| Even Cornel West parrots Athenian era warnings about majoritarian tyranny, mob rule, etc. I have near religious faith in democracy. I'm so out of step. I don't know why. My enthusiasm for democracy originated in my workplace experiments. Ideas gleaned from Peter Drucker, Deming, and probably some others. I just needed an efficient, effective way to get my coworkers to step up and contribute their knowledge and expertise. I really had no stake in the outcomes. At the time, my role was often called "facilitator", which I've never liked. I now prefer Michael Lewis inspired label of "referee". Any way. Democracy in the workplace was like magic. Consensus forming just happened. It took a while to build the trust. My job was mostly to ensure the group honored and delivered on its own decisions. I squashed snipers and saboteurs. It made me very unpopular. Until I was tasked with resurrecting the next zombie project. My team mates missed me after I was gone, belatedly realized that I had empowered them. I think about how to replicate that success all the time. Still no clue. Edit: Just pulled up his wiki. Hoppe wrote a book called Democracy: The God That Failed. Explains your down vote. Haha. No worries. The world needs its Eeyores (Austrian flavored libertarians). Helps keep us humanists on mission. |
It falls apart as soon as you have huge disparities in privilege, wealth, and education in a nation state - manipulated by industrial narrative management techniques engineered by small privileged castes fighting hard to keep and enhance their caste privileges at the expense of everyone else.
They're not comparable situations. There is no sense in which democracy can ever be a solution in the latter, because it doesn't exist in the first place.
You need relative equality of power between participants and groups for democracy to be viable, and as soon as that disappears - it's gone.