Is Democracy Hitting the Fossil Fuels too Hard?
Stick that in your democracy and smoke it?
Over the past few weeks the notion of democracy has been getting its fair share of attention in the media, and quite rightfully so; Greece had a referendum on whether or not it was going to accept new terms for another round of bailout funds in exchange for the prolongment of austerity measures and the continuation of its debt peonage.
That this was a welcome occurrence is thanks to the short shrift that the term “democracy” has been getting the past few years, and I’m not just talking about neoliberals claiming to bring “democracy” to Middle East countries and such. What I’m talking about is how the term “democratization” has been continually added willy-nilly to just about every new technology that comes along: there’s been the democratization of cell phones, of high-speed Internet access, of automobiles, and much more. So rather than “democratization” implying the beneficence of freedom upon a people, it now generally means the accessibility and wide adoption of the latest consumer gimmick by the masses.
Democracy, however, did not start out as a device for unfettered consumption, but rather implied a government assembled by the people through freely elected representatives. So it was therefore a welcome relief to hear Greece’s prime ministerstating the other day after the recent referendum that “Today we celebrate the victory of democracy. We proved even in the most difficult circumstances that democracy won’t be blackmailed,” for that was in fact an exercise in democracy.
Nonetheless, with some commentators going so far as to claim that we are seeing an “epic battle for the future of European democracy,” one could be forgiven for thinking that the Greek crisis has spurred on what might be called “democracy at the crossroads.”
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