« La démocratie, les démocraties : quelles caractéristiques aujourd’hui ? »

Chapitre précédent : Chapitre d’introduction à l’HGGSP.
Chapitre suivant : Axe 1 – Penser la démocratie.

La démocratie, c’est bien plus que la pratique des élections et le gouvernement de la majorité, c’est un type de mœurs, de vertu, de scrupule, de sens civique, de respect de l’adversaire, c’est un code moral.

Pierre Mendès France, La Vérité guidait leurs pas, Paris, 1976, Gallimard, p. 35.

Democracy will win – because a government’s legitimacy can only come from citizens ; because in this age of information and empowerment, people want more control over their lives, not less ; and because, more than any other form of government ever devised, only democracy, rooted in the sanctity of the individual, can deliver real progress.

Barrack Obama, Address to the People of Estonia, Tallinn, 3 septembre 2014.
→ https://ee.usembassy.gov/remarks-president-obama-people-estonia/
→ https://americanrhetoric.com/speeches/barackobama/barackobamaestoniapeople.htm

"It comes from a very ancient democracy, you see...."
"You mean, it comes from a world of lizards ?"
"No," said Ford, who by this time was a little more rational and coherent than he had been, having finally had the coffee forced down him, "nothing so simple. Nothing anything like so straightforward. On its world, the people are people. The leaders are lizards. The people hate the lizards and the lizards rule the people."
"Odd," said Arthur, "I thought you said it was a democracy."
"I did," said Ford. "It is."
"So," said Arthur, hoping he wasn’t sounding ridiculously obtuse, "why don’t the people get rid of the lizards ?"
"It honestly doesn’t occur to them," said Ford. "They’ve all got the vote, so they all pretty much assume that the government they’ve voted in more or less approximates to the government they want."
"You mean they actually vote for the lizards ?"
"Oh yes," said Ford with a shrug, "of course."
"But," said Arthur, going for the big one again, "why ?"
"Because if they didn’t vote for a lizard," said Ford, "the wrong lizard might get in."

Douglas Adams, So Long, And Thanks For All The Fish, New York, Harmony Books, 1985, chapitre 36 ; (trad. Jean Bonnefoy), Salut, et encore merci pour le poisson, Paris, Éditions Denoël, collection « H2G2 », n° 4, 1994, p. 228-229.