Helen K wrote: <Once the Federation is replaced, there will doubtlessly be other urgent problems. Do people learn to vote on them, or does the person with the most power say "We do it my way, for now"? If that happens, democracy never has a chance.>
Now there are urgent problems and there are urgent *problems* ... and then there's war, which cannot be run by a show of hands (the Athenians tried something fairly close, and it was a disaster). Britain basically suspended *all* elections for the duration of the Second World War (and habeas corpus got a fair old bashing as well) - basically suspending democracy as we know it while busy defending it. Yes, the USA held an election in the middle of the Civil War - but that is the exception that proves the rule, something that historians hold up as a quite unprecedented (and rarely if ever emulated) act - an example of what an amazing thing a *stable* political system could manage.
Neither the B7 universe nor the Liberator comes under my heading of a stable political system anyway <g> and the 'one-potato' system of counting heads may seem simpler but with this lot would simply mean that the muddle-and-go-nowhere of S3 started two years early and Travis squashed them flat while Vila and Avon (at the very *least*) were still arguing the toss.
The point - for me - about both the British suspension of democracy as and the Blakean variety on board the Liberator is that in both cases the people involved (the British public in general, and Our Heroes) basically agreed to said suspension (and yes they did. Even Avon. They could have refused to obey him, individually or together, at any point, and they chose not to, he never *had* to force the issue or resort to threats).
Whatever came after the federation would certainly *not* be democracy as we know it, IMO - the total lack of experience with the concept in its modern, complicated form, plus the mental and spiritual effect on every citizen within the Federation of *living* within such a corrosive society, would make it impossible. It would be a harsher, more flawed system than any of us live in (or a myriad of different independent systems all working things out in different, faltering, sometimes bloodied ways).
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