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“What is Democracy?”
Presented by Victor Provenzano
I have framed the presentation and discussion on the "nature and existence of democracy" as a series of either speculative or philosophical questions. Victor
What is Democracy?
Here are just a few of the possible questions deriving from the initial one:
1) First, the defining Socratic question: What is democracy? Can we even define it beyond its Greek etymology in which --- as a word made of two parts, dēmos and kratia --- it was designed to mean the "rule of the people"?
2) Has democracy ever existed, is it a genuinely attainable condition, or is it merely an aspirational idea?
3) If democracy exists, what is its minimum condition?
4) If democracy exists, what might it hope to become if it ever arrives at its ultimate condition, assuming that there is one?
5) On whatever scale that a nation (or a lesser political entity) might exist, does it have to have some measure of direct or participatory democracy in order to be democratic or can a mere representative democracy suffice?
6) Can there be democracy in only one country or in only one region of the world?
7) Can a nation rule, either directly or indirectly, over another nation and still be seen, in any way meaningfully, as being democratic?
8) Given the rise of authoritarian leaders such as Trump, Modi, Putin, Orbán, Duterte, Erdogan, and Bolsonaro in recent years around the world, are all or many of the regimes that one might still want to refer to as democratic now also living under the threat of authoritarianism, just as the self-declared democracies of Western Europe (actually empires in many cases) were living under a similar threat in the 1920s and 30s?
9) In short, to whatever degree democracy exists at present, is it now genuinely sustainable in the face of these threats? How does democracy's new crisis of sustainability relate to the deepening crisis of ecological sustainability in which our current civilization, along with all of the species on earth, also seem to be under threat?