Democracy --> no vote, you draw admin/management by lot (again, Aristotle, Politics - chapter 4 if I remember). Modern states are oligarchies of different flavours - in some of them the plebs are allowed some leeway, but have no (or token) say in the commons.
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If at any point you have a process of societal ruling class selection (e.g. vote, exams, market success, hereditary, intelligence, you-name-it) you have an oligarchy.
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I don't think that is true. For instance, China and Cuba have a process of societal ruling class selection, but they are not oligarchies. And I think that while the US and Germany are de facto ruled by oligarchs, they are republics with representative democracy.
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There is nothing democratic about US or Germany - they are oligarchic liberal states. China is oligarchic but not liberal, Cuba is a more difficult case, but obviously none of them democratic (at least in the original sense)
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I don't think that the West is entirely undemocratic, it is just not like the fairytale version we put into schoolbooks. There are rules that create a high degree of accountability even for the powerful, and in principle everyone can rise up there, unlike in a tyrannical system.
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In all political systems you can rise through the ranks - even ex-slaves in Rome could become rich (i.e. people that were treated as things for parts of their lives) - and there are certain traditions that bind the elite. Liberalism != Democracy.
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Rome was a republic! But just a hundred years ago, you generally could not rise through the ranks in Germany unless you were a member of the hereditary aristocracy.
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You could buy titles in all European states since the inception of Feudalism (and it's part of what caused the French revolution, they overdid it). If you are saying that lives in Europe are better now vs 100 years ago, I agree.
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They are, but quality of governance and political permeability are not the same thing. Singapore is not very democratic, and I hear people there think life is good.
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OK - so the question of how absolute the oligarchic rule should be or what form it should take has been posed (and debated) from the early renaissance onwards. A liberal bunch of nice oligarchs don't make a democracy - nor does economic success.
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We agree, but this debate is mostly inconsequential, because decisions about power tend to be made implicitly, by the dynamics of existing power; it is an emergent path with few genuine opportunities for deliberate re-design, because that requires abdication of existing powers.
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