Democracy

In the dictionary definition, democracy "is government by the people in which the supreme power is vested in the people and exercised directly by them or by their elected agents under a free electoral system." In the phrase of Abraham Lincoln, democracy is a government "of the people, by the people, and for the people."

A specific interpretation of Lincoln's phrase, where the term "the people" is understood to mean all people regardless of how much power and resources they control:
● "government of the people" i.e. the people's government. The people OWN the government. The government BELONGS to the people.
● "government by the people" i.e. the people either giving permission to specific representatives to make governing decisions (in a large democracy), or directly make governing decisions themselves. The people STEER the government.
● "government for the people" i.e. the point of government is to work towards purposes defined by the people. The people's GOALS/AIMS/ENDS are served by the government.

Freedom and democracy are often used interchangeably, but the two are not synonymous. Democracy is indeed a set of ideas and principles about freedom, but it also consists of a set of practices and procedures that have been molded through a long, often tortuous history. In short, democracy is the institutionalization of freedom. For this reason, it is possible to identify the time-tested fundamentals of constitutional government, human rights, and equality before the law that any society must possess to be properly called democratic.

Democracies fall into two basic categories, direct and representative. In a direct democracy, all citizens, without the intermediary of elected or appointed officials, can participate in making public decisions. Such a system is clearly only practical with relatively small numbers of people--in a community organization or tribal council, for example, or the local unit of a labor union, where members can meet in a single room to discuss issues and arrive at decisions by consensus or majority vote. Ancient Athens, the world's first democracy, managed to practice direct democracy with an assembly that may have numbered as many as 5,000 to 6,000 persons--perhaps the maximum number that can physically gather in one place and practice direct democracy.

Modern society, with its size and complexity, offers few opportunities for direct democracy. Even in the northeastern United States, where the New England town meeting is a hallowed tradition, most communities have grown too large for all the residents to gather in a single location and vote directly on issues that affect their lives.

Today, the most common form of democracy, whether for a town of 50,000 or nations of 50 million, is representative democracy, in which citizens elect officials to make political decisions, formulate laws, and administer programs for the public good. In the name of the people, such officials can deliberate on complex public issues in a thoughtful and systematic manner that requires an investment of time and energy that is often impractical for the vast majority of private citizens.

Isokratia does not refer to a group of persons but rather to an abstraction, “equality.” Isokratia shares its prefix-root with two other terms used by Herodotus as periphrasis for democracy: isonomia and isegoria. On the analogy of isonomia (equal-law), isegoria (equal-public address), and the evidently early regime-term isomoiria (equal-shares: attributed to the predemocratic Athenian lawgiver, Solon) it seems likely that iso- prefix-roots refer to distributive fairness in respect to access in a sense of “right to make use of.” Equal access in each case is to a public good (law, speech, “shares”) that, when it is equitably distributed, conduces to the common good. Thus, isonomia is fair distribution of legal immunities across the relevant population and equal access to legal processes. Isegoria means equal access to deliberative fora: equal right to speak out on public matters and to attend to the speech of others. By analogy, isokratia is equal access to the public good of kratos – to public power that conduces to the common good through enabling good things to happen in the public realm.

So kratos, when it is used as a regime-type suffix, becomes power in the sense of strength, enablement, or “capacity to do things.” This is well within the range of how the word kratos and its verb forms were used in archaic and classical Greek. Under this interpretation for isokratia, each person who stands within the ambit of “those who were equal” (say, the citizens) would, enjoy access to public power in this “capacity” sense. This might include, but need not be limited to, access to public offices. In sum, rather than imagining the –kratos group as sharing the –arche group’s primary concern for the control of a (pre-existing) constitutional apparatus, I would suggest that the –kratos-root terms originally referred to a (newly) activated political capacity.

MST (Metasystem Transition) Theory sees control as much as a bottom-up process where free actors increase their freedom by integration in a whole as of a top-down process with control imposed from above.

Today, in democracies that are more diverse and pluralistic than anything nineteenth-century liberals could have imagined, the priority they placed on democracy's role in preventing political conflict spilling over into violence is more relevant than ever. In this perspective, democracy ultimate purpose is peace rather than justice, or rather, sufficient justice to secure peace, defined as a minimal constantly tested and renegotiated willingness by competing groups, factions, and parties to obey the rules of the democratic game. When competitors accept democratic outcomes as legitimate, they accept closure, at least until the next contest starts. If they win, they do not seek to crush their opponents. If they lose, they do not seek to take revenge or sieze power. Legitimacy is thus contingent and performative and always conditional on the willingness of political competitors to abide by the same rules.

The saving grace of democracy is the possibility that losers get to become winners. Whenever a group, faction, or party believes that victory was stolen from them or that they are fated to be premanent losers, violence becomes a possibility in the democratic game. Successfully managing peaceful democratic transitions between competing elites is the sine qua non of democratic legitimacy.

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The electorate, aided by a skeptical media, uses elections to make rough-and-ready choices between the contending versions of reality put on offer by competing politicians. Voters, in other words, select not only representatives but representations of reality. Voters do so, moreover, by testing- again, in a rough-and-ready way- political visions against their own lived experiences. With alarming frequency, however, this correspondence approach to truth gives way, and voters chose politicians, not by checking with lived reality, but by selecting the rhetorical style that panders to their predjudices or confirms their illusions.

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While it is natural enough, at the height of democratic competition, to think of your opponent as an enemy and to see an electoral competition as a battle, democracy can be destroyed from within if the competition essnetial to it is modeled as war, and if political opponents are understood as existential foes. "We must not be enemies," pleaded Abraham Lincoln in his First Inaugural Address, "Though passions may have strained, it must no break our bonds of affection." There ought to be no enemies in the democratic house. The term "enemy" should be reserved solely for foreign foes and those who collude with them to betray the country. Democracy is not war by other means. It is the only reliable alternative to war.

A politics of enemies may have the false glamor of seductive simplification, but it comes with dangers for those who practice it. Those who live by the sword die by the sword. It is stringly in the interest of political competitors instead to model the struggle as a competition between adversaries. An adversary, after all, is an opponent who plays by the same rules as you do, accepts democratic outcomes, congratulates you upon your victory, and if they win, thanks you for playing your part in the contest. MOreover, an adversary today may become an ally tomorrow, or even a friend. An adversary is not necessarilt nicer, more polite, more civil, or worst of all more "gentlemanly" than an enemy: An adversary is merely someone who understands the rationale for keeping electoral competition within bounds.

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In any competitive democratic system, the temptation to treat an adversary as an enemy in unavoidable, but it is a temptation that democratic systems themselves seek to control. Among the least studied aspects of democratic politics are the rituals, practices, and habits devised over the years to prevent competition from becoming destructive to the democratic system itself. ...