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Good point. For example, if you squint hard enough, the choosing of a council or legislature through lots as was done for a time in the Venetian state, is "democratic" in that everyone in some broad class (the people eligible to be chosen at random) had an equal chance to participate in the government, but would not meet with the approval of most modern advocates of democracy, even though IMHO it is worth trying again.
The Venetians understood that some of the people chosen by lot would be obviously incompent at governing, so their procedure alternated phases in which a group was chosen by lot with phases in which the group that is the output of the previous phase vote to determine the makeup of the input to the next phase with the idea that the voting phases would weed out those who were obviously incompetent. So, though there was voting, it was done only by the relatively tiny number of people who had been selected by lot -- and (if we ignore information about specific individuals) they had the same chance of becoming a legislator as the people they were voting on.
IMHO probably the worst effect of Western civilization's current overoptimism about democracy will be to inhibit experiments in forms of non-democratic government that would not have been possible before information technology (including the internet) became broadly disseminated. (Of course such experiments should be small in scale till they have built up a substantial track record.)
rhollerith_dot_com:
I beg to differ. The worst effect is that throughout recent history, democratic ideas have regularly been foisted upon peoples and places where the introduction of democratic politics was a perfect recipe for utter disaster. I won't even try to quantify the total amount of carnage, destruction, and misery caused this way, but it's certainly well above the scale of those political mass crimes and atrocities that serve as the usual benchmarks of awfulness nowadays. Of course, all this normally gets explained away with frantic no-true-Scotsman responses whenever unpleasant questions are raised along these lines.
For full disclosure, I should add that I care particularly strongly about this because I was personally affected by one historical disaster that was brought about this way, namely the events in former Yugoslavia. Regardless of what one thinks about who bears what part of the blame for what happened there, one thing that's absolutely impossible to deny is that all the key players enjoyed democratic support confirmed by free elections.
Seconded. I live in Russia, and if you compare the well-being of citizens in Putin's epoch against Yeltsin's, Putin wins so thoroughly that it's not even funny.
You could attribute the difference to many correlated features, such as the year beginning with "20" instead of "19".
Also: The economy in Yeltsin's day was unusually bad, in deep recession due to pre-collapse economic problems, combined with the difficulties of switching over. In addition, today's economy benefits from a relatively high price for oil.
That would be a less absurdist version of my point.
I assumed you meant that economic growth (in general) meant that the wellbeing of people is generally going to be greater when the year count is greater. I was providing specific reasons why the economy at the time would have been worse than regressing economic growth would suggest, other than political leadership.
Yes, that is a very bad effect of the overoptimism about democracy.
Another example: even the vast majority of those (the non-whites) who could not vote in Rhodesia were significantly better off than they came to be after the Jimmy Carter administration forced the country (now called Zimbabwe) to give them the vote.