Nonsense. Democracy means rule by a (majority of) the people, generally by choosing leaders and policies in free elections. Nothing more, nothing less.
What Andy is describing is a liberal (original meaning) or civil society. Which can exist and has existed (to varying degrees) under a variety of systems of governance or ways of choosing leaders.
There is, for instance, no theoretical obstacle to a civil society existing under an absolute monarchy.
While civil societies and democracies have most often co-existed, there is no law that says this is inevitable.
Just as one can have a civil society without elections, one can also have elections without their creating a civil society. What if the majority of the population is opposed to a civil society, as appears to have been the case in the recent Egyptian elections?
I hesitate to invoke Godwin's Law, but it should be noted that A. Hitler came to power via legal and constitutional democratic means. While the Nazis rejected elections thereafter, this was an ideological decision, not based on their thinking they might lose. All observers of the time were in agreement that the Nazis would have won minimum 2/3 of the vote in free elections held later in the 30s.
Ran across a couple of epigrams that express the downsides of democracy, as such. One of them is pretty crude.
Democracy is two wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for dinner.
Gang rape is democracy in action.
This democracy = civil society notion is strongly held by both right and left. It is based on the idiotic notion that other peoples are "just like us." They want what we want, whether we think that is a social democracy or a free market utopia.
But what if they ARE different? What if they choose something other than what we would choose?
Good points.
The more I consider the matter, the more I appreciate our founding principles that culminated in our Constitution and the Bill of Rights. We have veered off course over the past several decades, but the founders gave us a way to self-correct. And that (self-correction via constitutional amendments) is what we should be about over the coming years and decades.
I pray it’s not too late.