Maidan Square in Kiev. Taksim Square in Istanbul. Tahrir Square in Cairo. Recent democratic movements around the globe have risen, or crashed and burned, on the hard pavement of vast urban public squares. [...] But too few observers have considered the significance of the empty public spaces themselves. [...]
If public squares are essential to democracy, is their relative absence in modern American life bad for our democracy—or a sign that we’re not as democratic as we imagine?
— zocalopublicsquare.org
20 Comments
nonsense. good that its not written in ink.
We *aren't* as democratic as we would like to imagine, but there are plenty of public squares/spaces that function as needed, even very well, for public demonstrations.
Donna, 'you' are not democratic, period. in the last few years, you have completely dismantled the vestiges of democracy. your congress does not work for the will of the greater number but rather for the will of a small group of rich individuals and corporations. your president can lie to you without fear of punitive reprecussions. your sires talk of spreading democracy when all they do is help spread wars, internal insurrections around the world and support for political and financial systems that destabilize and impoverish populations across the globe. they then send your tax exempted NGOs to further instill that.
you're not really allowed to demonstrate and protest en masse against the system...and more importantly, you've been humiliated as a public to the extent that most of you don't even have the will or desire to do so. in that sense, you yourself have been "third world-ized" . indeed, many of you think that what comes your way is as natural as natural disasters with no identifiable source. Should I also bring up your country's devious undemocratic foreign "policy" (sorry, piracy)? oh i did above...anywho
you live and you have always lived in an empire built on mafia type foundation , in its internal and its external fronts- and once you turn against that mafia, you're precluded by whatever means possible and 'palatable' at that moment.
just in case I come across as being anti-american, it is not because I believe that americans are worse than other people. not really (although i like the myth that protestant roots were particularly racist and preclusionary, and cruel through valuing work over the human spirit, over its capacity to be broken) , but your system encourages the exasperation of greed at the expense of others, no matter what your ethnicity or location. it is not a democratic one.
'democratic' means we get to vote for our leaders. which we do in america. it's a representative democracy, which means we aren't directly voting on policy and such. also, with our electoral system, in some cases we aren't directly voting for our representatives, but rather for someone to cast our state's votes for federal representation.
there are problems, and always have been, with our ballot infrastructure. for example, a governor could have an abundance of ballot locations in areas that are likely to support his party without providing as many locations in districts that support the other party, or ID checks to limit who can vote, dead people voting, or outright vote tampering. however, that only moves the results a little bit. polls and the media keep things fairly accurate. bush got elected because a lot of people supported him. obama got elected because a lot of people support him.
money has the influence in politics it has because we allow it. the states could amend the constitution to remove all money from politics if they wanted, or set term limits, or whatever other amendment we all agreed on. they have that right, and that power, and that authority. unfortunately, there isn't enough support among the people of the united states to do that. maybe some day you'll mature past your 'hate america' phase and gain a broader understanding of what's happening.
there is no reason to believe democracy can't lead to an oligarchy if that's what we choose to do with our votes. if we choose to let our votes be bought by koch industries, we can do that too. that's our right as participants in a democracy.
thanks for that, a pathological symptom illustrated above: "we democratically choose to opt out of democracy."
Even if American cities were to create new public squares, dispersed regional density would often preclude their function as a center of civil discourse/protest. If I'm in Compton, it's unlikely I'm going to get on a bus to Downtown L.A. to protest injustice in Compton. Different city forms determine different modes of discourse/protest. Perhaps a better question would be, "What are the most appropriate American forums for civil discourse?" The public square may be an appropriate forum in D.C. (don't we already have this space?) or a state capital (same here?), but must every burg have its miniature Tahrir Square? Who's to say my neighborhood coffee shop or favorite social media site could not be just as effective?
money has the influence in politics it has because we allow it.
I think the problem is everyone has been divided into their own special interest that they vainly hope will make them successful someday and the politicians play to their interests. Every group is trying to protect market share while claiming its protecting the American public from inadequate quality. Its all resulting in a system in which the rich get richer.
Though, we do have dynasties here in USA. Kennedys, Clintons, Bushes.., I am talking about last 50 years or so. Three families, generations, very significant and not coincidence. This is how it would look like if foreign media start to talk about the US, the way US media talks about foreign regimes.
http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_world_/2014/04/18/if_it_happened_there_how_would_we_cover_chelsea_clinton_s_pregnancy_if_it.html
it would be interesting to create a sort of global virtual square. a single virtual space where we could communicate freely with each other possibly with avatars or something like in sim city...a bunch of characters from all over the world wandering around a virtual square...maybe items like a bullhorn can randomly appear allowing anyone to pick it up and speak a message that all can hear...
maybe the square would parametrically grow as the crowd grew...It could be parametric to size itself according to the best amount of space/person that encouarages the most dialogue and interaction.
Its called a parking lot.
Oh but Americans did have public spaces...except their preference was for using them for lynching and public expresssions of repression and subjugation. Oh, I hear yankee doodle talk about democracy? "My dissertation explores lynching’s constitutive formations of black and white citizenship in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. I examine privileged legal and psychological constructions of white subjectivity while investigating the oppression of black subjects forced to relinquish personhood in the American public sphere, where the privileges of citizenship were preserved by extending exclusively to white men the power to touch, observe, and torture the body of the Other with curiosity and violence. The public squares, court houses, and churches that served as settings for lynching are now valorized by American exceptionalism, but for African-Americans they were stages of suffering, as Saidiya V. Hartman has called them, as well as places of political lack"
https://urresearch.rochester.edu/institutionalPublicationPublicView.action?institutionalItemId=8305Come to think of it, perhaps its a good thing that you're being blessed with less public space then :-)
remember when all those 'occupy' protests were happening all over the country? there were people at zucotti park, but also in chicago and denver and somewhere in califorinia, even some in kansas city. those people easily found places to congregate. all over the country. the problem certainly wasn't lack of public space; the problem was riot cops spraying them with tear gas.
as the ninja above points out, even if public space was otherwise hard to find (which it's obviously not), we have very large parking lots that could accommodate a lot of people. i recall when the huskers won the national championship in football a few years back, which provided a good reason for people to gather at those public squares, everyone went to 72nd and dodge and blocked the intersection. even though there was a perfectly good huge parking lot right there, and a mall, for whatever reason people gathered in the street.
moral of the story is, we have tons of open public space for people to use if they want. our car-dependent lifestyle requires it. also, we aren't using those public squares for lynchings or other racially charged purposes. geez, you are seriously fucked up in the head.
look, he's lynching a black guy
Aren't we a representative republic? In a democracy, no one could have any special privileges granted by the government, which is totally NOT what we have going on here.
The US is a bit big for one public square anyways.
representative of what? and no, for the 317,914,714th time (for each US citizen circa 4:48 Am GMT April 23 2014), you are not a democracy.
"Despite the seemingly strong empirical support in previous studies for theories of majoritarian democracy, our analyses suggest that majorities of the American public actually have little influence over the policies our government adopts. Americans do enjoy many features central to democratic governance, such as regular elections, freedom of speech and association, and a widespread (if still contested) franchise. But, ..." and then they go on to say, it's not true, and that, "America's claims to being a democratic society are seriously threatened" by the findings in this, the first-ever comprehensive scientific study of the subject, which shows that there is instead "the nearly total failure of 'median voter' and other Majoritarian Electoral Democracy theories [of America]. When the preferences of economic elites and the stands of organized interest groups are controlled for, the preferences of the average American appear to have only a minuscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy.
To put it short: The United States is no democracy, but actually an oligarchy.
And the source report
Its technically a republic, this is what I remember from high school social studies, but we can keep arguing about what a democracy in theory should be and how no country actually is one. Pie in the sky speculation is always fun!
I just studied this. Republic just means you have elections, whether or not they are rigged or corrupt.
Democracy means one person one vote, or majority rule. We don't have that, we protect minority interests, like interracial marriage.
tammuz, I think the oligarchy label sounds right.
you'll see arguments that claim america is a republic from certain right-wing organizations such as the heritage foundation or glenn beck, and they try to tie it in the federalist papers and things james madison said. i don't get why they do that. it isn't very genuine, as representative government isn't reflected in the republican party's policies any more than the democrat's positions. i don't see any point to saying our government was founded on the federalist papers or anything like that. if you want to discuss why the government exists, or states rights, or any of those issues, it should be based on what's happening in the real world today, not in a context that existed hundreds of years ago.
america is an indirect democracy. madison believed an indirect democracy was not a democracy at all, and he wrote what is essentially propaganda to spread his views. good for him.
from this source:
http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/157129/democracy/233839/Democracy-or-republic
james wilson (there were also anti-federalist papers) said:
“[T]he three species of governments,” he wrote, “are the monarchical, aristocratical and democratical. In a monarchy, the supreme power is vested in a single person: in an aristocracy … by a body not formed upon the principle of representation, but enjoying their station by descent, or election among themselves, or in right of some personal or territorial qualifications; and lastly, in a democracy, it is inherent in a people, and is exercised by themselves or their representatives.” Applying this understanding of democracy to the newly adopted constitution, Wilson asserted that “in its principles, … it is purely democratical: varying indeed in its form in order to admit all the advantages, and to exclude all the disadvantages which are incidental to the known and established constitutions of government. But when we take an extensive and accurate view of the streams of power that appear through this great and comprehensive plan … we shall be able to trace them to one great and noble source, THE PEOPLE.”
our legislation is bought by a few very wealthy people. however, wouldn't you say their power comes from the people we elect? i think i pointed this out before, but bush became president because a lot of people support him. obama became president because a lot of people support him. the same could be said for paul ryan and nancy pelosi and harry reid and mitch mconnell. even if they rig their elections, it only moves the number a couple percentage points. it's not going to change until a lot of people quit supporting those that allow their votes to be bought. it's not the 3 or 4 percent of people who sway the election that are causing the problem so much as the 40% or so who get these people elected.
republic and democracy are synonyms
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