I don’t really feel representative democracy falls into a category of democracy anymore.
Well it is Bourgeois democracy that’s slowly been consumed by corporate power. Globally
Yeah literally, this same thing can be said about every country on earth. The only places where corporations haven’t infected the government are ones like Afghanistan that have no strong corporations.
Cuba would like to have a word with you
Haha true that. This was inevitable btw, the further capitalism develops the more its will absorb everything. Religion is done for, community is done for, bourgie democracy is dying, next come nationality I guess, the environment is already compromised. It truly is a vampiric black hole.
Religion is done for
This is not because of capitalism. Religion has been used as a justification to extort money - look at the Catholic church in the Medieval times. If capitalists could make you believe that giving them money had any correlation with the afterlife they would gladly do so.
One plenary indulgence, please.
an Indian version of fascism.
Lol, what? Isn’t fascism the same across the globe?
Not really. Every instance of fascism has been really good at adapting to a local culture and political environment. Just to cite the major ones from 1930s Europe, there are clear differences between nazism (German fascism), Francoism (Spanish fascism) and Italian fascism (the original).
It’d be absurd for fascism in the USA to parade with swastikas, pagan symbols and Hugo Boss uniforms. An American fascism would use stars and stripes, crosses and… red baseball caps, I guess. In the same way, Modi’s Indian fascism uses Indian iconography to maintain power.
Fascism also exploits grievances, much like other populist movements. I’m not very familiar with Spanish and Italian fascism, but the Nazis had a whole stack of grievances. Many were complete nonsense, but that never stopped anyone.
Not really, it always adapts to local needs and shares the same oppressive memes, sometimes taking some and leaving some behind.
When a party form a government on its own i.e without any coalition partners, they tend to target the opposition with all the arsenal be it CBI , ED and sometimes even the Judiciary. However the elections are fair and impartial for the most part. Just recently, BJP got its ass handed to it in a state election in Karnataka. They may win the federal election again but it is hardly a death of democracy. Their grip on states have been slipping and once it goes out, they will most likely lose the federal government as well. The same happened during Indira Gandhi era. The same is happening now. Democracy survived then and will survive now. I am not saying there is no assault on democratic institutions in India. But they have proved resilient enough to prevent a democratic collapse as portrayed in this article.
Sometimes, democracy is the enemy of freedom. In cases like that, which side do you support?
Well in any case, you shouldnt support Authoritarians, or those who rule through imposing long term centeralized control. They are the antithesis to freedom. Anyone can easily label themselves as supporting ‘freedom’.
The true strength of democratic systems anyways is that it provides a buffer between people and out of control government entities. This government might have your approval but will the same people be leading in 40 years?? 60 years?? Will they have the same values??
They will have the same powers regardless of whether you agree with them or not.
Wait how so?
I remember the day we started bombing Iraq. Their vice-president (actual it was their president, but he was second in command to Saddam as the PM) was a Christian calling on the pope to help stop the war. After the war, things go so bad that we had to intervene a second time to stop the killing of Christians. Freedom of religion definitely took a hit, since the public at large didn’t support it. Was it worth it in that particular case to get rid of a dictator? Maybe, maybe not. He most likely would have fallen during the Arab spring - if it still occurred without our Iraq intervention.
My main point is the American public loves ‘freedom’, but you shouldn’t t expect it to follow democracy. Specially when popular leaders get elected claiming everything wrong with “country name” is because of “insert basic human right”.
When I look at Modi I see another Erdogan
It’s as if western style liberal democracy is an inherently unstable political system.
Bro you are literally shilling for China in another reply in this thread.
Yogthos cited nine sources and summarised the main theme running through them. Those sources included esteemed Western outputs. How is that shilling for China?
Just stating basic facts bro.
Totalitarians in either China or India are bad.
People in China say it’s a democratic country that represents their interests, but I’m sure a western chauvinist who’s never been to China knows a lot better than people living there.
You mean to say that the system that led to the Iraq war, the 2007-9 housing crisis, the unpreparedness for a predictable pandemic, and myriad other events of this kind – with no option for the ‘represented’ publics to prevent said events – is unstable? You might just be on to something.
In unrelated news, the Bank of England has raised interest rates with the stated intention of making homeowners poorer. About 20% poorer, I’m told. The board of the bank is unelected and the electorate have zero control over its decisions. The (unelected) Prime Minister appears to disagree with the decision but also has zero control over the board’s decisions.
The bank hopes that by making people poorer, inflation will come down – after two years – and workers will become so desperate that they are too scared to go on strike for a pay rise! This is all public knowledge because several interested parties said the quiet part out loud.
Don’t worry, though, Britain is a liberal democracy so the Brits can vote for different representatives in a year’s time. Well, those who survive will be able to vote. And nobody will be able to vote for the Bank of England board. But it’s still a democracy.
The board of the bank is unelected and the electorate have zero control over its decisions. The (unelected) Prime Minister appears to disagree with the decision but also has zero control over the board’s decisions.
This is more feature than bug in a central bank. Let’s say the US president had direct control over fiscal policy. The president says print money and drop the interest rate, the central bank says how much. It gets really tempting when reelection comes around to juice the economy. The negative consequences - inflation - take enough time to do their damage that people will already be going to the polls before they get hit.
The way the Bank of England gets its board does seem less than ideal, but not terrible as these things go. It’s kind of a run of the mill technocratic structure.
I’ll upvote this as it’s fair point, but my point was that liberal democracies cannot claim to be democratic if there is no real democratic oversight over such significant political decisions. The fact that this can be dismissed as part of a technocracy illustrates the point well, I think. So many people will lose their homes and hundreds of thousands/millions will see a dip in their living standards and no amount of the ‘democracy’ on offer (periodic voting) can change that. It makes a mockery of the concept and, as you say, it’s a feature not a bug of liberal democracy. We’re in full agreement about that!
As compared to?
Compared to China, Cuba, and Vietnam.
I’ll take “unstable” over “authoritarian” thanks.
Adorable that you think west isn’t authoritarian. Every government is fundamentally authoritarian because the government has the monopoly on violence, that’s where its authority comes from. And when people in western countries don’t behave the governments unleash their security forces on them as they did during George Floyd protests in US and they’re doing in France right now.
China does keep it’s slaves in line more… and their recent pushes for global imperial authority have had a lot of success.
It’s always amazing to see the wild fantasies westies believe about other countries.
No, I mean it, they really have taken the models of the British Empire and the American Empires and expanded them in a way neither at their heights could ever justify nor imagine. Surveillance system sales to authoritarian governments? Selling surveillance in other countries?! Like the CIA look like idiots spending money to get surveillance in other countries on that one. Plus they get to support the dictators keeping the peasants sending raw resources to China!
Purposely loaning money to countries with bad credit histories for leverage to get them to build ports for the Chinese empire’s trade network?! Britten spent so much time and money fighting wars, and colonizing just to be our shined on that.
And let’s not even get to started on the levels of control business have over workers there. The US robber barons use the State here looks like child’s play to the anti-union, anti-solidarity work done by the CCP. A giant union ran by the largest capitalist in the country? With authorities able to crack down on grassroots organizing on the opposite side, and the ability to send slaves from regions in need of “reeducation” all around the country. Makes the US look practically socialist on some fronts (we aren’t and have a good way to go).
Literally every word of that is a falsehood.
They aren’t loaning out money to have ports built? They don’t have a state run union? Their government isn’t filled with some of their richest? They don’t have a program reducate certain peoples that includes shipping them accross the country? Like come on, some of these are just established public facts that even the CCP doesn’t deny.
can you even call it a democracy anymore?
Of course not. India used to be secular. the far right Hindu extremism is taking over. Also it’s so good to be able to post this and not be trolled by pro Modi trolls. The amount of concentration of power due to lack of alternatives is so scary.
PS: I’m an Indian who now lives in Australia.
Just to clarify, the lack of alternatives creates a vaccine creating an almost defacto win for Modi et all. that’s the part of democracy collapsing
MODIcracy
Thank you for sharing this.
Says “World’s largest democracy” but it’s not about the PRC? India, unlike China, actually has something resembling pogroms against Muslims.
Because the PRC is not a democracy?
PRC has fewer people, regardless of it’s political structure.
PRC still has very slightly more, as far as I can tell. About 20 million more, 1.40something billion vs 1.42something billion.
Who gave you the opinion that the PRC is less of a democracy than India?
Who gave you the impression that the PRC is a democracy at all?
Now now, I asked you first ;)
But I would say that it was mainly the Chinese people who gave me that impression with their consistent and overwhelming approval of their government, and their majority view that it is indeed democratic. I know that any such heterodox claims will be dismissed out of hand, but I’ll still give you a shot.
I get that you’re an advocate of authoritan one party rulership and you’re free to call that democracy.
I’m not exactly a fan of liberal democracy but I value systems where the citizens have a high degree of influence on who governs them, the ability to freely create opposition parties and where state censorship and suppression are not openly advocated.
I’d be really happy if there was a living, successful alternative to the western style liberal democracies. Leninism or the particular capitalist system China has developed don’t seem very attractive to me.
You’re just operating on inherited opinions from western propaganda: https://www.newsweek.com/most-china-call-their-nation-democracy-most-us-say-america-isnt-1711176
The dictatorship of the bourgeoisie seen in America and elsewhere is a genuine dictatorship, where speech is only free so long as it is meaningless and has no reach. In reality, speech is controlled by corporations and billionaires who publish what they want published and censor on their platforms unilaterally. The fact that it’s corporations and not the government doing this is a distinction without a difference when these same corporations work with each other and control the government through lobbying, “consultant” positions, 6-figure “speaking fees”, etc.
You can always say that the respective other site is “just” operating on propaganda based opinions.
I’m not sure what point you’re trying to make by saying that people in China believe to be living in a democracy. So do the people living in liberal democracies, a system you yourself describe as a dictatorship. All that you’re proving is that people can be mistaken. Not which people - if any - actually are.
Without a clear definition of what one means by “democracy” it’s a pretty useless argument.
If you include freedom of assembly, free speech, a free press, free and secret elections and the other commonly valued parts of a western style democracy there’s really no question that China doesn’t even come close to qualifying.
The people in power in the West love the power the PRC has and do their best eroding the little power people here have to implement similar levels of surveillance and control where they don’t already exist.
I see only losers in this kind of competition.
Thought this would be about the US
It’s foreshadowing
“Oh no. Thats disgusting. Which one? There are like… sooo many.”
