Democracy

One hears an awful lot on the topic of "democracy" and democratic ideals these days, particularly in the context of promoting it in other nations (This post was sparked by a Lincoln-Douglass debate at Milton on the very topic). It seems simple enough, right? Everyone knows what democracy means -- "Government by the people", to quote both Merriam-Webster and dictionary.com.

And yet, such a simple topic can be so complicated ... What, in practice, does government by the people mean? Both dictionaries I reference refer to "majority rule" in one form or another, the situation becomes more complicated on issues on which there is no majority opinion, but rather a large number of varying factions. Arrow's Impossibility Theorem essentially states that there is no generally fair method for choosing a winner out of multiple possibilities.

But even aside from questions of voting, I have to wonder if there could even be a democratic system without voting as such. Could you somehow have a system that reflects the ideals of "government by the people", without actually directly polling the entire populace? I don't know how such a system would work, but it's not immediately obvious to me that voting as we (or the ancient Greeks) conceive of it is the only way to implement a democracy, even though the two have become fairly synonymous in our conception. It all comes back to the question of how exactly you decide what the people want in their government. And what if the people were to vote to establish an absolute dictatorship?

I guess the take-away is that it seems odd to me to spend so much time debating the merits of spreading democracy in various ways, when we're not even sure exactly what democracy means, and how to best implement it. It seems to me that those are questions worthy of more attention than they're getting.