Democracy, for me, is such a tough thing to define. I found it especially difficult to define it in fewer than 25 words. To start I looked up a definition of Democracy from the Internet.
“Government by the people; a form of government in which the supreme power is vested in the people and exercised directly by them or by their elected agents under a free electoral system.”
I found this definition to be lacking direction; it’s too literal. I tried making several single sentence definitions that included the purpose of democracy. Here’s a couple.
Democracy is a system of government in which authority is collectively held by the people of a nation in order to protect the rights and equality of those people.
Democracy is a system of government that protects the interests and freedoms of the individual by giving the individual political representation.
I found my definitions of democracy always to contain key words of American Democracy: equality, freedom, liberty, rights, ect. I feel then my personal definition of democracy must be biased because it is being written from an American perspective. I think many other Americans also base their image of democracy on American ideals.
Perhaps this says something about how a successful democracy operates. Earlier we talked about how democracy needs to be developed by a nation not forced on it. How American democracy developed over 160 years in the American colonies. I wonder if a successful democracy can still develop in a globalized world.
Another challenge I found in defining democracy is that the term itself, democracy, is a very complicated concept. I feel it is easy too get either too vague or specific about what constitutes a democracy. For example what level of equality does a democracy require, can it have an extreme disparity between social and political classes, or contain a large host of socialized government institutions, or have a powerful level of national/political/military leadership and still be considered democratic. I find it hard to understand today, when the goal of many Americans is to globalize democracy, how we can label one nation democratic (in the American sense of the term) over another.
Evan, This is a record of just the struggle we want to be in this semester. Already you are on your way. Does it help if you limit your topic to American democracy? Certainly the challenge is to figure out the proper relationship between those key concepts. ("American democracy is a system of government built upon equality of rights and that promotes individual freedom by....") Keep at it! DeAne
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