Once again, it’s patriotism time. Many of our readers, I imagine, are thoroughly tired of the old love-your-country routine, and yet, it’s still worth considering.
If nothing else, it’s sobering to observe how many countries in the half-century or so I’ve been paying attention have enthusiastically announced conversion to “democracy”, only to revert to some kind of autocracy, with oligarchy being the most popular version. The former Soviet Union in all its branches provides a host of bad examples, along with a few successes to be sure.
The demise of the much-touted Arab Spring is the latest sad story. Some Middle Eastern countries can’t even drum up a strongman to run things, but have reverted to a kind of tribal feudalism reminiscent of Europe in Shakespeare’s time, with no end in sight. Iraq and Afghanistan, two countries which have absorbed a great deal of money and a huge investment of human lives, seem poised to abandon the pretense of elected governments altogether. And so it goes.
The “democracies” I studied in my high school ancient history class don’t look much better in retrospect. Yes, some Greeks and some Romans for relatively short periods of time had some versions of group decision-making, but your chances of being outside the group were much greater than your chance of being a voting citizen, if you were a foreigner, a woman, a slave….
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