Democracy or Dictatorship?

In my last post I touched on how in a democracy, it is not an okay practice to ignore the wants of the people. This in no way should be part of a democratic form of government. Similarly, in the Social Contract by Jean Jacques Rousseau, he says that the sovereign (the people collectively) are suppose to legislate, and that they are supposed to legislate according to the general will. Not the will of one man which is exactly what happened in Flint. While this dated version of democracy does not correlate exactly with our current representative democracy, we still appointed a group of official to be in charge, and those wants were completely ignored by the state government.

Also touched on in my last post, this failure to practice democracy was allowed by an emergency manager law that can shift power from a group of publicly elected officials to someone who may not even be from the city that Is being affected. According to tripplepundit.com an emergency manager can: Hire/fire local government employees, renegotiate, terminate, modify labor contracts with state treasury approval, sell, lease, or privatize local assets with state treasury approval, revise contract obligations, change local budgets without local legislative approval, initiate municipal bankruptcy proceedings, and hire support staff. By appointing a person to take care of these task, Snyder successfully ignored the “general will”, and this have left a large number of flint citizens wanting his job. But can you blame them?

                                                                               I constantly ask myself how is it that the democratic constitution of the United States of America allows for this to happen? It bothers me because this is not something you would commonly see in a democracy. Even though we have a representative democracy, which is different from a direct democracy, appointing someone not voted by the people should not be a common practice. He took out of power the representative chosen by the people. This is something that would be seen in a government where one man is supreme, and they follow one person, and not the wants of the people.

Clearly Michigan doesn’t have a dictatorship, but every time this EM law is put into affect then in my opinion they are taking on simple characteristics of a dictatorship. Shifting power into the hand of one man is not something that needs to be done.

As a result, I have one simple solution to fix this obvious failure in democracy seen in Flint Michigan. Remove the emergency manager law. This is something that needs to be done. Every time this law is used it is a failure in democracy. This failure is almost as big as overturning the voter referendum which was also done by Snyder which was made in efforts to stop the switching of the Flint water source. Overall it is clearly seen that the government allows for a official of the government to over extend his powers and cause a lapse in democracy. The only way to stop this completely is to remove laws that allow this abuse of power to stop. Power should be in the hands of the people. At this point there is already not that much power in the hands of the common person because our current form of representative government. By overlooking the wants of the people and also removing elected official from office is something that must not be allowed to happen. In my opinion the people have spoken and it is now time to act. There should not be room to further overlook the “general will” in the future.

In my next blog, I will talk about solutions to the problem, and in my opinion what can be done to prevent failures in democracy, like this one, from happening again. I also will be interviewing someone who has worked closely with people in the Flint.

Works Cited

Newell, Andrea. "How Michigan’s Elimination of Democracy Poisoned a

City." Tripplepundit.com. Tripplepundit, 5 Feb. 2016. Web. 3 Apr. 2016.

Rousseau, Jean Jacques. Social Contract & Discourses. New York: E. P.

Dutton & Co., 1913; Bartleby.com, 2010. www.bartleby.com/168/. [Date of Printout].

Picture above obtained from : Walking Dead Meme