By Alec Hogg
Democracy is a National State in which its citizens vote to determine policies, leaders and laws. That’s widely appreciated. Not as well known is that this is not a typical circumstance for our species. Instead, dominance by elites and, at best, ‘benevolent’ dictatorships has been humanity’s norm.
___STEADY_PAYWALL___It’s worth remembering the roots of democracy stretch back two and a half thousand years to Athens, where it lasted a century, and then the half a millennia of the Roman Republic. Unfortunately, this system of citizen equality died with Julius Caesar and was only resurrected 17 centuries later with the short-lived Corsican Republic (1755-1769).
Bloody uprisings that led to the founding of the United States of America (1776) and the French First Republic (1792) brought democracy back – but certainly not universally. For instance, SA’s BRICS partners China and Russia have never embraced it, preferring their autocracies. Given Pretoria’s admiration of Xi and Putin, it’s worth letting that sink in.
Like most rational beings at BizNews, we believe power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Democracy is not perfect. Nothing man-made ever can be. But democracy does provide an effective check on absolute power. Something we saw again yesterday after public outrage reversed a deliberate cloaking of Eskom malfeasance. Constitutional Democracies like SA’s are relatively rare and mostly fragile. Worth fighting for.
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- Doomsayers get a lot of the attention, and perma-bulls get the rest. But in the past 11 months, they’ve all been wrong, stock market Cassandras and Pollyannas are stuck in limbo. Click here.
- Fallout from the Banking Crisis: What’s Ahead? During a recent LinkedIn Live event, a panel of Wharton experts noted that the fallout from Silicon Valley Bank’s failure will likely be contained within the commercial real estate sector. Click here.
