May, 1. Comrades, let's celebrate!

[loftar]

At least, celebrate it.

Forgive me, but I'm not very inclined to celebrate a "holiday" that commemorates the international socialist movement.

The police were in the wrong to move against a protest that was, up until that point, peaceful.

Yes, of course. I cannot imagine that the words "Workingmen Arm Yourselves and Appear in Full Force!" printed on the flyers for the protest might have had anything to do with the appearance of the police.

The initial motivation for the protest was, incidentally, an unprovoked police attack on a group of striking workers.

You mean that unprovoked attack after "a group of workers surged to the gates to confront the strikebreakers" after several days where "workers continued to harass strikebreakers as they crossed the picket lines"? I might concede that it's hard to tell from the historical record whether the police attack could "really" be said to have been justified or not, but I would certainly understand any police officer with an itchy finger during that kind of situation.

oh my. what would you want loftar, other than the democratic society of which you are a part of?

A "democratic" society is one under the rule of the majority, which in many ways is the polar opposite of a free society. Interestingly, the word "democratic" held only negative connotations up until roughly the 19th century: just to take a few examples, Aristotle used the word to refer to the corrupted form of a constitutional society; and during the Philadelphia Convention, many constitutions were refused because they were considered too democratic.

In contrast, in the more ancient traditions of the Scandinavian peoples (and many other Germanic tribes), the law was held as something almost sacred and not to be changed for light and transient reasons*. To argue against democracy is not, however, the same as arguing against popular representation; but popular representation is, on the other hand, not the same as an omnipotent assembly. An important function of the king in our older forms of government (and of various other balances of power in other governments) was to prevent the popular representation from enacting laws that were not related to the running of what is the proper realm of government. It is arguable that such relative immutability of the law is equal in importance to the very contents of the law, because it means that the law can be fully understood, adapted to and invested in. In contrast, our modern "law" which changes from year to year or even from month to month erodes the respect for the law (since noone can even hope to grasp it or rely upon it). Of course, the only real reason why law these days needs to be updated constantly is because everything is being run by government, and law is the only instrument through which the government can run its operations. Also, the accompanying erosion of the immutability of the law also makes it more open for modification by majorities in spite of the traditional respect for minorities**.

It is interesting to note that both England and Sweden, which have shared not entirely dissimilar institutions of constitutional monarchy with popular representation in past centuries, have already gone through a phase where the popular assembly seized complete control of government (England during the "Commonwealth" era of 1649-1660 and Sweden during the "Age of Liberty" of 1718-1772 (during which the king was not actually deposed, but rendered completely powerless)). Both instances were fraught with power-hungry politicians and infringements on the freedoms of the public, and essentially the same things are happening in our present day. The same can likewise be said of the Soviet countries -- communism, too, is a fundamentally democratic movement. Democratic governments put complete faith in the "will of the people"*** and its elucidation by elected assemblies, and indeed to clear the path of this will, they attempt to remove every obstacle to it (including balances of power), the consequence of which is just that it makes it ridiculously easy for dangerous demagogues to rise to power by manipulating the voters. It is not Cromwells, Lenins or Stalins which lead to the downfall of commonwealths and socialist republics -- it is democratic government which leads to the rise of Cromwells, Lenins and Stalins.

* "Siunde articulus ær þet, æt kununger skal [...] al gamul suerikis lagh, þeem sum almoghin hauer meþ goþuilia ok samþykkio viþer takit ok staþfæst [...] halda ok styrkia ok væria" -- From the supreme law of Magnus Eriksson of ~1350, freely translatable as "The seventh article is that Kings shall strengthen and protect all ancient Swedish law, that which the public with good will has agreed upon and enacted." (Emphasis mine.) Similar passages can be found in countless provincial laws of the same, earlier and later eras.

**Various collections of parliamentary procedure have a lot to say about the importance of "harmony of action" and the right of minorities not to be respectlessly outvoted, but one citation from Robert's Rules of Order (1876) speaks loads about the effects of democracy upon Congress: "On account of the party lines being so strictly drawn in Congress, no such thing as harmony of action is possible, and it has been found best to give a bare majority in the House of Representatives (but not in the Senate) the power to take final action upon a question without allowing of any discussion."

***The very notion of the "will of the people" is absurd, of course. No unified will of the people can exist, because "the people" is made up of individuals with very different wills. The attempt to lump them all together into a "collective will" just makes the collectivist foundations of democratic government all the more obvious.

[cobaltjones]

Here's and interesting article about the downfalls of democracy in present day society that I think you'd like.

[Jackard]

whoa i didnt know there was a holiday for walls of text

[Markoff_Chaney]

Whoa. I just realized who you are, Loftar. You're one of the guys responsible for this awesome little game. Before I go back to arguing politics, I'd like to thank you for that.

Okay. Back to politics:

The police were in the wrong to move against a protest that was, up until that point, peaceful.

Yes, of course. I cannot imagine that the words "Workingmen Arm Yourselves and Appear in Full Force!" printed on the flyers for the protest might have had anything to do with the appearance of the police.

According to the wikipedia article, that phrase was omitted from the final draft. And the speakers at the protest appear to have done everything possible to urge non-violence. In any case, I don't think it's useful to re-litigate blame for Haymarket. Leftist groups have traditionally taken the position that the Chicago police were in the wrong. My point was that the actions of the Soviet bloc were not consistent with the leftists' own claim that May Day commemorates the struggle against unjust oppression. So it didn't make much sense for DeBosh to use Soviet propaganda to celebrate May Day, unless he was posting it for kitsch value.

Democracy is bad. [MC: paraphrased for brevity]

Your point about the "tyranny of the majority" is well taken. I've argued that point myself. But that isn't an argument against all the forms a democratic society could take. It's just an argument against the most extreme form of democracy.

Unless you're an anarcho-capitalist, you probably think that government has some functions it ought to perform. Personally, as a libertarian capitalist, I think that the government ought to maintain a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence (and not much else). If a government is going to exercise this authority, then citizens should have some influence on the process. This would require a democratic mechanism of some sort.

[loftar]

My point was that the actions of the Soviet bloc were not consistent with the leftists' own claim that May Day commemorates the struggle against unjust oppression.

On the other hand, it might be said to be consistent with hatred for the bourgeois, which is pretty much all that the Soviets can be meaningfully said to have been consistent about. ;)

If a government is going to exercise this authority, then citizens should have some influence on the process. This would require a democratic mechanism of some sort.

You will kindly note me arguing above how popular representation does not equal democracy. It seems that we have less differences than might at first have been imagined, so let me turn the discussion around a bit: I think "democracy" as a term is a poor choice of wording to use, because it implies almost only bad things. I think it suffices for me to quote von Kuehnelt-Leddihn on the matter:

As a matter of fact, the vast majority of the population of the United States uses it [the word "Democracy] to denote anything at random with which they agree in the realm of politics, social life, and economics. We will only quote a few examples:

Mr. Green, the millionaire, shakes hands with workers. He is "democratic." (He is, as a matter of fact, demophil, but not democratic which latter word is derived from demos, the [common] people, and krátos, power.)
Mr. Gray protests against censorship as undemocratic. (Censorship may be illiberal — against freedom — but not necessarily against the majority.)
Mr. Black is against Negro lynching, denouncing it as undemocratic. (As soon as the majority of a township wants to hang a Negro this action is un-Christian, illegal, but certainly very democratic.)
Mr. Red extols the icebox and the shower as the pillar of our "democratic life." (This is plain nonsense but of frequent occurrence.)

Finally one and the same thing can be considered to be democratic and undemocratic at the same time: for instance, the New Deal, Tuxedo Club, Presidential acts, prices of fur coats, British accents, China,
Russia, England — all according to individual likes and dislikes. Communists call their creed "streamlined democracy" or "Twentieth-Century Americanism."

We see, then, from the plurality of present-day connotations of democracy that it would be thoroughly unjustified to use the term "democracy" in any other sense than in the classical and universal one. We may well agree that the mischief started by uneducated popularizers has already reached such proportions that a Hercules is needed to clean this Augian stable of popular misconceptions, false labels, and mispresented ideologies. Even some of the more intelligent writers have become a prey to popular pressure, and as modern intellectuals do not lead the masses any more, but follow them and subordinate their ideas and language to the demands of the market, the confusion has now reached its climax.

If anything, I would argue that "Democratic" has basically taken on the meaning of "Egalitarian". Which is, of course, only yet another reason to avoid it.

Unless you're an anarcho-capitalist, you probably think that government has some functions it ought to perform. Personally, as a libertarian capitalist, I think that the government ought to maintain a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence (and not much else).

If anything, I would argue that the greatest problem with both of those stances are the fact that they are basically revolutionary -- adherents propose to create a new society ex nihilo, disregarding preexisting culture and popular convictions, which must by necessity fail. They may be useful as abstract principles guiding the formation of a government, but noone can create a society, and I would argue that even proposing to do so is dangerous; most importantly because attempting to do so erodes people's belief in and respect for precedents (and a society without cultural precedents is too empty to act as a guide for inter-personal relations) from which also springs the respect for the immutability of law. (This is also what I mind the most about the writings of Ayn Rand.) This is why I take quite conservative stances in many political issues: Monarchy may not be the ultimate form of government, but it is one for which we have tons of precedent, and it has worked quite fine in the past (leftist historical revision aside).

I leave you with a quote of Metternich, on the subject of the liberal revolutions to impose British parliamentary forms in southern Europe (and a small wink on the applicability of the same quote on the present-day revolutions in the Arabic countries):

A people who can neither read nor write, whose last word is the dagger — fine material for constitutional principles! [...] The English constitution is the work of centuries [...] There is no universal recipe for constitutions.

[Koru]

At least, celebrate it.

Forgive me, but I'm not very inclined to celebrate a "holiday" that commemorates the international socialist movement.

Actually, nobody cares about that anymore. If you forget about all the politics, there is a nice day to go out for a picnic. Even if you do it everyday or often, most ppl just need an excuse for that, for example Labour Day. Every reason to celebrate is a good reason .

[Markoff_Chaney]

The very notion of the "will of the people" is absurd, of course. No unified will of the people can exist, because "the people" is made up of individuals with very different wills. The attempt to lump them all together into a "collective will" just makes the collectivist foundations of democratic government all the more obvious.

[...] adherents propose to create a new society ex nihilo, disregarding preexisting culture and popular convictions, which must by necessity fail. They may be useful as abstract principles guiding the formation of a government, but noone can create a society, and I would argue that even proposing to do so is dangerous; most importantly because attempting to do so erodes people's belief in and respect for precedents (and a society without cultural precedents is too empty to act as a guide for inter-personal relations) from which also springs the respect for the immutability of law.

How can culture act as a guide if people have no coherent collective identity?

Useless semantics.

Meh. Words can have multiple definitions. Mr. Ritter acknowledges this, implicitly, by explaining what the word democracy "actually" meant in each example. The meaning of an utterance is somewhere between what it was intended to mean and what it was interpreted to mean. Context clues help, but language ain't an exact science.

[ArvinJA]

At least, celebrate it.

Forgive me, but I'm not very inclined to celebrate a "holiday" that commemorates the international socialist movement.

Actually, nobody cares about that anymore. If you forget about all the politics, there is a nice day to go out for a picnic. Even if you do it everyday or often, most ppl just need an excuse for that, for example Labour Day. Every reason to celebrate is a good reason .

This is what happens in Sweden. Ugly people gather and start talking about class warfare and stuff like that. It's not pleasant at all.

[Potjeh]

Yeah, shame the good ol' king isn't running things nowadays, else we'd throw all that riff-raff onto galleons.

[pyrale]

This is what happens in Sweden. Ugly people gather and start talking about class warfare and stuff like that. It's not pleasant at all.

Man, it's so sad to live in sweden . People using their free speech right is really disgusting.
I mean, if you were living in somalia you could order your militia to shoot them atleast. Fuck yea, that would be true freedom.