Democracy is made of The People who make the government. Legitimate government is made from what The People who make it want it to be.

THE FLEEING BY NIGHT of the Afghani government and the melting away of its Army in the face of the Taliban, not to mention the corruption and ineffectiveness of the government for two decades but, also,  the largest army in the country that the United States payed, trained, equipped and  propped up proves one thing, there was no prospect of an egalitarian democracy there even after the many years of ''nation building," a phrase that should elicit the most extreme skepticism in the light of this history.  

One of the former American military people I've heard in the last week said that much of the military accomplishment in Afghanistan was always a lie because much of the Afghani army's reported success what was reported as their accomplishment was actually done by allied militaries but reported as done by the Afghan army.   She also, I will note, paid her respect for the Afghani soldiers who she said were hard fighters but it's clear that didn't stop what has happened.  

Forms of government are generally named for who makes them, who the power is.  Dictatorships are made by dictators, monarchies are made by monarchs and their families, oligarchy, plutocracy, and other forms of gangster government are named for those gangsters who make the government and are  the governors.  Some of those gangster governments are named by the gangsters who try to give them a basis in their professed faith, Marxism, Nazism, various theocracies.  Though those are mostly cover for the actual gangsterism that is the basis of exerting control and its motive,  it's how you get Marxist governments that are organized on the basis of Victorian era capitalism on steroids, power flowing out of the gang, the "Communist Party."  Marx generally has little to do with it, perhaps if he's in hell he's being tortured by what they have and still continue to do in his name.   I doubt that the "Islamic Republic" that will for a time hold general sway in Afghanistan will be in keeping with the actual teachings of the Koran anymore than the "Most Christian Kings" and "Holy Roman Emperors" based their rule on the teachings of Jesus, Paul and James.  All non-democracies are merely rule by a gang mob, the biggest gangster at the top of it.  That's as true for it being Henry VIII or Kim Jong-un. 

I have written extensively on the extreme danger when there is an ideology that the gangsters really believe in, such as the Nazis belief in natural selection, that's, to some extent, a more complex form of gangster government operating from a self-serving superstition.  If the current Taliban is another of those remains to be seen.

The dangers of political science in misnaming things comes from a general misunderstanding of the most basic distinctions of governments based on mere words that hide more than they clarify.  

Those distinctions most well known in the definition of good government by Abraham Lincoln, government of The People, by The People, and FOR THE PEOPLE as a whole.   He was defining good government based on political and legal equality of all of The People, what I support as "egalitarian democracy,"  the only legitimate government.  And, it should be noted he implied that his hope for it was as an example for The People, everywhere on the Earth.  It is the sole legitimate form of government in so far as it is possible for human beings to form legitimate governments, imperfect in the extreme but, stealing and turning a line from someone I have little respect for in this regard, Winston Churchill, it's the worst except for all of the other ones, though I doubt he meant egalitarian democracy.  And it has to be set apart from and above other forms of government which are, as well, called "democracy" but being inegalitarian don't share in its legitimacy because it is not based in the thing Jefferson noted grants whatever degree of legitimacy any government can have, "the consent of the governed." 

I have complained before that the word "democracy" is importantly and, I now believe, dangerously used for different things which are, to an extremely important extent, contradictory.   The number of dictatorships in the 20th century that have called themselves "democratic" is an example of that danger.  Also and maybe even more dangerously are the contradictory meanings of the word "liberal."   

The original Athenian democracy was nothing of the sort if you are talking about anything a modern democracy should emulate.  It was an agreement among a small minority of ruling elite men of inherited position as members of old, unenslaved to some extent aristocratic Athenian families, adult males only, who ran things and held power over all of the Women, resident foreigners, and a large number of enslaved people and in time the imperially governed.   That is nothing like a tolerable modern meaning of "democracy" WHICH IS EGALITARIAN OR IT IS MERELY A FORM OF GANGSTERISM in which a minority lords it over everyone.  

The 18th century concept of "liberal democracy" in which the government allows freedom from restraint to the rich business and merchant and, lest anyone forget, slave owning classes whether by legalized ownership of human beings or by wage slavery, is just an updated version of the gangster governance of classical Athens.  Its major reform from that being that the ruling class is merely based on the accumulation of wealth, not of family history.  It is one of the most dangerous things in how using the words "democracy" and "liberalism" can be confusing, using the same word that allows wage slavery and leaving the poor to a Malthusian concept of "the law of nature" to mean that as well as the egalitarian good will and universal generosity meant in the original meaning of "liberalism" as liberal provision for the least among us.  To call the original American system "democratic" on the basis of there being a vote by white, male citizens (originally only those owning a certain amount of property) is an anachronism, it is no more a legitimate government than any other such restricted system no matter that there is a vote by that elite and exclusive governing class.

Democracy is made of The People who make the government.  Legitimate government is made from what The People who make it want it to be. Without them wanting equality and democracy, a government based in the best judgement based in the good will and good thinking of The People in all in an effective majority, legitimate government, egalitarian democracy not only will not happen, it cannot happen no matter what form it is given.  That accounts for the many failures of democracy in the period of the dismantling of so many colonial governments in which there is said to be their first and last free election before the habits of gangster government are reverted to.  The government being made from what The People who make it want, that goes for bad government as well as good government.  

In many places the existence of egalitarian democracy is at the mercy of the morality of the majority who live there or of a coalition of those of good will in that majority with those who hold the same desire in minorities.  It is ridiculous to think that in any place egalitarian government, legitimate government can be had without that coming together of people of good will and realistic assessment of the reality they live in.   American liberals. even those whose liberalism is based in economic justice, are distressingly lacking in one or the other as we are constantly learning.   I have confessed again and again that I was totally unrealistic about the possibilities of what could happen in the 2020 election, the Democrats, especially the Black Voters of South Carolina, thank God, understood what was possible better than I did. It is not surprising that the subjugated people in one of the worst governed of our states would have to be so realistic whereas a white male from New England, once again, longed for what was not to be.*  If the Biden administration is the turning point away from Trumpian, Republican-fascism they are the people who saved legitimate government here.  If Republican-fascism wins over it, egalitarian democracy in our time is done for.

That difference between liberal-democracy and legitimate egalitarian-democracy is what accounts for the knee capping of any aspiration for egalitarian democracy by the original slave-power in the United States working hand in glove with the rich anti-democrats of the Northern states, Alexander Hamilton one of the sleaziest of them but also John Jay, who with Alexander Hamilton sold the mine field of the Constitution filled with booby traps to kill off democracy, the Electoral College, the anti-democratically constituted Senate - the current worst danger to democracy under the American system, the Supreme Court sandbagging even the duly adopted laws protecting egalitarian democracy, is not contained in the document, that is a power the non-elected "justices" gave themselves by fiat.  As I mentioned yesterday, the idea that the United States under a Supreme Court imposed president, George W. Bush, was going to go to other countries on the other side of the world, depose their dictatorships and impose modern democracy on them by force was one of the most outrageous examples of American arrogance and hypocrisy in recent history.  

The fact is that nowhere where The People do not both want equality on the basis of their good will and trust in each other and the desire to know what is real from fiction, is egalitarian democracy possible. 

What happened both in the disaster of Iraq after the fall of Saddam Hussein and in the final denouement of the Bush invasion of Afghanistan should be the final nail in the coffin of such "democratic" pretenses to cover imperial interventions in other countries as if we could make them, in a majority want egalitarian democracy.  We have a hard enough time fighting to make one here, we are fighting for its and our lives here, in the United States in 2021, we had better get that fight won or egalitarian democracy just might perish from the Earth in 2023.

The original sin of the American Constitution is that it was made by aristocrats who wanted to be unhampered by government to enrich themselves and exercise their personal desires (in the way of Athenian oligarchic democracy) but who did not want The People to govern, though that promise is what they made to those who fought the revolution that put them in power to do what they wanted.  I think we got only as much democracy as those aristocrats did not dare to withhold or thwart. The rest has been the constant struggle which comprises the only good that there is in the history of the United States.  We were fools to not have gotten rid of those things which have repeatedly thwarted egalitarian democracy STARTING WITH THE POWER THE COURT GAVE ITSELF TO, BY A SIMPLE MAJORITY, OVERTURN LAWS MADE BY THE DEMOCRATICALLY ELECTED BRANCHES.  That power which the Rehnquist and even more so the Roberts Courts to destroy equality is matched in dangerousness by the power they used to impose George W. Bush as an president in the putsch orchestrated by Jeb Bush and the Florida Republican Party.  Getting rid of the Electoral College is as important since in our benighted system which any president, legitimate or not, names the members of that dangerous court.  The anti-democratic Senate's further ratfucking of democracy through the filibuster is another such danger that must be changed.  

Those are the things the United States can give to the struggle for egalitarian democracy around the world, serving as both a source of the aspirations of Lincoln for legitimate government and the many examples both leading to that and away from that which embodies our government and culture. 

Egalitarian democracy is made OF The People, By The People, and For ALL OF THE PEOPLE wherever it can possibly exist.  To think that Americans can make that for anyone else is as absurd as the claim that we have secured that for ourselves.  The past 20 years in Afghanistan have been a dangerous and foolish and arrogantly racist delusion, dangerous for the people who died in the war, dangerous for those who assumed what was propped up by the United States and its largely European, Canadian, etc. allies could last beyond the always limited time period when it could be propped up from abroad.  The origin of that danger was the delusion that it could be done, a lot of that flowing from the racist dismissal of the minds and lives of people with brown skin who don't speak English, thinking we could substitute our thinking for their determination of what happens where they live, among themselves, that is inherent to the ruling class of the United States, in that period in Dick Cheney and George W. Bush and the American media and its pundit clique of clackers. 

* Another reason for getting rid of not only the Iowa Caucus but also the New Hampshire Primary as setting the stage for the Democratic nomination.