Democracy™ Is Bullshit
I live in an Asia’s oldest democracy and right now we have a completely unelected President and a despised Parliament, and this is apparently democracy. Democracy™, a marketing exercise atop rank oligarchic evisceration. In our country, the ruling oligarchs are crushing the poor and selling off the country to foreign bondholders. It’s a farce and Sri Lanka isn’t unique in our system failure.
Pakistan is suffering under a coup government, as is Peru, as was Ukraine, no one even knows which way is up anymore. Elections are heads they win, tails they lose, and if the coin lands on its side, they just flip the whole table. The UK — the birthplace of Parliamentary democracy — is on its third unelected Prime Minister and in the US, well that’s the biggest shitshow in town. This was posited as the way we were supposed to develop to get rich and happy, but these people are all increasingly impoverished and miserable.
I use the term Democracy™ to cover all these disasters even though democracy is a philosophically much wider term. If talk to Aristotle (via his book On Politics) democracy would include more popular systems like China’s or Singapore’s, as he said, “some persons think that there is only one species both of democracy and oligarchy; but this is not true.” Under Democracy™ the variety…
