re: "Democratic letdown" (BP, PostBag, January 31, 2020)
Dear editor,
If I might briefly respond to a couple of Torontonian's misunderstandings in "Democratic letdown," the first is his straw-dog argument that I or anyone else is so silly as to argue that democracy solves all problems. No, democracy cannot and does not promise to "rid Thailand of corruption" or totally solve any other problem. Others might, but democracy makes no such extravagant claim.
It is true as he points out that many "in western societies feels let down by their democratic systems." But this dissatisfaction, however strong, does not entail that any other system is or could be better. That cancer patients greatly dislike the common side effects of their treatment does not mean that any other available treatment is preferable.
Torontonian is probably familiar with Winston Churchill's famous characterization of democracy as "the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time ..." (1947). It is worth repeating why Churchill was right. Democracy is necessarily better than every other system because it is the only political system premised on the ideal, ever imperfectly realized as history attests, that all citizens have a voice in determining the form of their society, its government and its laws. No other political system can even claim to respect that basic human right to having a say in consenting to how and by whom you are governed.
Felix Qui
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The above letter to the editor is the text as submitted by Felix Qui to the Bangkok Post.
The text as edited was published in PostBag on MonthDate, 2020, under the title "The best form of rule" at https://www.bangkokpost.com/opinion/postbag/1848209/the-best-form-of-rule
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