Our Democracies have Failed

I was raised in a country that believes in a democratic selection process for governance. For those amazingly few people who do not know what I mean by that – I live in a country where people vote for political representation. All my life I have been told that this is the very best way to pick governance and that all other forms are garbage and not ’free’. That word came up a lot but are we free? Have we ever been free?

As I aged and went through life I reveled in the democratic process. I joined political parties, more than one actually, I also attended a few rallies and listened to all the dogma and speeches. But year after year, election after election and politician after politician it dawned on me that I was believing in one big deceptive bag of nonsense. Every election was like a repeat of the one before it – ‘vote for me because the other guy is bad’ is not a valid campaign slogan but so very many elections are won based on that simple statement alone. It began to dawn on me that most people are not engaged enough to make informed voter decisions and those that are usually wallow in the deceptions that are put before us by all political parties looking to win the popularity contest (sorry I meant ‘election’).

I came to understand that Politicians only know one thing and that is how to get themselves elected. They say whatever the voter wants to hear and then they do whatever they want afterwards while claiming they have full support for everything they do. They do not answer to us, the people, they answer to their contributors, usually rich people or corporations looking for government kickbacks. They do not tell you this during the election cycle of course. Most who voted for them had no real clue what they even believed in or what they would or would not do.

A big problem in a multi-party democracy is that you end up with governments that have less than 50% support. This always creates problems as many will stage protests against such a government. It also opens the doors for radicals as a radical can easily find 29% support for them in a country but getting 50% support is virtually impossible for any radical to do unless the choice has been forced onto the voters. This brings us to the two party democratic system. In this system you get governments with the illusion of 50% support - I say illusions as people are forced to ‘pick the lesser of two evils’ which is also a very bad place to be when voting. Many vote for one candidate simply because the other one is too bad to consider. This is not real support.

The problem is level of education. The less educated a person is the more likely they are to react instead of think. To win such people over all one has to do is convince them that the other guy is out to destroy their way of life - whether or not this is true is irrelevant as such people never ask follow up questions like ‘how?’ or ‘why?’ and simply react to what ever is said to them. Farmers in the US learned the hard way (probably not for the first time) what happens when you vote based on how you feel instead of what is real. I hear China got a deal on soya beans from Argentina. All because Farmers never completely understood exactly who they were voting for or never considered all the consequences. Billionaires are billionaires because they do not care about people. A billionaire will never relate to middle class people, even if they came from the middle class to begin with. Election after Election the wrong people get in. It is interesting that the smartest people in the world all seem to come from non democratic nations like China. Also interesting how the ‘freedom loving western democracies’ always try to stage a coup to change regimes in countries were the vote does not go their way. Anyone who thinks this is ‘for the people’ is just plain crazy at this point.

After all my observations I no longer believe in democracy. Especially not the current western version of it. The concept that ‘anyone’ can run for office is just flawed in the extreme. It is literally the only job in the world that has no qualifications at all other than being popular with the crowd. How many times have we had to deal with incompetent leadership because ‘anyone can run for office’? Virtually every democracy in the world today is run by deceptive incompetents living in someone else’s pocket. Elections are more like baseball games now – all for show with no substance. Politicians have degenerated into morally bankrupt incompetents only interested in winning the popularity contest they need to worry about every four years. Even so, the elections are limited to those people whom the contributors to political parties deem appropriate. In some European countries like Romania we even see politicians locked up simply for not towing the official line. This is not really what democracy is suppose to be. I may support democracy at some point in the future again but not until it is cleaned up. Restrictions (Qualifications) need to be placed on candidates to ensure they actually know how to run a country as leaving that up to the people to decide obviously fails miserably as the current crop of incompetent leaders demonstrates conclusively. Mandatory retirement ages also need to be set. What version of the future does a 84 year old man have anyways? Think about it.