The Degeneration of Democracy By Steven Laib

Science fiction author Robert Heinlein has earned both my admiration, for his philosophical content, and my wrath for sometimes presenting certain aspects of that philosophy in plots of dubious value; especially when they contain excessive sexually oriented subject matter that adds little but titillation to his writing. One such book was "Glory Road". But what really stuck in my memory of that book was a scene where the protagonist, Oscar Gordon, attends an intergalactic social event where an alien asks him if America had given up its experiment with democracy. Clearly, this individual was a monarchist, and Heinlein does make a case, of sorts, that such a system has its advantages. However, that was not what eventually struck me as the most the important point. What I eventually realized was that a monarchy, or a similar authoritarian system is often desired by a large portion of a population simply because they don't want to take responsibility for their own lives and their own destinies. This becomes fairly obvious when we consider how the United States has shown a consistent increase in national government power often driven by an apparent desire by on the part of a significant segment of the public for government provided security. Of course, those who are willing to sacrifice freedom for security will eventually have neither, to paraphrase Ben Franklin. But today there are all together too many Americans who don't see it that way. If they did, there would be no social welfare agenda pending in Congress, and President Bush would not have to repeatedly veto the SCHIP bill. His rationale? That it would lead us further toward nationalized health care, which has already been shown to be a bad deal in Canada and England. This is one of the times when Mr. Bush has it right. It is a shame that he didn't take the same attitude on education a few years back.

The Degeneration of Democracy ...

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