Is democracy dead?

[handmade34]

Governments now answer to business, not voters. Mainstream parties grow ever harder to distinguish.

http://aeon.co/magazine/society/henry-farrell-post-democracy/?utm_source=Aeon%20newsletter&utm_campaign=f0b8062932-Daily_Newsletter_21_August_20148_21_2014&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_411a82e59d-f0b8062932-68622033

...Crouch (Post-Democracy 2005) sees the history of democracy as an arc. In the beginning, ordinary people were excluded from decision-making. During the 20th century, they became increasingly able to determine their collective fate through the electoral process, building mass parties that could represent their interests in government. Prosperity and the contentment of working people went hand in hand. Business recognized limits to its power and answered to democratically legitimated government. Markets were subordinate to politics, not the other way around...

...At some point shortly after the end of the Second World War, democracy reached its apex in countries such as Britain and the US. According to Crouch, it has been declining ever since. Places such as Italy had more ambiguous histories of rise and decline, while others still, including Spain, Portugal and Greece, began the ascent much later, having only emerged from dictatorship in the 1970s. Nevertheless, all of these countries have reached the downward slope of the arc. The formal structures of democracy remain intact. People still vote. Political parties vie with each other in elections, and circulate in and out of government. Yet these acts of apparent choice have had their meaning hollowed out. The real decisions are taken elsewhere. We have become squatters in the ruins of the great democratic societies of the past...

[Lint Head]

1. It is dead. It used to be a wave that overcame power, privilege and royalty.

But oligarchic corporate power has managed to dam the flow into a small lapping splash that can be fooled, by public relations corporations, into believing it is a giant wave of fairness and impartiality.

[rock]

2. Why did I think of this?

[handmade34]

3. ...

[FiveGoodMen]

4. Zappa's quote keeps coming to mind

“The illusion of freedom will continue as long as it's profitable to continue the illusion. At the point where the illusion becomes too expensive to maintain, they will just take down the scenery, they will pull back the curtains, they will move the tables and chairs out of the way and you will see the brick wall at the back of the theater.”
― Frank Zappa

Maybe Democracy was never alive to begin with.

[blkmusclmachine]

5. Is democracy dead?

Yes.