Criticism of democracy
[8] The influence of the ancient critiques of democracy is seen in how Madison spent the months before the Constitutional Convention "studying many centuries of political philosophy and histories of past attempts at republican forms of government".
[6] Thucydides, the famous ancient Greek historian of the Peloponnesian War, witnessed the fall of Athenian democracy and applied scientific history in his critique of the democratic government.
[10] At the heart of his critique were how democracy failed "in the search for truth" and how leaders and citizens attempted "to impose their own speech-dependent meanings on reality".
[10] Thucydides blamed "public orators" and demagogues for a failure of epistemic knowledge, allowing most Athenians to "believe silly things about their past and the institutions of their opponents".
Political leaders in Singapore and China, such as Lee Kuan Yew, have said Confucianism provides a more "coherent ideological basis for a well-ordered Asian society than Western notions of individual liberty".
[6] Medieval Jewish political philosophy was influenced by Plato, Muslim thought, and Halakhic concepts and was "monarchist, and inherently anti-democratic.
But neither is it hard to find them in Western classics: One has only to reflect on the writings of Plato or Aquinas to see that devotion to discipline is not a special Asian taste.
"[15] Thomas Hobbes, one of the first philosophers of the Enlightenment, published Leviathan in 1651 in defense of "absolute sovereignty" and supporting the royalists in the English Civil War.
[17] Later Enlightenment thinkers, such as Madison, who shared Hobbesian concerns about "the strongest passions and most dangerous weaknesses" of human nature, would use some of these critiques to improve modern democracy.
[18][8] Romantic critics of democracy include Thomas Carlyle, John Ruskin, Matthew Arnold, James Fitzjames Stephen, Henry Maine, and William Lecky.
The three doctrines were "most perfectly represented in Plato's Republic," while classical history seemed to provide examples of "the common man's inferiority" as in the cases of Athens and Rome, "which showed the populace turning to disorder".
[citation needed] According to Boaventura de Sousa Santos, "democracy is being so emptied of content that it can be instrumentally defended by those who use it in order to destroy it," saying that individuals calling for increased democratization and protection from fascism are labeled as leftists.
[22] De Sousa Santos says that while the Western world displays its support for democracy, its approval of governments being overthrown is a double standard.
Methods such as false flags, counterterrorism-laws,[25] planting or creating compromising material and perpetuation of public fear may be used to suppress dissent.
Manin draws from James Harrington, Montesquieu, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau to suggest that the dominant form of government, representative as opposed to direct, is effectively aristocratic.
As far as Rousseau is concerned, elections favor the incumbent government officials or the citizens with the strongest personalities, which results in hereditary aristocracy.
Additionally, Manin is interested in explaining the discrepancy between 18th-century American and French revolutionaries' declaration of the "equality of all citizens" and their enactment of (aristocratic) elections in their respective democratic experiments.
The giving and receiving of bribes, the threat or use of violence, treatment, and impersonation are common ways that the electoral process can be corrupted,[33] meaning that democracy is not impenetrable from external problems and can be criticized for allowing it to take place.
[45][46] Professors Richard Ellis of Willamette University and Michael Nelson of Rhodes College argue that much constitutional thought, from Madison to Lincoln and beyond, has focused on "the problem of majority tyranny".
They conclude, "The principles of republican government embedded in the Constitution represent an effort by the framers to ensure that the inalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness would not be trampled by majorities".
[citation needed] Arrow's impossibility theorem suggests that winner-take-all elections (unlike multi-winner voting such as proportional representation) can be logically incoherent.
But intrigued and curious about this little hole, researchers, not deterred by the possibly irrelevant, began digging in the ground nearby...What they now appear to have been uncovering is a gigantic cavern into which fall almost all of our ideas about social actions.
[61]: 60–64 According to Wang Zhongyuan of Fudan University, this critique arises as part of a post-1990s trend in which various countries have sought to redefine "democracy" in ways that differ from Western multi-party democratic systems.
[66] Chinese policymakers argue that policy under democratic systems is largely restricted to ad hoc interventions which leaves social development vulnerable to market forces.
[67]: 144–145 Chinese planners argue that such interventions are incapable of coping with fundamental challenges such as environmental degradation, dysfunction in capital markets, and demographic change.
[67]: 145 James M. Buchanan and Richard E. Wagner argue that the nontransparent nature of tax system causes a fiscal illusion which results in greater government spending than democratically expected.
According to him, with a budget of $600,000, he led a team of hackers that stole campaign strategies, manipulated social media to create false waves of enthusiasm and derision, and installed spyware in opposition offices to help Enrique Peña Nieto, a right-of-center candidate, win the election.
[77] They criticized the FBI for announcing that the agency would examine potentially incriminating evidence against Hillary Clinton's use of a private email server just 11 days before the US election.
The 20th-century Italian thinkers Vilfredo Pareto and Gaetano Mosca (independently) argued that democracy was illusory, and served only to mask the reality of elite rule.
[92] Charles Maurras, a supporter of the Vichy regime and member of the far-right FRS of the Action Française movement believed in biological inequality and natural hierarchies, and claimed that the individual is naturally subordinated to social collectivities such as the family, the society, and the state, which he claims are doomed to fail if based upon the "myth of equality" or "abstract liberty".
