Democracy promotes stability (English Argumentative Essay)

Democracy is a system of governance that aims to represent and execute the will of the people. Typically, democracies have several identifying institutions such as a constitution, legislative council, elections, free media and independent judiciary which are in charge of executing the constitution.

By stability, we will use the criterion of equally representing people's viewpoints, as only when there is a near equal representation of all the people's views can there truly be stability.

Democracy in its essence means “people power”, coming from the Greek words “demos” and “kratos”, “demos” meaning "people," and “kratos” meaning "rule". In Athens, the founding place of democracy, all discussion took place in the open on a hillside. The citizens heard every word spoken during these discussions and then, they debated among themselves what action to take. Each citizen, from the poorest beggars to the richest merchants of the time, heard and contributed to every argument with the same importance as the most experienced political leader. Everyone knew that the issues involved the security of the city and its empire, a question of war and peace; if the result should be war, the citizens themselves would do the fighting. That is truly democracy, that is truly representing and executing the will of the people, which are the main aims of democracy.

However, that was democracy. What we have called democracy in this country never came anywhere near what Athens had. Let’s look at what democracy is in today’s world. Today, in the world’s supposedly most democratic nation, the US, we have a certain political leader, launching regiment after regiment of soldiers to the slaughter house in Iraq, while parents beg him to stop the mindless massacre of American people. Ironically though, the number of people that have been killed in the Iraq war have exceeded the Americans killed in the World Trade Center terrorist attack.

The principle tenets of democracy are that everyone must be represented, that everyone must get a say, no matter how small, in how the government is run and the decisions made. Today’s democracies appears to achieve these aims, by giving everyone a vote, and a say, but I will show you how the process of voting, which is the principle method with which democracy strives to fulfill its aims, instead deprives people of representations, and runs against the ideals of Democracy itself. This, by the above criterion, would lead to social instability.

When democracy aims to execute the “will of the people” through voting, it actually is executing the will of the majority of the people. As we do not live in a utopian world, people have different views and hence not everyone can agree on the same thing. Everything would be fine, so long as everyone gets a say and representation, but by carrying out the will of the majority, democracy effectively deprives the minority of their representation, undermining its own core principle of equal representation for everybody. Why is this so? Humans are naturally ego-centric in their thinking, hence the populace can most probably will be biased against certain groups of people (for example the African-Americans in America in pre-1965.

Through majority rule, these people can thus call for racist and biased action against the people who they consider inferior to themselves within a country or organization, say ethnic minorities or members of a particular religion.

Just look at the “White Australia” policy, where the deportation of thousands of Melenesian people out of Australia took place under the guise of strengthening racial homogeneity, or the USA’s racial discrimination pre-1965 against the African-Americans, where just because of their skin colour, they were discriminated and prejudiced against by a democratic society. Is the will of this minority truly being represented in these cases?

Do we dare think for even one second, that the African-Americans actually wanted to be legally discriminated against by the Jim Crow Laws from 1876 to 1965? Due to these laws, public schools, public places and public transportation, like trains and buses, were required to have separate facilities for whites and African-Americans. Are they supposed to submit to this tyrannical majority all because they have the “supposed” misfortune to be born as a member of a racial minority? Last but not least, can we really say that democracy has brought about ample stability in these countries?

No to all the above.