[code_sardaukar]

As a former "left-anarchist" I'm familiar with this sort of story. We had similar stories of left-anarchist utopias from (1) pirates (2) partisans in the Spanish civil war and (3) various "workers collectives" throughout history. None of them lasted and most collapsed due to internal problems not being crushed by the nation state.

What has been shown to work in the long run, is Western democracy.

[redial]

That is a very skewed view of history. The Roman Empire lasted around 400 years. The British Empire controlled the world for almost 300 years (and the monarchy is still in place after almost 1000 years), and those are only two examples. The US was founded in 1776, The French Revolution, that gave birth to the modern Western Democracy concept happened around 1790, that is at most 240 years, and it only became predominant after WWI, so around 100 years. Although in my opinion superior (or maybe i'm just biased), western democracy is not assured to work in the long run, many countries after adopting it have gone back to monarchies or dictatorships. And after all, all forms of government that preceded it have been replaced.

[restalis]

Democracies are demanding the political leaders to limit their power both in mandate time-span and share of it by seeking consensus among parties with different views. This forces the governance to be moderate by design compared to chosen moderation of other forms of government. However, this presents itself as an attack surface from external powers. Political interference is way easier. Also, to be in democracy leadership role, considering its power limitations, may be quite frustrating if you want to get results quickly. This alone is enough to explain a few of relapses to dictatorships through power encroachment by ambitious political leaders. Add in here other political context deficiencies like weak political opposition and dirty (as in crime-like) measures of rivalry, and you get the idea. The populace may live "content" by various degrees in many forms of governance, but this is not what is supposed to comprise a defining differentiation. The real difference lies in the inherent ability to cope with various challenges (that have to be dealt with on political levels), my favorite of which is change in all of its forms. All forms of governance have benefits and drawbacks and employing the right one is tricky, it's an ongoing experiment that humans are yet to learn from.

[redial]

We are in agreement then, democracies can fall for lots of reasons. They also have the potential to be very successful.

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.

[dforrestwilson1]

Yeah that makes sense, but it seems fair to argue that relative to other forms of government, a properly balanced democracy which offsets the functions of government tends to be more stable and last longer than competing alternatives such as dictatorships or communism.

[restalis]

Dictatorship (or totalitarianism, my preferred term for it) is not assured to be unstable. If done right, the totalitarian regimes manage to periodically weed out the internal threats, including dissidence, and thus keep the remaining masses content, a trick employed at least since the dawn of written history with Ancient Egyptian police[1]. As I see it, the totalitarian political system however, being one of the most rigid of all, is more prone to corruption than others. (You may think of the pun about power tending to corrupt and absolute dictatorial power - absolute corruption, but I'm more about the precarious ability to react to different form of corruption.) The communism's main idea is to please the majority, which happens to be the mass of mediocre, at the expense of the the ambitious minority, the needs of which are taking a back seat. This makes communism a lesser environment for development, but it's not in itself a destabilizing factor.

[1] http://www.reshafim.org.il/ad/egypt/law_and_order/police.htm

[walshemj]

Nearer 1400+ years

[foota]

Many? Examples?

[redial]

Cuba, Chile, Argentina. They all had democracies, and then collapsed into dictatorships. I'm sure someone more knowledgeable could also name some African or Middle Eastern countries.

[tremon]

I'm tentatively adding Turkey to that list.

[yahyaheee]

As some others have pointed out, there is a lot of evidence that hear democracies were overthrown because of western influence.

[redial]

Does that even matter? Democracy does not make you inmune to the rest of the world. Democracy is not only an idea and if you want to claim its robustness you have to make sure it is able to cope, in practice, with internal and external opposition, just like all other forms of government. I'm just pointing out that in many cases it has not.

[yahyaheee]

Oh I totally agree, it almost seems that democracy works best when wealth and resources are abundant. This abundance is often at the cost of other nations, in which democracy probably won't last because of the external pressure.

[appleflaxen]

iran

[CapitalistCartr]

Iran got that because the CIA did it forcibly.

[saiya-jin]

true, and true for Chile also (and probably more)

[Ericson2314]

Can somebody unflag the Cuba comment? The US puppet dictators are hard to defend.

[_0ffh]

Germany as well.

[foota]

The other countries people have stated make sense, I wasn't aware of a serious issue with Germany? Unless you're referring to Hitler?

[_0ffh]

As another example for "western democracy is not assured to work in the long run, many countries after adopting it have gone back to monarchies or dictatorships". So yeah, Weimar Republic.

[AlgorithmicTime]

When did Cuba have a functional democracy?

[drieddust]

In few years time, we will read about Cheran mafia's ascend to power. These utopian dreams almost always result in oppressed becoming oppressors. This quote sums it up quite nicely.

“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

[redial]

Western democracy is the result of the French and American Revolutions.

[eru]

The US is not that important.

Arguably the British tradition had a bigger impact---without people's revolutions. (There was the Glorious Revolution..)

[redial]

I'm sorry I don't understand your comment. Not that important for what? The British tradition (which tradition?) had a bigger impact on what?

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).

[quirkafleeg]

> I'm sorry I don't understand your comment. Not that important for what? The British tradition (which tradition?) had a bigger impact on what?

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.

To put it another way, New Zealand had universal suffrage when Queen Victoria was on the throne; the USA didn't even fully have it for black people when Barack Obama was born.

[redial]

If we follow your example then no one really has a true democracy yet, after all in most countries people under 18 (or 21 or whatever age they use) are not allowed to vote. This might be considered barbaric in the future.

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.

[dredmorbius]

Take a look at English history, say, Roman times (43 AD) to present. It's fascinating on multiple counts. I'm sketchy on this myself, but a rough outline:

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.

[eru]

The Brits had a gradual accumulation of rights. First more for the upper nobility, later for the common man, too. They also had pretty stable governance for quite a while now.

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.

[redial]

I now get what you are saying, thanks for the clarification.

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.

[drieddust]

Democracy in modern world is a result of Industrialization and it was a ugly,long and slow process.

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.

[1] http://www.history.com/topics/french-revolution

[redial]

The Industrial Revolution was a factor in the uptake of democracy, sure. Just as WWI, WWII and the Cold War were. But it all started in 1776 in the US with the Declaration of Independence and in the 1790s with the French Revolution, which was the inspiration for South America to declare independence from Spain and establish their own democracies with different levels of success. The French Revolution didn't last in France, not at first, but the core concepts are the basis of our current democracy largely in part because the American Revolution kept them alive and spread them.

[drieddust]

I think quirkafleeg above answered on American revolution.

[redial]

Attempted to.

[restalis]

The "American Revolution" was just a struggle for independence. The "revolution" in the true sense assumes a change in values on multiple levels.

[redial]

The intelectual pilar of the American Revolution was a manuscript called Common Sense by Thomas Paine where the changes in values where outlined.

Calling it just a struggle for independence says nothing about why they were struggling to be independent.

[dghf]

> most collapsed due to internal problems not being crushed by the nation state

Weren't the Spanish anarchists betrayed by their Republican and Stalinist allies?

[amelius]

> What has been shown to work in the long run, is Western democracy.

Western democracy works?

[dredmorbius]

Arguably it does, though that depends strongly on what you accept its intended results to be.

[Razengan]

> What has been shown to work in the long run, is Western democracy.

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.

[epitomix]

I think you are missing the bigger picture. This is a story of a town dealing with the problems that arise in a failed state. The Mexican state and federal governments have failed to provide the basic services that they are responsible for, most importantly security.

[carapace]

But I don't think these folks are "leftists"?

> "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.

[cel1ne]

Thanks for the comment, I had exactly the same thought.

[yarou]

Can you point to an example of a Western democracy today?

[Noseshine]

Even when every single person complains, the result of democracy is not to make each and every person happy.

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.

[chriswarbo]

> 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.

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)

[saiya-jin]

Switzerland, 800 years and kickin' high