The Downhill Slalom of Good Democracy

The “Economist Intelligence Unit Index of Democracy,” whatever that is, did a study to determine the best functioning democracies in the world. Here are the top 10:

1. Sweden
2. Iceland
3. Netherlands
4. Norway
5. Denmark
6. Finland
7. Luxembourg
8. Australia
9. Canada
10. Switzerland

Apparently the essence of a functional democracy is proximity to good skiing.

In addition — Far be it from me to start anything, but I suppose everybody’s too busy getting night sweats over what Michael Richards said about blacks to notice that this list of nirvanic Democracies are chock full of more white people than a John Tesh concert in Utah. “Reverend Jackson, white courtesy phone.”

But we’ll leave that to people whose job it is to worry about the irrelevant.

Here’s where the U.S. and Great Britain ranked:

The reports singled out the USA (17th) and Britain’s (23rd) poor results, partly to blame on measures adopted to fight terrorism.

“The United States and Britain are near the bottom of the full democracy category, but for somewhat different reasons. America falls down on some aspects of governance and civil liberties. Despite low election turnouts, political participation in the United States is comparatively high,” the report said.

True, if you’re a terrorist in the United States, your civil liberties are somewhat limited. I think that’s worth sacrificing being among the top 10 though.

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 23rd, 2006 at 8:16 pm and is filed under Current Events. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. | 0 views | Trackback | Print this page |

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