Word: carres
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Liberal democracy, according to Carr, is dead. Originally a democracy of property owners, it was given purposeful meaning by the ceaseless, dynamic pursuit of progress; but it had grave faults...
Mass democracy is also a state of affairs in which "propertyless non-taxpaying wage earners" (who probably now hold the balance of power in most elections) have become a unique class "whose relation to the state is primarily that of beneficiaries." Dryly Author Carr adds that as yet mass democracy is still on trial...
What's Wrong with Demos? Diagnosis is often half the cure, and some of Editor Carr's most brilliant chapters are strictly diagnostic. He believes that erstwhile "liberal democracy" (the kind in which most U.S. and British citizens imagine they still live) is being replaced by "mass democracy." Mass democracy is distinguished by overwhelming popularity and prestige of the chief executive (Roosevelt, Churchill); by the growing weakness of Congress or Parliament; by a tendency of the executive and the masses to interact directly via radio and straw polls over the heads of electoral bodies...
...Small wonder that the voter, the consumer, the little man decided there must be something basically wrong with democracy and glanced about the world uneasily for a way out. Author Carr asserts that in the U.S. and Britain the bewildered, apathetic little man has thus far found this way out only in war. "It is useless today," he writes, "to condemn the economic consequences of large-scale war because it is destructive of accumulated wealth. This is not the main consideration, so long as it mitigates the evils of unemployment and inequality. . . . War is at the present time the most...
Thus humanity must not try to get "back to normalcy" after World War II as it did after World War I. "The only stability attainable in human affairs," says Carr, "is the stability of the spinning top or the bicycle. . . . The survival of democracy depends on its ability to establish control over those economic forces which have hitherto defied its authority...