An interesting observation is: if you consider the overall system of antithetical ideologies and jockeying competitive (self-)interests in play here, the self-defining competition between Democracy and “Other” kinds of political system seems to be a necessary component in the sustainable continuity of Democracy itself. The gestalt of the Global information-processing system lumbers and lurches along from one catastrophic and self-inflected phase transition to another but the main cast of centralised/(partially-)decentralised control systems remains the same – as though they were Classical narratives or psychological archetypes that percolate through history to rise again and again, wearing different clothes and carrying polished versions of the same (old) stories.
Democracy has survived and thrived in the successful forms – such as they are – that it has assumed because it is the form of (self-)government that most easily self-replicates through a transmission medium of persons (i.e. minds), tribal self-interests, artefacts and integrated socioeconomic metabolism(s). The oscillating pendulum between political Left and Right is really nothing other than a microcosm of the discontinuity that also exists between Democracy and Other forms of large-scale organisational ideology.
Daedelus Kite 