Bevin Chu
January 22, 2007
Washington Post: Democracy Gone Wild
OFF/beat
by Emil Steiner
Real, Strange News
Top 5 Political Brawls
Democracy Gone Wild
Political Shoes Drop in Taiwan. (AP)
On Friday, the Taiwanese Parliament dissolved into chaos after lawmaker Wang Shu-huei threw a shoe at Speaker Wang Jin-pyng. The shoe missed its intended target, instead striking the face of a lawmaker next to Jin-pyng, and soon enough Taipei's Legislature had degenerated into a Jerry Springer episode. Of course, "the boot-brawl" is only the latest in a long history of governmental throw-downs ...
Comment: The Taiwan independence movement has long been obsessed with "raising Taiwan's international profile."
Congratulations. They've raised Taiwan's international profile.
Not only did they make Time Magazine's TOP TEN list of Biggest Scandals of 2006, they've kicked off the New Year by making the Washington Post's list of Top 5 Political Brawls.
Modern champions of democracy assume that democracy is the best political system ever tried. Actually, that understates their attachment to democracy. For them, as for True Believers of all stripes, no alternative is possible. For them, democracy is not merely the best political system ever tried, it is the only political system worth trying. Democracy is the one true faith. Any other system is unthinkable. Any other system is heresy. Any other system is the Work of the Devil.
America's Founding Fathers knew better. They knew that democracy is the worst political system ever tried. They knew that due to its inherent defects, democracy would invariably degenerate into chaos, and when the chaos became intolerable, into dictatorship.
Don't believe me? Consider the following quotes:
"Democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide."
-- John Adams, 2nd President of the United States
"The majority, oppressing an individual, is guilty of a crime, abuses its strength, and by acting on the law of the strongest breaks up the foundations of society."
-- Thomas Jefferson, 3rd President of the United States, author of the Bill of Rights
"Democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their death.
-- James Madison, 4th President of the United States, Father of the Constitution
"The experience of all former ages had shown that of all human governments, democracy was the most unstable, fluctuating and short-lived."
-- John Quincy Adams, 6th President of the United States
"Between a balanced republic and a democracy, the difference is like that between order and chaos."
-- John Marshall, Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, 1801-1835
What we are witnessing on Taiwan today is a democracy rapidly wasting, exhausting, and murdering itself.
What we are witnessing on Taiwan today is a democracy revealing its true face as nothing more than mob rule.
What we are witnessing on Taiwan today is a spectacle of turbulence and contention incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; as short in its life as violent in its death.
What we are witnessing on Taiwan today is the predictable fate of the most unstable, fluctuating and short-lived of all human governments.
What we are learning on Taiwan today, the hard way, from first hand experience, is the difference between a balanced republic and a democracy, i.e., the difference between order and chaos.
America's Founding Fathers knew that any nation so obtuse and myopic as to adopt democracy would end up like Taiwan today. They knew this two hundred years ago, and warned America and the world about it.
Why are we surprised?
Isn't it time we wised up?
Isn't it time we replaced our unwarranted faith in democracy with a justified confidence in the marketplace?
Isn't it time we replaced our outdated faith in artificially imposed political order, with an enlightened understanding of spontaneously generated social and economic order?
Isn't it time we stopped surrendering our rights and liberty to "national leaders," hereditary, elective, and otherwise, and started owning our own power as emotionally mature and politically sovereign individuals?
Even the American model of democracy, that the Bush administration is so ferverently prosetlyzing around the world, is hardly the model for the rest of the world to emulate. The ideal "one person, one vote" model has long degenerated into one million dollars (or more and increasing), one vote.
ReplyDeleteDear Laohu,
ReplyDeleteWell said. The Founding Fathers were well aware of the structural defects of democracy. That's why they had such contempt for democracy as a political system. That's why they preferred a republic. The distinction was important to them. How laughable it is that so many modern Americans who "champion democracy" have no idea what they're doing? They have no idea that they're championing a political system that is un-American in the extreme, that the Founding Fathers detested?