2013-03-02

The Slow Death of Democracy

Spain fights Catalan push for secession
The government said it would ask Spain’s constitutional court to nullify the Catalan parliament’s January declaration, which stated that the “people of Catalonia have, for reasons of democratic legitimacy, the nature of a sovereign political and legal subject”.

The resolution is intended to pave the way for a regional referendum on independence, and reflects the recent surge in separatist sentiment in Spain’s most important economic region.

In America, elected results are being overturned after local governments create financial crises that require state level bailouts.




This is part of the rightward swing of the pendulum that I have discussed previously. Not right-left as expressed by political parties today, but the right-left in terms of 1700-2000, of monarchy versus democracy. The logical end to the democratic impulse is either the tyranny of the majority (expressed by the Soviet Union) or the splintering of government into thousands of nations (Wilsonian democracy/self-determination). We see the latter in the secession movements we see in Spain, Scotland, Belgium and Italy, but also taking place at the state and local levels in the United States as cities and counties break apart. Now, in the U.S. there is a state level government (Michigan) stepping in and nullifying the elected local government due to financial crisis, essentially saying the locals are incapable of democracy.

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