Democracy and Its Enemies by Paul N. Goldstene

Author:Paul N. Goldstene
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: undefined
Publisher: Lexington Books, a division of Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.
Published: 2012-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

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These are tensions which raise disturbing questions about the cogency of majorities in the modern world. But they are also questions which are generally ignored by most who support democracy, who rightly fix on the formalities of voting and on who should be entitled to vote in particular elections, along with the details of their mechanisms and procedures, while wrongly avoiding the issue of rule by ignorance. Nonetheless, electoral activity of this kind has egalitarian value. Even though the problems of information and civic knowledge are pervasive; and that majorities voting to be represented by a few is not democracy; and whether or not people exercise the franchise in a manner that many democrats consider to be rational usually in a liberal America, meaning for their own immediate financial interests—the very act of voting encourages an ethos that moves the culture in the direction of political equality. It thus induces a complicating pressure on the propertied elitism of the prevailing order. Within “the information society”[9] information about the actualities of politics is exceedingly scarce for most people. Yet, because of the myth of democracy, policy must sometimes be explained or, at least, made palatable to the populace and, in this manner, an expanded franchise whittles away at “the ideological veil with which society conceals the true nature of political relations”[10] wherein the substance of power invariably hides.

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