Ukraine (closed; covers till August 2014)

[TheCurmudgeon]

Several questions:

(1) Is it justified for those of "an individualist mindset" to conduct a "non-democratic change of power"? What if those individuals are not in the majority or are distinctly in the minority? Is the reverse equally justified; can those not of an individualist mindset also execute a "non-democratic change of power"? If tomorrow ethnic Russians in Ukraine conducted a counter-coup and installed a pro-Russian government, is this justified politically or morally?

As with any form of governance (democracy, autocracy, or monarchy), who is in the majority (or who was right) is a matter of who wins. Crude, but realistic (but not really "realist"). Often it follows the sentiment of the majority of people but in reality it is the majority who are willing to act in the seat of power, in this case Kiev. The motivation to act is key. The motivation is often set off by a threat to a perceived gain (the Davies J-Curve), or a disjoint between the values of the leader and the values of the people (individualism versus collectivism - system legitimacy), or it is motivated by a feeling that those in power got their unlawfully (procedural legitimacy, or an illegitimate claim to power). People will endure terrible hardship if the feel that the system, even an inequitable one, matches their values and ideals of legitimacy.

Let me provide two examples. A commoner will brag about his king and live in a hovel while the king lives in a palace because the king and the commoner share an identity (English, lets say). The King is the representative of the whole of England. There are good kings, and sometimes bad kings, but the commoner still understands the system, built on a common identity and an obligation of the king to take care of his subjects, and agrees to it. The communal or collectivist ideal. The identity, survival, and advancement of the group, even at the expense of the individual, is what is important.

On the other hand, there is the individualistic ideal. Here every person is his own master and creates his own destiny. If a man builds a company and lives in a palatial house, with and income 100,000 time that of the average worker, that is not inequity. That is the way it should be. Even if I lose everything in a business venture and end up homeless, I do not begrudge the rich man of what he has or expect him to care for me. That is not the system I believe in, even if others might see this as the epitome of inequity. Here the individual is supreme - let ten guilty men go free rather than convict one innocent man.

In is all in what you value, what you believe. And when the values of the people and the values of the government diverge, expect trouble.

As for the reverse, it is happening as we speak in the Crimea. The people there, who share a common identity with Russia and are ideologically aligned with it, will vote themselves into an autocratic state because that is what they want. For those in the West, we will not understand. We will scream that this was Putin stealing the will of the people. But it will be the people exercising their will. They just are coming at the problem from a different set of values and ideals.

(2) If the fact of someone's election is "largely irrelevant" and "elections are not the important point", then how do we measure democratic governance?

Yeah, that one has been a problem for years. Polity database, Freedom House, and others have tried to come up with reliable measures of democracy, or even just to define the term. If you figure that one out you will be famous.

(3) Is this a useful framework for understanding the events in Kiev and Washington's and Moscow's actions? It seems to me to be a strain of ideological consistency to champion democratic governance on one hand and to install governments in a "non-democratic change of power" on the other. Is that not the opposite of individualism?

It doesn't matter how it comes to power, only how it conducts itself. The US did not come to be through an election. We fought a war. We WERE the rebels.It is not about how you get there, it is about what you are once you are there.