Charles Mills Democracy

If one were to take the concept of democracy, lay it down on an operating table, cut it open and look around inside, I do not believe any one part would be significantly larger than the other. A grotesque image perhaps, but a most fitting one. Democracy is dying, and it is about time we, as a society, analyze its inner parts and remove what has been slowly killing it ever since its birth.

Much like Charles Mills’ criticism of racial liberalism, this is not meant to be an attack on the idea of democracy. Rather, it is a close look at what has made the concept rotten in its practice today. I believe that in an ideal democratic society, there is no single greatest value, but rather two that go hand in hand above the rest. These are …show more content…
Charles Mills calls this as racial liberalism -- a term he describes as “the actual liberalism that has been historically dominant since modernity: a liberal theory whose terms originally restricted full personhood to whites (or more accurate, white men) and relegated non-whites to an to an inferior category, so that its schedule of rights and prescriptions for justice were all colour-coded”. This, he continues, is mostly due to the social dynamics at the time where modern liberalism was implemented. A time where women were thought to be inferior to men, and expected to be submissive -- a time where black men and women alike were sold, bought, and traded as property, while aboriginals were shot down if not compliant to the loss of their land elsewhere. In effect, Mills argues that some remnants of this history of discrimination still remain today, but are ignored due to our society believing itself to be fair to all in its current …show more content…
This, he writes, is a hypothetical situation where political decision makers are rational, do not care about the affairs of their peers, have a sense of justice and what is good, and operate under a veil of ignorance. It is this same hypothetical veil of ignorance which is both the most important element to this theory working, but also what breaks it. Under a veil of ignorance, those making decisions on behalf of society will not know who they are going to be in said society. This, Rawls states, leads them to make moral decisions which, if anything, work to the advantage of the least fortunate. Unfortunately, as effective as this may actually be in addressing the issues with democracy today, there is no real way to carry this out in the real world. Politicians already know where they fall within society, and sometimes make decisions knowing they will be part of one group or another as a result. Unless these same politicians practically raised in isolation, trained as politicians, serve the public for a few decades, and then get assigned to a random part of society upon retirement, it is simply impossible to blind politicians under a veil of