More on Republics turning into Tyrannies

DOWN DEMOCRACY’S SLIPPERY SLOPE TO TYRANNY

My work in politics was interesting, insightful, and in the end only reinforced that which I already understood living in California. “Money is the mother’s milk of politics.” I would do it all over again, probably have numerous times with slight differences through eternity, as a man knapping flint to an edge, later whipped until the back was nothing but blood, later still publishing untimely truths from an unlicensed press and gaoled, and now on FB (sometimes since I am banned routinely) and now on Substack. I am a child of the Cold War and Vietnam. I did not register for the Draft because I knew it was ending when I turned 19. Had I been ten years older I think Canada would have been my destination. My father was anti-war and he told me if it continued I should go to Canada.

Randolph Bourne opposed to WW1 wrote his tract, lost his professorship, War is the Health of the State https://www.panarchy.org/bourne/state.1918.html.

Here is an essay on the war at home. https://thekronstadttribune.com/2021/09/01/down-democracys-slippery-slope-to-tyranny/

The keen and enlightened individual who has read Plato, knows very well, as the great ancient Philosopher tells us in his magisterial Republic, that the insipid scourge of a tyranny arises, as a rule, from democracy, the great democracy that has been portrayed through skillful propaganda and rhetoric as the best of all governmental organizations of our time. Historically, this process has occurred in three quite different mantras. Before describing these several patterns of social change, which could be precisely identified by the deft student of antiquity as the Anacyclosis, let us precisely state what we mean by “democracy”, as in present times the widely understood meaning of the word and idea has been greatly misconstrued by various interests, governmental, ideological and private over time.

Pondering the question of “Who should rule,”, the wily democrat gives the answer: “the majority of politically equal citizens, either in person or through their representatives.” In other words, equality and majority rule are the two fundamental principles of democracy. A democracy may be either liberal or illiberal, of which the Republic of Taiwan and Burma respectively could be approximately called prime examples of the two sorts.