59:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/?p=18263"},"modified":"2014-09-24T12:59:39","modified_gmt":"2014-09-24T16:59:39","slug":"what-is-a-true-democracy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/2014\/09\/24\/what-is-a-true-democracy\/","title":{"rendered":"What is a True Democracy"},"content":{"rendered":"

There was a fabulous comment<\/a> on the article I mentioned in my previous post A Bottom-Up Solution to the Global Democracy Crisis<\/a>.<\/p>\n

I’ll quote a little bit of the comment:<\/p>\n

A true democracy, however, would always be able to step on the rights of a minority: as the old saying goes, a \u201cdemocracy\u201d is two wolves and a sheep voting on what\u2019s for supper.<\/p>\n

If you are the two wolves, you have to convince the sheep that he lives in a \u201cdemocracy\u201d and he should submit to the will of the majority, or perhaps you will just disenfranchise the sheep, telling him he can\u2019t vote so it really doesn\u2019t matter what he thinks, anyway. This can be done in various ways: you can make more and more petty crimes into felonies thereby precluding the sheep\u2019s right to vote (ah, I say old boy, I think you entered the wrong pasture\u2013that ain\u2019t your grass); you can gerrymander pastures such that other sheep cannot be included, and thus cannot vote; you can demand that the sheep show an ID issued by the wolves and you can always dress a wolf up in sheep\u2019s clothing so that he can make speeches to the other sheep about why it is in their best interest to follow the edicts that the wolves lay down. He will explain on his radio show (or TV program) that not to follow his advice would expose the whole herd to unknown dangers. At least this way, a few at the time can be picked off and the herd as a whole will consider itself \u201csafe.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Some of the links in the comment are also great.\u00a0 I think I’ll make separate blog posts of those.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There was a fabulous comment on the article I mentioned in my previous post A Bottom-Up Solution to the Global Democracy Crisis. I’ll quote a little bit of the comment: A true democracy, however, would always be able to step on the rights of a minority: as the old saying goes, a \u201cdemocracy\u201d is two […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[166],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-18263","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-stevegsposts","7":"czr-hentry"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18263","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18263"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18263\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18264,"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18263\/revisions\/18264"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18263"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18263"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18263"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}