Catamount, on 14 August 2012 - 09:57 PM, said:
FYI, the modern, Western-style democracy has been in the extreme minority for most of the 300 year time period you tout. Prior to 1950, the United States and France were the only major countries with such a system in place, and the US was considered a quaint backwater until World War 1, while it took France a hundred years or more after the revolution to stop reverting to monarchism.
Virtually all of Western Europe was living under a monarchy or a fascist system until the end of WW2. I don't think you want to make the argument that Hitler was an improvement over the Kaiser.
In fact, prior to 1950,
most of the world was the imperial possessions of a handful of powers who had little interest in extending suffrage to the natives. The Industrial Revolution that brought about so much change in the world was mainly the product of Great Britain, a monarchy, with the US getting on the bandwagon later. In general, it was felt that progress was something for white Europeans of good breeding, and everyone else was just along for the ride.
And then there's the Soviet Union and red China, which made an astonishing level of technological and social progress, given that they pulled their nations up by the bootstraps from medieval stagnation to the space age in only a few decades, and no one would accuse those states of having any particular interest in democracy, human rights, or individual opportunities. German scientists notwithstanding, one could argue that the Soviets made more progress in 50 years than the West made in 150.
That the democratic republic (the common people elect the rulers from among the common people) as a form of governance spread around the same time as the Industrial Revolution happening is a statistical artifact. Correlation is not causation.
Furthermore, you're conflating democracy with secularism, humanism, and market economics, and in doing so, excluding all systems other than Western-style democracy and medieval feudalism. You can have a monarchy rooted in fundamental human rights (Great Britain post-
Magna Carta), a market economy without democratic principles (modern-day China, Argentina under Pinochet), or a secular, "democratic" state with no free market or human rights protections (NSDAP*-era Germany, Soviet Union, China under Mao, Iraq under Saddam Hussein), just as easily as you can have a theocratic democracy (Islamic Republic of Iran) or a democracy with a state-run economy (Social Democracy).
Combining secular governance with human rights protections and a market economy seems to be essential to providing a high quality of life for citizens, but the requirement of elected representation is less clear. At present, no significant state has been created that enforces** human rights protections, secularism, and a market economy without also being structured as a republic***. The concept is essentially untested.
(And your claim that wealth disparities are at an all-time low is flat wrong. The wealth disparity in the United States alone is now bigger than it was in ancient Rome, including slaves. Forget counting non-First World countries.)
*National Socialist German Workers' Party. N*zi gets excluded by the profanity filter.
**There are, of course, totalitarian states that claim these attributes for propaganda reasons, but which don't have them in practice nor ever made any pretense of enforcing them.
***The UK of today is a
de jure monarchy, but a
de facto republic, as the Prime Minister exercises more real power than the Queen, and the House of Lords is being slowly dismantled.
Edited by CaveMan, 15 August 2012 - 02:00 AM.