{"id":368381,"date":"2018-07-07T07:46:56","date_gmt":"2018-07-07T06:46:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/newswire\/incivility-now\/"},"modified":"2018-07-07T07:46:56","modified_gmt":"2018-07-07T06:46:56","slug":"incivility-now","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/newswire\/incivility-now\/","title":{"rendered":"Incivility Now!"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

A virtue of a thing, according to Aristotle, is that which makes it perform its function well.\u00a0 Sharpness is a virtue of a knife; civility is a virtue of liberal democracy.<\/p>\n

Our liberal democracy, like similar regimes nowadays in other capitalist countries around the world, is not particularly democratic.<\/p>\n

\u201cDemocracy\u201d means rule of the people, the demos<\/em>, as distinct from elites of one or another kind.\u00a0 In the United States and elsewhere, the word \u201cdemocracy\u201d long ago lost this class-specific connotation.\u00a0 \u00a0In self-described democratic countries, the undifferentiated citizenry, the people as a whole, rule \u2014 in theory.\u00a0 This is not what the word meant in Greek antiquity, but it is close enough.<\/p>\n

Or it would be if theory and practice were more in line.\u00a0 In practice, the rulers in self-described democracies are economic elites\u00a0\u2013 usually not directly, but through a political class that serves their interests.\u00a0 The United States is no exception; by no stretch of the imagination is ours a government of, by, and for the people.<\/p>\n

However, like the others, the United States does fill some, by no means all, top political offices through nominally free and fair competitive elections. \u00a0\u00a0This is its main, arguably its only, genuinely democratic feature.<\/p>\n

Much has been written and said about \u201cAmerican exceptionalism.\u201d The implication is that we are better than other countries, and therefore, presumably, more liberal and more…<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair A virtue of a thing, according to Aristotle, is that which makes it perform its function well.\u00a0 Sharpness is a virtue of a knife; civility is a virtue of liberal democracy. Our liberal democracy, like similar regimes nowadays in other capitalist countries around the world, is not particularly democratic. \u201cDemocracy\u201d […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[519],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-368381","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-newswire"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/368381","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=368381"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/368381\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=368381"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=368381"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=368381"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}