DEMOCRACY UNDER ATTACK: DEFEND AND EXTEND

Democracy is now under attack around the globe.
It is being attacked both from without and within free, or partially free, societies.
The attack from without is centered in Russia, which is currently not a free country. It can be argued that Russia has been the locus for reaction and autocracy since just after Waterloo. Anyone remember Alexander I’s idea of a Holy Alliance against liberalism and democracy?
But wait: don’t the Bolsheviks and the USSR make an exception to that? I’m still pondering that, because I’m not sure the answer is yes. Bolshevism’s original stated intent was a ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ but whatever there was of democracy in that was very autocratically stifled by Stalin, if not earlier by Lenin. Both men had highly autocratic ways of governing.
Before I go any further, let me be clear. Real democracy proceeds from the bottom up, autocracy from the top down. Keep this in mind as we proceed.
The Russian Revolution may have started with a democratic impulse, but was imposed in the same old autocratic way that has characterized Russia ever since the Mongols conquered it and held it (except for what’s now Belarus and most of the Ukraine, which became part of a Polish-Lithuanian kingdom) for two centuries. So right now, the Revolution doesn’t look like too much of an exception.
And other autocracies, most notably China, are watching democracies to see how we react to this revival of autocracy and all its ways of increasing misery among most humans for the sake of elevating a handful of mostly exceptionally vicious bipeds.
An earlier post of…