What is Better - a Meritocracy or a Democracy?
by John Lawrence, May 22, 2020
It is assumed that in a democracy the voters will elect wise and stable leaders. However, that is not always the case. The US circa 2016 elected an idiot with no previous government experience to the highest office in the land. He in turn has appointed bigots to the highest court in the land and fired anyone in government who is critical of him. Democracy is no panacea. And how can it even be called a democracy when one of the Houses of Congress puts the kibosh on the wishes of the other House which more truly represents the people? The Senate controlled by one party effectively has a veto over the other party.
Many opinion polls have shown that Americans want gun control. In a true democracy that opinion should prevail, yet it doesn't because the other party has a veto over what the majority of Americans really want. In a true democracy only the opinion of the majority should determine what the laws should be. The designers of the Constitution did not want the US ruled by the majority of the people since they considered that mob rule. Instead we got mob rule for the one office that all Americans vote for: the President. But mob rule is guaranteed by the one House that was supposed to prevent it - the Senate. Instead the Senate is beholden to the President who was elected by the mob.
One writer thinks that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has delivered more good governance than any other party in the world. Kishore Mahbubani writes:
"Yet, it is also a fact that relative to its peers around the world, the Chinese governing class generates more good governence (in terms of improving the well-being of its citizens) than virtually any other government today. Since the CCP is constantly vilified in the Western media, very few people in the West are aware that the members of the Communist Party have delivered the best governance China has ever enjoyed in its entire history."
Delivering 850 million people out of poverty in less than 40 years is a pretty good record. During that time period the wages of the American working class have stagnated. One reason the CCP has done so much good for the Chinese people is that it promotes the best and brightest Chinese minds to the top of the government. This makes it a meritocracy much more than an autocracy.
Mahbubani, a Singaporean, continues:
The strong and competent CCP is therefore delivering a global public good by ensuring that China behaves as a rational and stable actor on the world stage and not as an angry nationalist actor disrupting the regional and global order. To appreciate why this is important, American officials should spend some time probing the leaders and officials of China's neighbors to ask if they would be happier if the CCP were to be removed from power. Since I live in the neighborhood, I can say with some confidence that most of China's neighbors would prefer to see China led by calm and rationbal leaders, like Xi Jinping, and not by a Chinese version of Donald Trump...
The Chinese value order and stability. They are opposed to chaos. They value the continuity of the CCP because they have had an Emperor culture for millenia. The Chinese Communist state is a replacement for the Emperor state. The Chinese people are afforded a great deal of personal freedom in economic terms. In fact upward mobility is greater in China than in the US. Their approach to balancing personal freedom and social order is different then in the west, but it has more to do with the Chinese character than it does with the Communist Party. The CCP does not actively interfere in the daily lives of its citizens. They have enjoyed more personal freedom under the CCP than any previous form of Chinese government.
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