The anti-democratic pundits like to point out how stupid we are. In Joshua Holland's latest piece at AlterNet he asks, "Are Americans too Stupid for Democracy?" Of course key to such a piece is to leave out what democracy really means, but he does provide a "defintion" of what the oxymoron "representative democracy" means:
The way representative democracy is supposed to work is pretty simple: you protect the fundamental rights of the minority (so it doesn't become two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for dinner), and then the majority of citizens, acting in their own rational self-interest, elect representatives who will pursue the greatest good for the greatest number of citizens.
I've previously written on this notion of minority rights here, but it should suffice to point out that the only minority that is seriously protected by our system of government is "the minority of the opulent" to borrow a phrase from James Madison.
Democracy is a wonderful invention by the people of the world to fight back against oligarchs, plutocrats, despots and other forms of ruling class dominance. It's based on the idea that we should have a substantive say in decisions in proportion to how we are affected by those decisions. And, yes, we have plenty of wonderful historical examples of it working in the large and small scale from the Spanish Revolution of the 1930s where tens of millions of people came together and took over factories and farms and ran them democratically to more modern movements like Occupy Wall Street and the People's Assemblies in Greece.
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