Here's a political cartoon:
Do you agree?
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This blog is dedicated to ethical debates regarding Just War Theory and the Profession of Arms as well as other issues of philosophical and ethical interest. Its primary contributors are future Air Force Officers currently attending the Air Force Academy. The views expressed in this blog are solely the opinions of the individual authors and not of the United States Air Force nor the Department of Defense.
7 comments:
Actually, I sort of do. Democracy is not what it used to be, especially here in America. The founders based the constitution on assumptions like the fact that the citizens of this country would stay involved. Alexis de Tocqueville, a famous writer in democracy studied the American system at length, and developed many theories for how democracy would survive. His greatest fear was that the people would start to settle for letting a larger central government lead them. He called it "soft despotism." Additionally, he said this springs from the want for both equality and liberty, but always equality, something that makes Democracy unique. In Europe, it is easy to see what Tocqueville was speaking to. Many countries there always aim things to the common denominator, eliminating any competition. They rely on the government for almost everything. This was not what Tocqueville, or the founding fathers saw for Democracy. As Americans continue to settle, and hand over more control to their central government, who about half of us deign to elect every election, democracy slips a little more into the soft despotism that he warned of. Soft despotism takes the power from the people. It also destroys everything that democracy was founded on. Tocqueville says to stop this from happening; Americans rely on associations, groups of citizens getting together, not necessarily to talk about politics, but just to see each other. More and more today that doesn’t happen. Tocqueville also stresses the equality of men and women, but the importance of different roles. He says women play a quintessential role in the home raising the children with high morals. The mores of the American people is one of the things that is essential to a strong democracy. In today’s society, women do not play that same role. More likely than not, women will be out in the work force, and the children will be at daycare, developing mores from T.V. and video games rather than their family. The future of democracy as it is written today looks bleak. Looking to Europe, you see a society that has a negative growth rate, they rely on immigration from of Muslims to keep Europe populated. Looking to America, you see the seeds of disaster sown in the ever growing power of the central government and the lack of political participation and associations in the American public.
smurf goes into more detail than I was thinking of going into, but I like that he did.
I was just going to say that even though Democracy is a separate concept from the Right to Know they go hand-in-hand (over time).
In our case, little things were kept from us to "protect" us from ourselves and what that includes has grown and grown. Now there are many behind-the-fog policies that really should be part of the public knowledge (for example: Gitmo, until it was brought to our knowledge). How many things are going on that we don't have knowledge of?
Now it's as if we're not a Democracy in some respects, but (like smurf) I attribute it to lack of effort on our part, not the government working behind-the-scenes.
Do the People in a democracy need to know what is going on? Can we just lock it up and throw a way the key and hope that democracy will prevail? Are you kidding? Democracy only functions if the People know what is functioning. The founding fathers made sure that this was a republic in which the citizens of this great nation would stay involved. This is not the case anymore. The citizenry does not even come out to vote. We leave the very viable thing we have in a democracy in the hands of those people who can do the worst with it. If we give up our rights to know, and our freedom of information, we are no better than China or Cuba.
I agree with the importance of access to information and the preservation of democracy. Perhaps I'm just one of those dark government agents who doesn't think citizens need to know all in every situation. While this is trivial, the agent in Men in Black describes Americans preferring not to know what goes on. I believe there is a certain weight to this statement. Intelligence and military activities, in our history, have often exceeded "acceptable" boundaries as set by the American government and people. Is this wrong? Perhaps, but it is indeed a complex issue. I still constantly wrestle with the issue of torture and the validity of its use in modern practices. The global war on terror has provided a blanket of powers for operations in the name of national security. It is the duty of each American to find the balance between power, knowledge, security, and secrecy.
I do feel that the cartoon is fairly accurate to a degree... there is lots of information that is kept from the public. I am not sure if this is right or wrong. To an extent, information has to be kept from the public or else our plans would not remain secret and they would be ineffective. I think that too much information is held from the public at times. People should be able to make decisions on issues that they could fully understand without having to know secret information that would hinder our progress. If the public would not be able to make a sound choice based on the knowledge that could be provided, then they should not know.
I am not going to argue about the specific acts of the current administration that probably brought about the cartoons, but I will speak to the idea of information and democracy being linked. I, like most of the previous bloggers, believe that the two are closely related. Unlike authoritarian governments, people in democracies should have relatively free access to information because their government is deriving its ability to govern from them. However, there is a limit to peoples right to know, and just because some of those rights have been abridged, does not mean that democracy will soon be fundamentally altered. Whether we like it or not, the way we must approach the world has changed since 9/11. I do not agree with all of the restrictions placed on information, but let's face it, even the founding fathers realized there would be extenuating circumstances that would require the slight altering of fundamental democratic institutions in times of national emergencies. Lincoln suspended the writ of habeus corpus so that our democracy could survive. Certainly, we are not talking about throwing people into jail without a trial, but we are talking about curtailing access to certain bits of information that might allow others to threaten us. I would hope that we can trust our leaders to use this power for purely beneficial and security reasons, but I do not think any change in information flow will translate into a loss of freedom or democratic rule, but we should always be cognizant of that possibility.
i think the real question is, how many people actually take part in our democracy. i find it very intersting that many people who complain about the nation today did not exercise their fundamental principle in a democracy: the right to vote
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