Cheran: A town that threw out police, politicians and gangsters
bbc.com
bbc.com
What has been shown to work in the long run, is Western democracy.
“But here's some advice, boy. Don't put your trust in revolutions. They always come around again. That's why they're called revolutions.” ― Terry Pratchett, Night Watch
Arguably the British tradition had a bigger impact---without people's revolutions. (There was the Glorious Revolution..)
And all I'm saying is that at some point we get bored of calling successful revolutions, well, revolutions, and just accept them as the new normal. But we remember the short lived ones as revolutions because we never got around to give them another name, and thus we associate revolution with failure, when it is not the case at all (one way or the other).
The American revolution, Constitution and Bill of Rights are all inspired and influenced by, among other things, the Magna Carta, the English revolution and English Bill of Rights.
Let's ignore the unexplained impact you claim the American Revolution has had on "Western Democracy" and examine the impact it had on democracy merely within the United States:
In 1776 the only people who were entitled
to vote were white men who owned property.
100 years and a civil war later, the 15th
Amendment was passed in an attempt to give
black men the vote.
Another half century after that women were
given the vote.
Almost another half century after that -
200 years after the American Revolution -
the Voting Rights Act had to be passed, to
finally, properly give black people the vote.
You are confusing your ideal of democracy with what was actually a change in the way to look at government: it was a complete rejection of the monarchy and its god mandated right to rule unlike anything that came before.
And sure, everything is influenced by what came earlier, after all Thomas Paine, considered by many the intelectual father of both the French and American Revolutions was actually British. What started in 1776 was the beginning of modern democracy, and it inspired many western colonies to break from their colonizers with their own democratic revolutions (not all successful), but it was not perfect, it has evolved a lot since then, and it will continue to do so.
I will also argue your point about New Zealand. If your democratic process can be subverted by the whims of a single person using the power of his/her inherited authority on the assumption of being divine, then you don't really have a democracy, no matter how many people are allowed to vote.
But again, that is not the point I was making in my response to op. I was just merely pointing out that not all revolutions end in failure.
They're allowed to vote when they reach the age of 18 or 21. How do people excluded from voting due to their race or gender become eligible to vote?
> You are confusing your ideal of democracy with what was actually a change in the way to look at government: it was a complete rejection of the monarchy and its god mandated right to rule unlike anything that came before.
I've already given examples where monarchical rule was rejected and curtailed - events which inspired and influenced the American revolution - so why are you still pretending the first people to come up with such concepts were American revolutionaries?
> I will also argue your point about New Zealand. If your democratic process can be subverted by the whims of a single person using the power of his/her inherited authority on the assumption of being divine, then you don't really have a democracy, no matter how many people are allowed to vote.
Key word: "If".
The Civil War interrupted that stability a bit (as AlgorithmicTime in a dead comment points out), but that wasn't as much upheaval as eg the French revolution.
> Not that important for what?
Western Democracy. Sorry for the confusion, I was relying too much on context here.
I agree with you, democracy can be traced to the British, and further back to the Romans, and even the Greeks, but it wasn't until the French Revolution that the core concept of it was implemented; namely that there are no divine rights of kings (Britain also contemplated that idea, it is a shame they didn't follow thru).
Democracy is not only about voting or rights or property, it is also the idea that the people can decide for themselves they way they want to live. Voting is just the best way we've come up to decide that until now.
For a very interesting take on this, see "The White Indians of Colonial America". (http://www.amstudy.hku.hk/staff/kjohnson/PDF/engl56_kj_axtel...)
The Romans were, of course, a foreign occupying force, but they served to keep other foreign occupying forces out. Once the Romans left (~450 AD), that stopped being the case, and England was successively invaded by Norsemen ("Northmen", a/k/a Vikings, Normandy is also settled by the Norse), and Saxons (from present day Holland / Netherlands), mostly.
William the Conqueror (Norman) was the last foreign invador to both substantially engage the dominant British inhabitants on their own soil, the last to defeat England (absent invited parties, e.g., Mortimor and the Prince of Orange). 1066 was the last time until the first World War that England was subject to any significant foreign attack, and the last time until the second World War that London itself was engaged by an enemy. I find that pretty significant.
There were numerous almost (though not quite) always peaceful devolutions of power from the Crown to an ever expanding scope of at first nobles, and finally commoners. The Magna Carta (1215), War of Roses (1485), the English Civil Wars (1642 & 1648), Commonwealth of England (1649), the Protectorate (1653-1659), the Bill of Rights (1689), Chartism (1838-1858) (the UK's answer to the Revolutions of 1848 and their populist reforms), Local Governance Acts (1888, 1894), and increasing welfare-state reforms of the 1930s - 1950s.
Throughout almost all of this has been a devolution of power from the centre to the periphery.
It's also occurred largely by the fact that those claiming additional power -- barons, lords, a growing merchantile and political class, and finally the proletariat -- could effectively make such demands, threatening disruption otherwise.
The concept of a revolution in the modern sense seems, well, quite modern: France (1794), Europe generally (1848), Russia (1917) and the subsequent Communist Revolutions of China and Cuba. (I'm excluding the Communisation of Eastern Europe which was in fact an act of imperial oppression by Soviet Russia). The Fascist revolutions of Italy and German (a strongly cautionary tale). The fall of the USSR and Communist Eastern Europe, though should fit. I'd include the Iranian Revolution (1979), though that was not in the Liberal tradition.
More generally, power transitions are from one oligarchical group to another, though frequently playing on public sentiments.
French revolution resulted in revolutionary becoming the aggressors and they were took over by Napoleon so power returned to back to Regency.
Revolutions in China, South America, USSR etc also resulted in same. I can't comment on American revolution though, it may have been an exception.
Calling it just a struggle for independence says nothing about why they were struggling to be independent.
Case in point: You can change things, even radically, in the western democracies. All it takes is to create a new party (the law and the constitutions place only very broad limits) - the you can get elected.
The point that new parties have not actually been elected is not a sign that democracy doesn't work, it is a sign that people in summary don't actually think any of them would be an improvement.
Just because you don't like some of the outcome doesn't mean it's not a democracy.
Whilst this is true, it also matters how the people's will is summarised, and (perhaps even more importantly) how that summing method affects the behaviour of the people.
The obvious example being that first-past-the-post systems have a tendency to get ~2 dominant parties (e.g. US and UK), whilst proportional systems tend to get more parties or coalitions (e.g. Germany and Scotland).
Hence, in a first-past-the-post system, the fact that new parties don't tend to get elected is a sign that people don't think those parties offer enough of an improvement to convince a majority of voters to sacrifice their influence on the race between the big 2. It's like a giant prisoner's dilemma, where it's possible for every individual to think that some new party is a big improvement, but for nobody to vote for that party as they don't trust others to cooperate.
Although there are second-order effects, e.g. it may be worth chasing a seat in parliament even if there's no hope of forming a government; or getting second-order effects from an issue/protest vote (e.g. voting UKIP to influence whichever majority party wins to focus on immigration)
My point is democracy as it stands today is very young and if you only compare it against the failed attempts of Communism you will miss almost all of civilized human history.
[1] http://www.reshafim.org.il/ad/egypt/law_and_order/police.htm
How "long" has "Western democracy" been around for?
In any case, I don't think it matters which -cracy/-archy/-ism it is. What ulitimately works is that the people be allowed to do what they want to do. ...within universal moral standards (:Murder is Bad.)
As long as people are allowed to buy what they want, watch, read and play what they want, build what they want, go where they want, work where they want — if they have enough money — and say what they want and have relationships with whomever they want, then on the whole they will be complacent if not content or happy. They won't care what type of government it is or who is running it.
Take a contemporary issue for example. Do you think you can even vote out the NSA and dismantle all domestic surveillance mechanisms at this point in America? But the majority of people don't care because they're more or less content.
I reside in a third-world country that isn't exactly a bastion of Western Democracy, yet the people here more-or-less live their daily lives out as one might in a Western country, so they don't really pay their government much mind.
In the end, what works is consumerism.
Weren't the Spanish anarchists betrayed by their Republican and Stalinist allies?
Western democracy works?
> "its autonomy as an indigenous Purepecha community is recognised and underwritten by the Mexican government."
My guess would be that this is a whole culture.
They will likely never see most places beyond their small farming-community town, probably won't do air/train/ship travel and they probably will never see even $X00,000 in net-worth.
But sometimes it seems that they are probably happier than the rest of us. Sitting in our cubicles, working 80 hours per week for 40-hour/week jobs, just to earn that little more money or get a slightly better job-title.
While they enjoy the land, the openness and live directly next to nature, the rest of us just "consume".
We eat, cohabit and slog away the valuable asset of time, just to repeat this cycle. We site behind keyboards, spending "10,000" hours mastering things that don't matter as much as the food we need from these kinds of people (who seem like farmers). We create pointless profiles and indulge in the gamification of these centralized ad-monsters, who steal our time through artificial "likes", "retweets", "upvotes", "stars", etc.
Granted, these people are homogenous and can make a system like this work. I just hope that the poison of alcoholism doesn't ruin them and what they're attempting to do in a country that is somewhat ravaged by drugs/cartels (or pointed out to be by the centralized mass-media cartel).
Why would you do that, in America? (Assuming you're a software engineer or other white-collar job). Are you in game programming or something?
I remember one episode of Anthony Bourdain from years ago. He was in some South American country in a village and he went along to gather some yucca with a local farmer. Saying how great these people live in communion with nature and so on. And the farmer looks at him and says something to the effect of "you can have this, how about a trade". Meaning "you get to farm yucca and I go to live in your apartment in New York".
Not sure what my point even is, but I think it is about choice. It is ok if they end up living and doing that by choice, but if they are forced by circumstance they might feel trapped. We can go and start farming and living like this (I would certainly fail there quickly). But if they want to, they can't come and sit in cubicles and get paid for it.
- our lives may not look that "sophisticated" to someone who travels to Monaco in private plane on a whim; all our "sophistication" is only in our heads
- generally speaking, i was amazed how defensive most people in this thread became, when they faced the fact that somewhere really far away in Mexican jungle some people dared to chose to live without gangsters/police/politicians; people here are almost offended by that possibility and started coming up with poorly designed straw man arguments (like GP) just to take attention away from the subject
I should have prefaced it with that I really admire what they did. When we protest in the West we go out and draw large sign and march in front of the White House. Then we go home to our warm beds. Or we write angry messages on the internet from the comfort of our own homes.
I think what these people did is the real form of protest.
yes! and personally i would say, that they returned to normal.
But finding that middle ground for themselves requires every man thinking for himself, which is kind of frowned upon in modern societies....
http://www.fff.org/explore-freedom/article/the-calling-in-de...
Every youth in the villages was trying to get to the cities. Their parents often couldn't read or even speak Hindi (let alone English), only their local dialect. So the kids were the ones getting the information for parents (like the price of goods in shops), sometimes translating, etc. as they were the first generation to be able to do so.
With a bit of schooling, they could get a factory or even a white collar job and happily left behind their subsistence living.
I think the "happiness" part was summed up with an interview my team had with a local woman. More than half her family, husband and all siblings included, were dead, usually before the age of 30, from causes ranging from disease to snakes to crossing the road without hearing the car.
Now I speak neither Hindi nor Marathi or whatever the local dialect was, and even connecting with and understanding my middle class Indian colleagues was difficult so maybe I saw what I wanted to see. Nevertheless I got the impression that the way people cope with such a harsh life is through a form of shell shock. They withdraw and just get on with surviving. I looked at the folks living next to their swimming pool sized field from which their entire life depended. I had a tough time seeing happiness. Nature, like the universe, is a cold and harsh place that doesn't care about you. The worst part is perhaps the lack of hope, of direction: tomorrow will always be like today, until the snake, disease or car gets you. At least the children have a bit of hope now, and through them the parents.
I left with renewed appreciation for what we have. Even today, I remember the intense happiness from seeing the smooth, clean tarmac at LHR. It surprised me somewhat how Brits could be so grumpy when they have it so good...
I'll leave the story about Tibetan yak farmers playing Android games whilst herding the beasts on horseback for another day.
That's all that matters to me. True happiness. Do whatever gives you true happiness. If you are happy overworking yourself to get that promotion, that's totally fine. Or if you are happy working at a low paying cash counter job at a supermall, that is okay too.
I think a major factor in this is not to get lost in the endless cycle of continuously trying to gratify yourself by siphoning off from what society offers you. This just leads you into a bottomless rabbit hole which forces you to be "unhappy" until you have that "new cool thing".
I have quit my old job. Joined a couple of friends at a startup, doing consultancy work. Nothing fancy. But we get along just fine. Cut myself off from facebook. Work from home, work out, contribute to open source. Couldn't be happier than what I am now.
It makes you wonder if the nation-state model of government has been extended into places where earlier, tribal models would have been less bad. And Mexico isn't even much of a failure.
Here is the kind of thing that makes me quesy:
Its ban on political parties, meanwhile, has been upheld by the courts, which have confirmed its right not to participate in local, state or federal elections.
OK, I see why they have the ban. But it also to curtails the right of the individual citizens to vote. Should any collective really have that right in a democracy?
What an insightful thing to do.
Just reading the article almost brought me to tears, too.
This is great and all, but it's not truly consistent with an American style of democracy which respects the rights of individuals to travel freely.
It's easy to imagine what would happen to any US city/county/region which set up a check point with the sole purpose of asking those questions of every person who passed through it.
Its completely consistent. Ever hear of stop and frisk?
Or, if you're ever found to be carrying a large amount of currency, police will seize it.
My point is that the right of an individual to travel freely isn't respected as you think it is, especially if you are a minority,
my comment got a lot of down votes, but i feel like either i'm missing something or the people who voted it down are missing something.
yes, the federal government restricts movement. yes, there are DUI spot checks in cities from time to time. yes there is even racial profiling by local police forces (which is not constitutional). but all of those things differ from an all-encompassing restriction on the freedom to travel into a region by mandatory choke points on roads into that region.
but people reacted quite strongly. what on earth am i missing here?
>but people reacted quite strongly. what on earth am i missing here?
try driving through the panhandle of Texas while brown or black. It's not exactly a choke point because I could go a few hundred miles out of my way or fly, but, at the time, I believed the same thing you do. I learned the hard way that often times the written law has no bearing on reality. You can say it's unconstitutional all you want, but that doesn't change what millions of people face. The reality on the ground matters more so than some dusty old document written a few hundred years ago, especially since, like a religious text, people interpret it in wildly different ways.
>yes there is even racial profiling by local police forces (which is not constitutional), but all of those things differ from an all-encompassing restriction on the freedom
There is the America as it likes to see itself and the America that truly exists. Just because there is a document written a few hundred years ago that expressly forbids the restriction on freedom of movement doesn't mean that it meshes with reality.
My point was that, within the US, a city/county/regional government would ultimately not be allowed to do this.
My comment was not about the US Federal government.
As for DUI checkpoints, though they are conducted by local law enforcement, such checkpoints do not ask people the same questions as the checkpoints in the original story and they do not exhaustively stop and check everyone on all the roads leading into a region.
So, I'm not seeing a serious criticism of my original comment.
Not much?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Border_Patrol_in...
Don't kid yourself into thinking you have unrestricted travel in the United States.