The First Democracy

 JEFFREY ST. CLAIR>

+ As we bear first-hand witness to the evisceration of “democracy” in our own country by the billionaire class, it’s perhaps helpful to consult what the Greeks now think about the failure of what’s considered–rightly or wrongly–the first democracy, the one that briefly bloomed in fifth century BC Athens before being crushed and supplanted by a dictatorship of oligarchs and eventual imperial occupation, first by the Macedonians, then the Romans. Here’s the view of contemporary Greek political philosopher Takis Fotopoulos:

The final failure of Athenian democracy was not due, as it is usually asserted by its critics, to the innate contradictions of democracy itself but, on the contrary, to the fact that the Athenian democracy never matured to become an inclusive democracy. This cannot be adequately explained by simply referring to the immature “objective” conditions, the low development of productive forces and so on—important as may be—because the same objective conditions prevailed at that time in many other places all over the Mediterranean, let alone the rest of Greece, but democracy flourished only in Athens.

+ The word that leaps out at me from Takis Fotopoulos’s post-mortem is “inclusion,” now being elided anywhere it’s found in the federal government here, with consequences that would surely be familiar to Demosthenes.

+ Keeanga-Yahmatta Taylor: “It is easy to dismiss D.E.I. programs as ineffectual, because in many ways they have been. But that raises the question of why the right is so determined to undermine and dismiss them.”