1. Is democracy failing in the 21st century?

I believe that democracy in the 21st century is indeed failing due to the rise of

“Tweedism” wherein the political elite or the very small percentage of the people are

the only ones who get to nominate the candidates that the larger population can then

elect. As Larry Lessig has specifically pointed out in his TED talk, the image of

democracy is seen as the citizens driving and controlling the bus, when in reality, the

steering wheel has become detached from the bus. I think what Lessig meant in this

analogy is that democracy is meant to let the whole population have just as much of

a control over the nomination of government officials as the “Tweeds”, and I totally

agree with this. Instead of letting the people only have control over the second stage

(election) of the selection of government officials, they must also have control over the

first stage (nomination) as well, or else it’s not much of a democracy given that the

nomination of these officials might have already been tainted with a biased

perspective from a very small percentage of the population. I think the failure of

democracy is also very obvious in the 21st century because of the continuous

escalation of democratic protests all around the world. These protests would not have

been necessary unless democracy is not failing in their respective countries.

2. Do we have alternatives for democracy?

Alex Tan’s last words from his TED talk were, “Democracy may have its problems,

but believe me, the alternatives are worse.” Although he did not go in depth as to what

the different alternatives for democracy were and merely called those alternatives non-

democracy, I’d assume that these alternatives are the other forms of government

aside from democracy such as dictatorship, oligarchy, monarchy, etc. I wouldn’t say
 that these other forms of government are an alternative or can be used

interchangeably with democracy, because these other forms of government do not

give as much power and freedom to the people the way democracy does. Although,

with the recent democratic issues and the obvious flaw in democracy in the form of

“Tweedism”, many would argue that democracy is very similar to oligarchy, which I

completely disagree with because democracy still somewhat lets the people have a

say in the government as opposed to oligarchy which only lets a few people have the

power and the right to rule. That being said, I believe that we do not have alternatives

for democracy because to say that these forms of government are alternatives for

democracy is to say that these forms of government also give as much freedom and

power to the people to rule the way democracy does.

3. Is the government of the few better than the government of the majority?

In my opinion, the government of the few is not better than the government of the

majority because this type of government only attends to the political insights of a very

small percentage of a population, typically of the political or economic elite. Even

though having a government of the majority comes with very obvious flaws, such as

the fact that the people will always find ways to disagree with one another, I still believe

that the government of the majority will know what is best for the people better than

the government of the few whose perspective is very limited and constrained in their

group.