The real apartheid state.

[timtofly]

Why not just sit down and look at why the US is so pluralistic?

 

[Masada]

I have to agree with NWAG. Pluralism doesn't work in the context of political systems that often empowered only a very small minority of the population to vote.

 

[Tahuti]

Yet political pluralism and democracy as we understand it in modern times are essentially the same things. Many hints of political uniformity in democracies is actually more indicative of being able to deal with political differences rather than actually suppression of pluralism. For instance, the grassroots wings of the Democrats and GOP are actually highly diverse, even if that is hidden by the fact that they appear as two parties.

 

[Masada]

So NWAG was right, Democracies didn't value political pluralism until modern times whenever the hell that is.

 

[Neverwonagame3]

I never disputed that nowadays democracy and political pluralism tend to go hand in hand. I'm just pointing out it wasn't always like that.

 

[Flying Pig]

Bear in mind that democracy and nationalism were quite entangled in the nineteenth century, when most of Europe's democracies emerged - the notion of getting rid of kings went hand in hand with an ideal community which was, by and large, homogeneous. It's not difficult to imagine that people who wanted France, Italy, Germany or wherever to be culturally and ethnically uniform would have had little trouble translating that logic to political beliefs.

That said, 'pluralism' may well be a relative term: yes, the level of political diversity in the Roman senate was markedly smaller than the diversity in 1945's House of Commons, but that didn't mean that there were no ideological conflicts, quite the reverse. Minority representation only forbids pluralism in those issues which unite the minority in question. Obviously, if only men are allowed to vote, then there are unlikely to be strong groups in Parliament supporting the interests of women, but there could be a great variation in beliefs reflecting the interests of different sub-groups of men.

As for Liberia, was it not founded as a place to send liberated slaves, much like Israel was founded as Jewish homeland? It also seems as if this constitutional relic is far from unconditionally accepted in Liberia.

 

[timtofly]

It seems that people used to be presented with an idea and then voted on it. Now that more people can think they present their idea and then convince others to vote on it. Pluralism happens because an idea has a binary vote.

If people really want to live by the "ideas" that every single person wants other people to vote on, that is not pluralism. That is just the presentation of millions of ideas to vote on.

 

[Neverwonagame3]

Bear in mind that democracy and nationalism were quite entangled in the nineteenth century, when most of Europe's democracies emerged - the notion of getting rid of kings went hand in hand with an ideal community which was, by and large, homogeneous. It's not difficult to imagine that people who wanted France, Italy, Germany or wherever to be culturally and ethnically uniform would have had little trouble translating that logic to political beliefs.

That said, 'pluralism' may well be a relative term: yes, the level of political diversity in the Roman senate was markedly smaller than the diversity in 1945's House of Commons, but that didn't mean that there were no ideological conflicts, quite the reverse. Minority representation only forbids pluralism in those issues which unite the minority in question. Obviously, if only men are allowed to vote, then there are unlikely to be strong groups in Parliament supporting the interests of women, but there could be a great variation in beliefs reflecting the interests of different sub-groups of men.

As for Liberia, was it not founded as a place to send liberated slaves, much like Israel was founded as Jewish homeland? It also seems as if this constitutional relic is far from unconditionally accepted in Liberia.

This doesn't change the fact that Pluralism did not exist as a cultural idea in the modern sense, nor was it considered important. In ancient Rome and the United States, factions were outright looked down upon as a bad thing. In France, the predominant idea was the 'general will', not a diversity of opinion.

 

[timtofly]

This doesn't change the fact that Pluralism did not exist as a cultural idea in the modern sense, nor was it considered important. In ancient Rome and the United States, factions were outright looked down upon as a bad thing. In France, the predominant idea was the 'general will', not a diversity of opinion.

So it would seem that pluralism only happens when individuals assert their personal opinions on the will of the majority.

 

[Borachio]

No. I'd say pluralism is the sign of a mature democracy recognizing that the opinions of minorities need some protection from the tyranny of the majority.

It's the expression of the majority view that all opinions are, like, just opinions.

Maybe.

 

[Flying Pig]

This doesn't change the fact that Pluralism did not exist as a cultural idea in the modern sense, nor was it considered important. In ancient Rome and the United States, factions were outright looked down upon as a bad thing. In France, the predominant idea was the 'general will', not a diversity of opinion.

I will give you that George Washington opposed political parties, but that is not the same as opposing groups of people with different beliefs. Even if ancient Rome 'looked down upon' factions - and I think you really need to justify that one! - it still produced the Gracchi, Cicero and Augustus within one human lifetime, which certainly gives it a more diverse political culture than just about any modern-day democracy. What you said about France is the subject of my first paragraph; that where the champions of democracy are also the champions of nationalism, it's unlikely that the democracy will place primacy on a diversity of opinion. However, the fact that a phenomenon is not recognised nor considered important does not preclude its existence. Newton did not invent gravity, after all.

 

[Cutlass]

This doesn't change the fact that Pluralism did not exist as a cultural idea in the modern sense, nor was it considered important. In ancient Rome and the United States, factions were outright looked down upon as a bad thing. In France, the predominant idea was the 'general will', not a diversity of opinion.

Some Americans looked down on faction. In theory. Yet Jefferson and Madison were creating a faction while Washington was still in the president's office. Years before Washington retired, in fact. Which by default left Hamilton as the opposing faction, because Washington himself tried to stay out of that game. Except that Washington was knowingly onboard with the Hamiltonian program. So while Jefferson and Madison did not dare directly break with Washington, they still acted to undermine him.

So it's not fair to say that there was ever a time without faction in American politics. There were just a few brief intervals where faction was not an open problem.

 

[Masada]

We're all really talking about the views of a bunch of dead white landowning men like that represented a genuine diversity of opinions and worldviews of the kind we like to imagine our current political system captures. Hah.

 

[Flying Pig]

Our current House of Commons has three main political parties, all of which are run by middle-class white men and all of which share so many policies that an observer used to those 'dead white landowning men' would pronounce them ideologically identical. There are two people who can potentially hold the office of Prime Minister after the next election, and they read the same subject at the same university. I think we deceive ourselves into thinking that our system is more diverse than it is.

Let's examine that. When were all men allowed to vote? How about women? When were seats apportioned fairly? When did the House of Lords cease to be a playground of the hereditary peers? &etc. We can go on. But let's not kid ourselves, early democracies were not interested in pluralism.

My mistake - I said from the outset, I think, that they were not 'interested' in it because the idea didn't really exist. No early democracy was designed with the view to create pluralistic discourse. That said, it can be understood to have existed at several points in history, in early and barely-functioning democracies, along certain ideological lines. Wherever ideological groups necessarily have to compete and vie for influence, with no one group able to dominate the system, then there is pluralism. Of course, as you rightly point out, there was never meaningful pluralism on 'the woman question', or 'the hereditary peers question', or anything of that nature, but there were huge differences of opinion on things such as protectionism, colonial slavery, industrial regulation, and so on.

Even then, do you really think that our current system captures 'a genuine diversity of opinions and worldviews'? It's certainly the case that Westminster, Capitol Hill or wherever you care to mention plays host to far fewer of those than the countries that these places purport to govern. What proportion of the people's opinions does the legislature have to acknowledge before it becomes pluralistic? I note, for example, that something like 8% of the British public voted UKIP in the last election, and they don't have a single voice in Parliament.

 

[Masada]

Hi,

Let's examine that. When were all men allowed to vote? How about women? When were seats apportioned fairly? When did the House of Lords cease to be a playground of the hereditary peers? &etc. We can go on. But let's not kid ourselves, early democracies were not interested in pluralism.

 

[Mouthwash]

How about actually defend your comments rather than dismiss all criticism

This is what I mean: http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articl...ity_tells_us_about_syria#sthash.3cCrB2Pa.dpbs

 

[Tahuti]

But let's not kid ourselves, early democracies were not interested in pluralism.

Note that I did not imply such either.

Simple majority rule is naïve democracy, or populist democracy... The larger the majorities involved, the more political pluralism is allowed, the more democratic a country is.

 

[Masada]

We're not talking about "simple majorities" though, we're talking about the majority of an often tiny very unrepresentative minority.

 

[Tee Kay]

I feel we need to define both democracy and pluralism. Sounds like people are talking about different things.

 

[Flying Pig]

I always took pluralism to refer to a diverse distribution of power. Different groups of opinion exist, and balance so that any decision has to be a compromise. At least, it will inevitably be influenced by more than one of the different ideological groups. Hence the current House of Commons is basically pluralistic, while this was not really the case in 1997. It also implies, to a lesser extent, a way of conceptualising power as multipolar, rather than stemming from one particular source. By extension, government becomes a process of mediation between different interest groups, rather than a ruler dictating to his subjects.

Democracy's a tricky one, but the a good working definition is Lincoln's 'government of the people, by the people, for the people'. There are degrees of democracy, for sure, but a reasonable acid test would be that the constitution and policies of the government are generally supported by most of the people. However, it's theoretically possible for a benign dictatorship to achieve this: China may be an example. So a democracy has to regularly seek the people's mandate - in the West, by regular elections - and have some means of allowing the people to bring new ideas into the discussion. For us, this means referendums on certain issues, as well as making it as easy as possible for anybody to stand for election or form a party.