The fallacy of democracies

George Bush once quipped that he hoped creating a stable democracy in Iraq would cause democracies to spread across the Middle East.  This would be good, he hoped, because only one time in world history did two democracies go to war with one another.

So here we are several years after that quip, and protests are raging across the middle east.  George Bush was right that once people get a taste of freedom they'd yearn it for themselves.  The problem is that democracies tende to lead to tyrany.  Once this happened the Middle East would be no better off than it is today.

There is a fallacy in the world today that what we have here in America is a democracy.  The founding fathers new that democracies lead to tyrany.  This is because by the definition of a democracy, every person would have to read up on everything that politics entails and attend meetings and vote.  Yet this is impossible.

Likewise, most people hope other people will represent them, and so they rarely show up to vote.  For this reason, one group of people often takes over a democracy, and the end result is usually a tyrany.  A perfect example is the Greek City-States where democracies were a popular form of government.

They started out good, protecting natural rights, yet in the end tyranies were formed, natural rights were absolved, and dissent among the people grew rampant.  The governments were destroyed, and the Roman Empire swallowed Greece whole.

The founding fathers new this, and therefore decided to create a republic, where the people voted for representatives to represent them in the government.  So long as a person remained fair and honest and educated he was allowed the right to represent the people.  Yet if he were to become unfair, lazy and repugnant, he would be voted out of office.

This is the form of government we have in the United States, and it is for this reason that the U.S. Constitution has lasted longer than any modern Constitution. 

So it might not be such a good thing that democracies are spreading across the Middle East.  A perfect example is what happened when the Palestinians voted (a natural right) for representatives, yet the people they voted for were....(drum roll please).... a terrorist group called Hamas pent with a charter pent on destroying the Jews.

What then, or who, is going to stop any new democracy in the Middle East from voting for radical Islamic rules that will lead them into tyrany. Since many of the protesting nations surround Israel, this would provide them with an ample means of destroying that nation. 

The worst part is they did it right under our eyes, becasue we thought we were wathing something that we had -- democracy -- spreading across the world.  Yet we were fooled because we do not even have a democracy we have a republic. 

How did we get so fooled?  To learn click here. (see 8-15-2011 post)