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LM1985's avatar

The fatal flaw of Western liberal democracy is that it’s perfectly possible to have a society where only a small percentage of the population is enfranchised or where slavery exists and said society can still be considered “democratic.” In Classical Athens, the gold standard for the Western democratic tradition, only about twenty percent of the population were citizens. The other eighty percent consisted of slaves, various categories of foreigners, and women. We often forget that a huge number of noncitizens had to work anonymously and thanklessly so Socrates could gadfly about the forum. This is why I think terms like authoritarianism have no meaning. In any society, the people who aren’t considered part of “we the people” are going to feel the hand of the state much more strongly than those who are in that group. Freedom often means the ability for real, legal persons (ie the people who actually matter and have rights) to assert their power over legal non-persons. This explains why so many Americans still think that not being able to discriminate constitutes a loss of freedom and why the idea of Arabs being equal to Jews is considered to be an unacceptable notion in Israel.

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