Technically, in a democracy every issue is a referendum. Officials are few and with limited power. Whitman has suggested that a political system is a merely a prerequisite for democracy, and that in a democracy literature is simple and cheery. Viewing democracy as a social condition instead of a political system is preferable for AmCon, since America is a republic and not a democracy. However, Whitman’s particular variation of this idea is improbable self serving. By proclaiming literature as the most significant art form, he inflates himself to the herald of an age of literary giants. That golden age never came; Whitman himself started writing more nuanced works after the war, including a great deal of all the evils he say should never be mentioned in great literature. The US only became THE world leader after the cold war, that only lasted a few short decades. Our main cultural exports were movies and music—British books are at least as popular is American ones, even here in the US.
Speaking of Britain, Whitman seems to think that the only democratic nation is the US. Surely he had read the Magna Carta and the Declaration of the Rights of Man. It is nowadays found all over the world, spread as much by European democracies colonizing as by the US.
In this cultural democracy, democracies and republics are interchangeable. Though we usually vote for representatives, similar assumptions underlie both systems. Each vote is equal. Everybody in the relevant group gets to vote. Whichever person or decision gets the most votes wins. Take the process of electing a president as an example. The vote of someone from Wyoming counts for a lot more than of someone from California. However, each voter in a district of California has equal power to elect a representative. Thus the present system seems fair enough, and it hasn’t yet been changed.
It is impossible to escape the assumptions of the society we are born in, and democracy is embedded in every American. The Nobel Peace Prize this year went to a Chinese dissenter, Liu Xiaobo. As westerners with democratic ideals, the prize committee sympathized with the dissenter. The Chinese government, understandably, felt that giving Liu Xiaobo the prize made no sense whatsoever. How could a peace prize go to someone who was undermining progress in a perfectly peaceable country? At worst, democracy clouds our judgment and prevents us from seeing that there are other ways.
I mentioned this story in class already, but this time I’d like to highlight a different aspect of it. Pinochet offered a referendum on whether or not he should stay in power. The democratic culture in Chile was able to peacefully remove a violent dictator with military support from the US. Because we absorb democracy as children, everyone agrees on the gist of it, if not the details. Even Pinochet believed that if the majority was against him, he must be doing something wrong. The best aspect is that it provides a convention on how to decide things without conflict.
This way of deciding applies just as much to everyday life as to brand political movements. When my friends and I are debating what kind of pizza to buy, we usually take a vote. Because we all believe it’s best way to decide things, we rarely challenge the results. The Board of Regents elects the president of St. Olaf, and many day-to-day decisions are made by committees of faculty members who discuss and then vote on issues. Shareholders vote on the board of directors for a company, who elect the chief-whatevers-officers who actually run the company.
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