Most people in North America revel in the fact that they live in countries that are ruled by the best type of political system available: democracy. People who advocate for the use of democracy will argue that all of the other systems are flawed and democracy is the best choice in terms of political system. One only need look to the history of the past few centuries to see the pain and suffering that has been caused by other forms of political systems. In this way then, democracy is a comparatively good political system. Those of us in Canada and the United States (and elsewhere were democracy takes place) understand that we could all have it much worse. However, few of us that live in democratic system understand the shortcomings of democracy, and the ways in which it desperately needs to be improved. There have been many shortcomings of democracy thus far that have been hard to address, including the bond political class and the citizen base, and it is unlikely that these problems will ever be improved on as they have become too entrenched in our system.
[...] The government at the time, which was comprised of a handful of privileged people with their own special interests, devised a story that they would then to the American public and the rest of the world which would give legitimacy to their plans of invading Iraq. Therefore this poll that the American government used as a way of justifying their actions was not democracy; it was just a by- product of the failed democracy that this essay is speaking of. [...]
[...] The ideals of democracy are based on the idea of everyone having an equal say, but this is no longer the case as the divide between the political class and the citizen base has grown alarmingly large, thus highlighting the shortcomings of democracy as a political system. There are many people that have raised these concerns, but the problem is that a real solution is hard to come up with. It is not to say that a solution is not possible, but the current balance of power sits with the privileged, and they are not about to give it up to the masses (as would be required in a true democratic system), and this is why a solution will likely continue to elude our society. [...]
[...] Clearly the odds are terrible and this is an indication that there is much more than democracy at work in the government of the United States (and arguably Canada and other democratic nations of the world).[7] According to Harvard University expert in politics Thomas Patterson, gap between the practitioners and the citizen despite the intimacy of television and the immediacy of polling has arguably never been greater. The world occupied by the hundreds at the top and the world populated by the millions at the bottom still overlap at points, but they do so less satisfactorily than before.”[8] In the United States this problem is highlighted with issues of population. [...]
[...] When democracy was created it was done so as a way of giving the people a voice in the process of governance, but this is no longer the case. Perhaps it is because democracy was created in a different age, when people had comparatively fewer political worries and there were much fewer people to govern. For example, when the United States was founded, there were about 3 million people in the nation and there were no problems of scale. Today however, democracy in the United States works in the same way it did when the nation was founded, but there are currently a hundred times as many people. [...]
[...] The political agenda is narrowly controlled by interest groups, and the actual citizen, the person that democracy was developed to speak for is not longer in the equation, they have been relegated to being a by standard in the process of policy making, and they have no choice but to deal with the results.[6] Once again, it is to be noted that the problem with democracy today is the divide that has been created between the politicians and the people. [...]
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