Ukraine (closed; covers till August 2014)

[TheCurmudgeon]

You missed something that Toqueville did not. Yanks are joiners. Yanks have a great affinity for cooperation without the need for external direction. Individuals have right that God gave them and those can't be taken away but we also recognize that we all have to cooperate. A good thing to look at in that respect are traffic laws and compliance. If people didn't yield for the common good you would have Kinshasa.

You have fundamentally misapprehended the character of your countrymen if you think Americans are not bound by an obligation to the common good. And this statement "...in their minds the government serves the people, the people do not serve the government" is a little scary if I get the implication right.

The Yanks that Tocqueville observed bear little resemblance to the Americans of today. I would suspect that his appraisal of Americans would be significantly different if he saw us today. Birth control, legalized abortion, gay marriage, all things that exist now that did not then. Just in the last 50 years, since the transition from the Greatest generation, Americans have changed their view on what government is and should do. Lets look at the common good. Taxation supports the common good, but Americans don't want to pay taxes. We make a joke out of cheating on them. No one will support an obligation of civil duty (one year working for the good of the nation), let alone a draft.

Further, we continue to base our political science on moral philosophy rather than modern psychology. We look to Hobbes and Tocqueville for the nature of American Democracy when they lived in a world most American's to today would find repulsive. But more important they based their philosophy on the world as they saw it. If one looks to modern psychology you will find a different explanation for why things are as they are. But this too, is for another thread.

No, you're wrong. People follow leaders in an organization. We have organized ourselves into a representative republic. We have delegated the authority to lead in overseas endeavours to others. If they don't, we have to wait until the next election. You have almost certainly been in a unit with a spineless do nothing leader. You didn't take over, you put up with it until another, better leader took over or you left the outfit.

I don't disagree that people follow leaders, but they follow leaders who they think believe in the same things they do, ones with the same values, ones who they see as legitimate. Hitler came to power because Germany was rejecting the republic and longed for a past where they were a dominant force in Europe. Putin is riding a similar wave. Democracy promised much but did not deliver. Russians remember the illusion of the past when they were a superpower. These are both repudiations of the individualist ideal and movement to the communal ideal.

A leader can provide direction for an organization, but in most cases, he cannot long take them where they don't want to go. That is even more true in a democratic government.