A Quote by Elif Safak
I am very worried about this concentration of power, and it's not only because of Erdogan. We have the ballot box, but we don't have the culture of democracy. The government says: You see, we have the majority, we're entitled to do anything we want. But that's not democracy, that's majoritarianism.
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In a democracy, supposedly we hold power by what we do at the ballot box, so therefore the more we know about political power the better our choices should be and the better, in theory, our democracy should be.
Liberals are concerned about the concentration of wealth because it almost inevitably leads to a concentration of power that undermines democracy.
Democracy is defended in 3 stages. Ballot Box, Jury Box, Cartridge Box.
The problem of the world today is the people talk on and on about democracy, freedom, justice. But I don't give a damn about democracy if I am worried about survival.
I call government that works the best for people open society, which is basically just another more general term for a democracy that is - you call it maybe a liberal democracy. It's not only majority rule but also respect for minorities and minority opinions and the rule of law. So it's really a sort of institutional democracy.
I am a Mexican. The United States lived seventy-five years with the one party system in Mexico - the PRI - without batting an eyelid, never demanding democracy of Mexico. Democracy came because Mexicans fought for democracy and made a democracy out of our history, our possibilities, our perspectives. Democracy is not something that can be exported like Coca-Cola. It has to be bred from the inside, according to the culture, the conditions of each country.
There are ways to pursue political change. In a democracy, it's through the ballot box. There are other ways, and many democracies have many different systems of democracy.
Democracy, or "majority rules," is another trick of our society to force us to do things we don't want to do. Even if we actually lived in a pure democracy (and the system we do live in is not even close), where everyone got a single vote on every subject, forcing the minority to obey the majority is no different to one man, if he had the power, forcing everyone else to do what he wanted them to-simply because he could.
The problem is that democracy is not freedom. Democracy is simply majoritarianism, which is inherently incompatible with real freedom. Our founding fathers clearly understood this.
Democracy is more than a ballot box.
The beauty of our democracy lies in the American value of equality: if you vote, you have a seat at the table. If you speak, you have a chance to persuade others. A billionaire and a minimum wage earner have the same power at the ballot box.
In capitalist society we have a democracy that is curtailed, wretched, false, a democracy only for the rich, for the minority. The dictatorship of the proletariat, the period of transition to communism, will for the first time create democracy for the people, for the majority, along with the necessary suppression of the exploiters, of the minority.
Everybody says, "Well, if it's a democracy, let them have nuclear weapons." America is the only country that has ever used nuclear weapons. We're the only ones, this democracy, our great democracy.
And the principle which distinguishes democracy from all other forms of government is that in a democracy the opposition not only is tolerated as constitutional but must be maintained because it is in fact indispensable.
Well, it all began with Democracy. Before we had the vote all the power was in the hands of rich people. If you had money you could get health care, education, look after yourself when you were old, and what democracy did was to give the poor the vote and it moved power from the marketplace to the polling station, from the wallet...to the ballot.
So I think that if we want to have a Congress, if we want to have government that looks like America, if we want to have government that is truly a representative Democracy, then we need to clearly address how we get our campaign laws out of the way of Democracy.
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