Down to the wire : confronting climate collapse / David - Index of

chapter 2
Late-Night Thoughts
about Democracy in
the Long Emergency
We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth
concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both.
—Justice Louis Brandeis
There is only one way to strive for decency, reason, responsibility,
sincerity, civility, and tolerance, and that is decently, reasonably,
responsibly, sincerely, civilly, and tolerantly.
—Vaclav Havel
z
Democracy, winston churchill once famously
said, is the worst form of government except for all
of the others ever tried. The Greeks, from whom we inherited the
idea of self-government, after all, couldn’t manage it for long and
fell victim to the political vices of greed, hubris, imperial overreach,
and ruinous wars. In modern times it is possible, historian
Walter Prescott Webb once wrote, that the upsurge of democracy
in the early modern era was largely the result of the abundance of
resources resulting from the discovery of the New World rather
than from any general human improvement. 1 His point was that
the larger per capita ratios of land, minerals, and natural resources
after 1492 reduced the pressures on governments and populations