主题：【文摘】+【原创】关于民主发点谬论 -- moridin

看了不少网上关于民主的争论, 基本上都是围

绕着两点:

1. 民主好不好? (主流说: 好!)

2. 民主是否适合中国国情? 换句话说, 在民主

的路上应该走多快? (没有共识)

一个没怎么得到讨论的问题是: 民主政体的生命力

到底有多强? 我的观点是, 民主政体是在资源无限

的条件下竞争的优胜者. 它的生命力取决于人类发

现/创造/利用新资源的能力.

从民主的发祥地古希腊到近代的民主范本北美西欧,

它们的一个共同点就是资源相对于人口是无限的. 这

里既包括自然资源如土地矿产也包括软资源如商业机会.

这种情况下一个能够在最大程度上发挥个人能动性的

政体必然会压倒对手脱颖而出. 但是到了人均资源不再

丰富的时候这样的政体是否还能坚持下去呢? 我曾经读到

的一篇文章里提到, 当经济发展很快时人们喜欢拿现在

与过去比并获得满足; 当经济停滞时人们更在意自己在

社会里的相对位置,更容易形成小团体去争夺有限的资源.

我觉得美国就快到这样一道坎了: 大家的期望都很高, 但

是科技革命(创造资源的主要手段)是可遇不可求的. 美国

社会的极端化就是内部竞争的苗头.

用emacs加拼音写到这里实在写不动乐. 下面抄段英文.

是大西洋月刊的, 大意是美国历史上

经济停滞期往往也是社会进步的停滞期. 经济增长是民主

的源泉.

The Atlantic Monthly | July/August 2005

Meltdown: A Case Study

What America a century ago can teach us about the moral consequences of

economic decline

by Benjamin M. Friedman

.....

W ould it really be so bad if living standards in the United States

stagnated?or even declined somewhat?for a decade or two? It might well

be worse than most people imagine. History suggests that the quality of

our democracy?more fundamentally, the moral character of American

society?would be at risk if we experienced a many-year downturn. As the

distinguished economic historian Alexander Gerschenkron once observed,

even a country with a long democratic history can become a "democracy

without democrats." Merely being rich is no bar to a society's retreat

into rigidity and intolerance once enough of its citizens sense that

they are no longer getting ahead.

American history includes several episodes in which stagnating or

declining incomes over an extended period have undermined the nation's

tolerance and threatened citizens' freedoms. One that is especially

vivid, and that touched many aspects of American life that remain

contentious today, occurred during the Populist era, toward the end of

the nineteenth century?roughly from 1880 through the middle of the 1890s.

For a decade and a half after the Civil War, economic growth was largely

exuberant, society optimistic, and social progress undeniable. But all

that changed over the next fifteen years, beginning with a faltering

economy. From 1880 to 1890 Americans' real per capita income grew on

average by just 0.4 percent a year (versus almost four percent in the

1870s). Then, after a few strong years at the start of the 1890s, the

economy collapsed altogether. A severe banking panic set off a steep

downturn, widely known at the time as the Great Depression. By the end

of 1893, 500 banks and 15,000 other businesses, including several major

railroads, were bankrupt. Prices, especially farm prices, had been

falling even when the economy was growing strongly. Now the declines

became ruinous. Wheat dropped from an average price of $1.12 a bushel in

the early 1870s to fifty cents or less in the mid-1890s, and corn went

from forty-eight cents a bushel to twenty-one. By the early 1890s

farmers in some western states were burning their nearly worthless corn

for fuel. By 1895 per capita income had fallen below the level it had

reached fifteen years earlier.

Popular discontent followed economic distress. In 1892 labor action

against the Carnegie Steel plant in Homestead, Pennsylvania, sparked an

armed battle between striking workers and company-hired Pinkerton

forces, leaving sixteen dead and more than 150 wounded. Two years later

a strike against the Pullman Sleeping Car Company led President Grover

Cleveland to call in the Army to protect the railroads. At the same

time, hundreds of unemployed men, led by Ohio businessman Jacob Coxey

(the group was known as "Coxey's Army"), marched on Washington to demand

federal assistance. Altogether, during the course of 1894 seventeen such

"industrial armies" marched on the capital.

But economic concerns did not manifest themselves only, or even

primarily, in labor marches and job riots; they soured many aspects of

American society. As wages fell and unemployment rose, fearful citizens

sought to close the country to newcomers?particularly from areas other

than northwestern Europe. The new Statue of Liberty (completed in 1886)

may have proclaimed America's welcome to the world's "huddled masses"

and "wretched refuse," but such popular magazines of the day as

/Harper's/ and /The Atlantic Monthly/ were full of ethnic jokes and

slurs. Beginning in the 1880s hard times catalyzed a movement to tighten

immigration standards. In 1882, after riots protesting the use of

Chinese labor for railroad construction, Congress barred Chinese

immigrants entirely. All other immigrants were subject to a head tax.

Some states adopted legislation prohibiting certain noncitizens from

acquiring land.

Race relations also deteriorated. In a spectacularly unfortunate

coincidence that would affect American history for decades, this period

of economic stagnation?the worst up to that time?set in just as

Reconstruction ended and the federal government finally withdrew its

troops from the defeated southern states. No one will ever know whether

the country's race relations, both in the South and elsewhere, would

have taken a different course had America enjoyed robust economic growth

during this period. In the event, the result was segregation by race in

practically every aspect of daily life, together with appalling racial

violence.

One reason for believing that economic frustrations contributed to the

sad history that followed is that although the former Confederate states

regained full political independence with the end of Reconstruction, in

1879, most of them did not begin to adopt what in time became pervasive

"Jim Crow" laws until the 1890s. By the end of that decade most southern

states had made it illegal for blacks to ride with whites in railroad

cars, and some had also segregated city streetcars and railroad-station

waiting rooms. The devices used to deny most black citizens their voting

rights?property and literacy requirements, poll taxes, and white-only

primaries?were likewise adopted mostly in the 1890s or after.

But the legal changes enacted during this period barely capture the

racist and anti-immigrant (and anti-Catholic, anti-Semitic, anti-ethnic)

sentiment of the time. The 1880s saw a rise in vigilante violence in

rural areas?not only lynchings in the former Confederacy but also

beatings, murders, and arson by such groups as the Bald Knobbers, in the

Ozarks, and the White Caps, in Kentucky and elsewhere. Such colorful

populist figures as "Pitchfork" Ben Tillman, who served as governor of

South Carolina from 1890 to 1894 and then as a U.S. senator, and Tom

Watson, a widely read newspaperman who ran for vice president on the

Populist ticket in 1896, were outspoken white supremacists. Tillman

publicly defended lynching, called for the repeal of the Fifteenth

Amendment (which had given the vote to blacks), and advocated the use of

force to disenfranchise blacks in the meantime. Watson's speeches and

editorials were regularly devoted to sensational attacks on blacks,

Catholics, Jews, and foreigners. The American Protective Association, an

anti-Catholic organization founded in Iowa in 1887, spread rapidly once

the 1893 depression began, and claimed to have 2.5 million members

nationwide by the mid-1890s. Anti-Semitic propaganda was so common among

Populists by 1896 that William Jennings Bryan felt obliged to disavow it

during his campaign for the presidency.

Steps that would have made America more democratic were not without

advocates during this period. Many Populists favored such measures as

direct primaries and the popular election of U.S. senators. Some also

favored women's suffrage. Bryan was a tireless advocate for all these

causes. Yet none of them advanced in the face of prolonged economic

stagnation. Meanwhile, the Supreme Court only made matters worse. In two

key decisions it effectively gutted the Civil Rights Act passed in 1875

(when economic growth was strong), declaring private racial segregation

and then segregation legislated by the states to be constitutionally

protected. Throughout the Populist era America's media, politics, and

legislation all lent support to cultural exclusion, societal rigidity,

and efforts to turn back the clock. These ultimately proved futile, but

for a while they poisoned both politics and society. Openness toward the

future, faith in a better society for all, and support for the rights of

minorities were simply not the order of the day.

E conomic weakness does not always produce social regress, of course;

history is not so deterministic. The depression of the 1930s led, for

the most part, to a reaffirmation of America's openness and generosity.

But that was atypical; the Populist era was more the norm.

When slow growth together with widening inequality halted improvements

in living standards for many Americans in the 1920s, the upshot was the

revival of the Ku Klux Klan (not just in the South?at the Klan's peak

perhaps one in ten white Protestant U.S. men was a member), the tightest

and most discriminatory immigration restrictions in the nation's

history, and the elimination of both federal and state laws designed to

protect women and children. Similar economic conditions in the 1970s and

1980s provided the backdrop for another round of anti-immigrant

agitation, the rise of the right-wing militia movement, and incidents of

politically motivated domestic terrorism.

Not just in America but in the other Western democracies, too, history

is replete with instances in which a turn away from openness and

tolerance, often accompanied by a weakening of democratic institutions,

has followed economic stagnation. The most familiar example is the rise

of Nazism in Germany, following that country's economic chaos in the

1920s and then the onset of worldwide depression in the early 1930s. But

in Britain such nasty episodes as the repression of the suffragette

movement under Asquith, the breaking of Lloyd George's promises to the

returning World War I veterans, and the bloody Fascist riots in London's

East End all occurred under severe economic distress. So did the

ascension of the extremist Boulangist movement in

late-nineteenth-century France, and the Action Fran?aise movement after

World War I. Conversely, in both America and Europe fairness and

tolerance have increased, and democratic institutions have strengthened,

mostly when the average citizen's standard of living has been rising.

The reason is not hard to understand. When their living standards are

rising, people do not view themselves, their fellow citizens, and their

society as a whole the way they do when those standards are stagnant or

falling. They are more trusting, more inclusive, and more open to change

when they view their future prospects and their children's with

confidence rather than anxiety or fear. Economic growth is not merely

the enabler of higher consumption; it is in many ways the wellspring

from which democracy and civil society flow. We should be fully

cognizant of the risks to our values and liberties if that nourishing

source runs dry.