Timeline for What's the most likely "post democracy" form of political government?
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12 events
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| Nov 5, 2015 at 18:39 | comment | added | Jim2B | I don't personally completely accept either linear or circular progression of such things. I was pointing out that this was one idea that's been around for a while and it makes a great deal of sense. As @JoeBloggs, I think the reality is substantially messier than a simple cyclical or linear progression. The humans involved often take detours and bend the heck out of that circle. The general concept still holds. People always want more and are always trading some things for others. Eventually that trading bites them in the butt. When the bite hurts enough, they do something about it. | |
| Nov 5, 2015 at 9:15 | comment | added | goldilocks | You missed the connotation in the question (and reality) that "representational" democracy is only one potential form of democracy, and in keeping with the orthodox Western linear conception of history as progress (a purely cyclical, revolution based vision of history does not fit well with the actual record), it is easily conceivable that we might look back at representational democracy as toward the "least" end of a spectrum representing attitudes toward democratic governing. I.e., the beginning of something less tyrannical, but still pretty tyrannical, when you get past the hyperbole. | |
| Nov 4, 2015 at 15:02 | comment | added | gerrit | @Jim2B Apart from discussion on where the US fits in, this model fails to account for the many (European) countries that went from tyranny to democracy without ever experiencing a revolution. but rather by monarchy and aristocracy step by step relinquishing their formal power (perhaps fearing a revolution). Most of the constitutional monarchies are like this. | |
| Nov 4, 2015 at 14:52 | comment | added | Jim2B | @gerrit, you are correct, blacks and women were granted liberty without having to go through revolution. Natives were never under US government control and so each tribe is in a different state of the cycle. | |
| Nov 4, 2015 at 14:41 | comment | added | gerrit | @Luaan US "from 10 o'clock"? Unless you're native, black, or female, you mean. | |
| Nov 4, 2015 at 10:23 | comment | added | Joe Bloggs | @Crissov: Mathematically speaking, if you have enough circles you can describe a spiral. Now I really want a Spirograph to play with. | |
| Nov 4, 2015 at 9:59 | comment | added | Luaan | @Crissov Well, the US was brutally imperialistic during most of its existence, with a lot of nationalistic fervour - I guess the same might apply to plenty of the old european monarchies. There was always a lot of power and money to gain from warring with your neighbours (the whole west coast, Texas, indjuns...). It might be a (temporary) stabilising factor. | |
| Nov 4, 2015 at 9:49 | comment | added | Crissov | @Luaan Yeah, that’s the “somewhat erratic” part. The US, in contrast, have now taken almost 250 years to get from 10 o’clock to somewhere between 2 and 7 o’clock (depending on whom you ask) on the Tytler cycle. I don’t think it’s actually supposed to be linearly chronographic, just schematic. | |
| Nov 4, 2015 at 9:30 | comment | added | Luaan | @Crissov Are you sure the radius is getting larger? I'd expect the exact opposite over human history. Even in the former Warshaw Pact, many of the individual countries went through multiple revolutions in the freedom<->tyranny wheel. Hereditary monarchies seem to be by far the most stable in the big picture, usually going for centuries without government change, and even then often changing just the dynasty, not the form of government. Both ancient and modern republics seem rather fragile in comparison. | |
| Nov 3, 2015 at 19:40 | comment | added | Crissov | When it comes to history, I don’t subscribe to circles. I rather think of it as a (somewhat erratic) spiral, so with every revolution (i.e. turn) the radius gets larger, and hopefully it’s like the lituus approaching a stable state. | |
| Nov 3, 2015 at 17:23 | history | edited | Jim2B | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
corrected spelling, fixed grammar
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| Nov 3, 2015 at 16:34 | history | answered | Jim2B | CC BY-SA 3.0 |