Barber on Democracy

"Democracy" as a symbol of "freedom" now seems to be the impetus for the Bush administration to export the American system of "democracy' to places that either never had a democratic government, or whose history, customs and traditions do not jibe with what Jefferson intended. This intention to impose democracy on the rest of the world has an historical precedent, namely, when Henry Ford decided that people could have any color car they wanted as long as it is black. Any democracy, but it has to be the American version.

What makes the activities of American conservative proselytizers alien to Barbar's comments is the fact that Barber seems to try to weld together liberalism and democracy in his explanation that there is a time "when the middle class grows weary of the problems of minorities and other oppressed groups and begins to sermonized about self-reliance" (Barber 110). The fact that the middle class and its liberal values is disappearing in its political power, that the ownership of private property is now so expensive and limited shows that much has happened in the 21 years since Barber's book was first published. Liberal democracy has disappeared much like Siegfried and Roy's tigers.

The fact that America is less and less a participatory democracy, is key. Less and less people bother to vote. A CBS News story seemed to prove young people's general disaffection with the political process:

"The sharp rise in turnout of 18-to 29-year-olds that those advocates were hoping for seemed lost in the body of post-election coverage. In fact, in the immediate wake of the vote, the general perception was that despite huge mobilization efforts, the youth vote comprised roughly the same proportion of the electorate as it did in 2000, in what some observers called a failed effort on the part of the youth voter activist groups" (CBS 2004 2).