FROM THE ARCHIVES:With dictatorships of the right and left triumphant in June 1940,
The Irish Timescarried this sombre editorial as the prospects looked very bleak for the future of the democracy the dictators despised. -
JOE JOYCE
‘WE ARE not prepared to assent to M de Tocqueville’s broad assumption that the progress of democracy is the inevitable fate of modern society; or that, while we survey with satisfaction the diffusion of happiness and knowledge in the world, we must perforce relinquish those honoured distinctions of privilege and aristocratic power which, more than any other human things, resist the attacks of time, correct by their permanence the transient accidents of life, and serve to maintain the symmetry and dignity of our social institutions.”
So wrote the Times, just over a hundred years ago, in a long review of Alexis de Tocqueville's "Democracy in America". What changes there have been in the world since then – and how remote does that confidence seem to-day!
Within this century alone the crowned heads of Portugal, Greece, Russia, Austria, Germany and Spain have been banished from their lands [ . . . ]
The world was a very secure place in those far-off days. If Divine right had disappeared in Europe, the power of kings was still a very considerable influence, and a score of monarchs sat securely on their thrones.
Democracy was moving onwards to fulfilment. The American system may have been more “advanced” than that of any other country, and M de Tocqueville may have dreamed of a day when no man would have any privilege above his neighbour; but little did anybody foresee the headlong gallop into which democracy so soon was to spring.
Did it gallop to destruction? That question, more than any other, is what the world has been asking itself in recent years. In the kind of government which flourishes to-day in France, and survived in Germany until 1932, does efficiency become confused by the babel of voices, and is the giant of national interest defeated by the thousand dwarfish interests of small men? Such has been the claim in many countries, until at the present time the number of States that have preserved the democratic system could be counted almost on the fingers of one hand.
In its place the totalitarian nations have resurrected the ancient tribal system of the supreme leader, a system which already had been found wanting and had been discarded by all but the most primitive races
A hundred years ago, the Times was not prepared to assent that democracy was the inevitable fate of society. Perhaps it was right after all; for even England and France have had to discard the essential principles. Before this present war has ended, will the pendulum swing back over a thousand years of human progress and stop there, or in that backward swing will it find the momentum to carry it several thousand years forward?
http://url.ie/bi09