What Happened to Democracy?

Part I : Modern Democracy Began in Classic Greece

* In 2003 around the world millions march in opposition to a war against Iraq. Public opinion polls show majorities everywhere oppose a war. But the US government and its allies launch a war anyway.

* Citizens in Regina who question whether the city government should use tax money to build a new football stadium ask for a public referendum. The city says no. “They may do this in the USA, but this is Canada!”

* A major public opinion poll in 2006 finds that 65% of Canadians see climate change as the most important political issue. Yet the federal government takes only limited action and then endorses new pipelines to export Alberta Tar Sands bitumen.

* A public opinion poll sponsored by the Toronto Star finds that 94% of Canadians think governments should take actions against corporations and individuals who use offshore tax shelters to avoid paying taxes. But nothing happens.

* Polls show a majority of Canadians are concerned about the steady growth of income and wealth inequality and the capture of new wealth and income by the richest 10%. Yet no government in Canada is willing to take action to begin to redress the problem.

* A Nanos poll finds that 64% of Canadians do not want the government to provide military equipment to Saudi Arabia. The Trudeau government keeps selling weapons to its political ally, the feudal government, as it steps up its war to kill all the Shia Muslims in  Yemen.

What is going on?

The Pynx where the Athenian Assembly met

We live in a country which supposedly is a democracy. Yet the majority of citizens regularly find that they have no influence on government policy. But isn’t democracy supposed to be a political system where the majority of the citizens determine policy? Why is this happening?

I think that if we asked people to define democracy they would most likely say that a country has a democratic form of government if it has regularly scheduled elections and the majority of voters have the power to change who runs the government. Many Canadians would likely add that a democracy should also have a constitution which guarantees liberal, civil and human rights. No government should have unlimited power over its citizens.

Canada, the United States and many other countries had a liberal form of government well before they had a democracy, where all citizens had the right to vote and hold political office. Slaves were not citizens Nor were women. Indigenous Canadians, Canada’s first peoples, did not get citizenship rights until 1956. Non-white immigrants from Asia were denied full citizenship rights for many years.

We should remember: in both Canada and the United States men were denied the right to vote and hold office unless they held a required amount of real property. The Founding Fathers in both countries, who drafted the constitutions, were very clear on this key issue: they were creating a liberal government and not a democracy. There would be no universal suffrage! The role of government was to protect the rights of property owners. As the  famous liberal,  John Locke argued, the government should be run by men with property.

Greek Democracy Fifth Century BC

The Origin of Democracy

It is widely recognized that democracy, as a modern system of government, had its origin in classic Greece. The peak period of this success was in Athens in the fifth century BC. As we know from the writings of Aristotle and the research done by him and his students at the Lyceum, there were many city states in Greece and its colonies that had some form of democracy. At the same time there were no other human communities in the world which had a modern political system which could be called a democracy. And of all examples of Greek democracy, Athens was the best.

It should be noted that at this time the political system of Greek communities was nothing like our current system of territorial states. There were many Greek city states, but no territorial states as we know them today. The city states typically included an urban centre, a surrounding rural area of farmland and local towns, as well as colonies, which stretched from Sicily across the Agean Sea to Persia and the Black Sea. Athens and the other similar political formations had not yet developed a bureaucratic state structure with a professional army, police, a penal system and a civil service. Those  urban formations were found in Mesopotamia, societies with kings and landed aristocracies.

The Greeks gave us the very term “democracy”--demos, the people, and kratein, to rule. Aristotle defined democracy as “the rule of the poor.” He wrote in Politics that extreme democracy, which he defined as the rule of the poor for the poor was “bad government.” “It would be unreasonable,” he wrote, “to give the highest offices to the Many.” Both Aristotle and his teacher Plato declared democracy to be “the worst form of government.” 

NOTE: This is the first part of a longer paper looking at the origin of democracy as a political system and why it is not found today among our political states. The rest of the paper will appear on this blog site over the next few weeks.