Nobody asked me, but … (#9)
May 7th, 2008 Al KalterIt appears that it will be a circuitous route to the point of this post, so hang on if you dare. It’s going to start out sounding political, but it won’t finish that way. At least, that’s the intention at this moment.
Growing up in the 1950’s and 1960’s, with the news dominated by the Cold War and later, Vietnam, we were taught that democracy was good and its antithesis, communism, was bad. Whether you accept or reject the good and bad labels, it’s still strange that we accepted these concepts as opposites. By definition, a better antonym for democracy would be autocracy (or theocracy, or dictatorship, or monarchy), and the opposing system to communism would be, of course, capitalism. The former terms refer to political systems, the latter to economic ones.