Re:Searching for the Spirit of the Midwest
by rayiner on Wednesday April 12, 2023 @08:46AM
(#35538776)
I agree with your first point, but I think the Massachusetts Bay colony is actually a model of democracy. It was an authoritarian theocracy, but not a top-down one. It was built on distributed social consensus between autonomous congregations, a structure that survives to some extent to this day: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congregationalist_polity
And it was a vehicle for “grassroots change.” They came over here and built exactly the kind of society the people wanted. Maybe it’s not the kind of society you’d want, but it’s the kind they wanted.
The Taliban analogy is interesting. I think democratic theocracy would have been a much better model for our nation building efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan than the secular liberal democracy we tried to impose on those countries.
And it was a vehicle for “grassroots change.” They came over here and built exactly the kind of society the people wanted. Maybe it’s not the kind of society you’d want, but it’s the kind they wanted.
The Taliban analogy is interesting. I think democratic theocracy would have been a much better model for our nation building efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan than the secular liberal democracy we tried to impose on those countries.