This turned into a very wordy obiwan-esque post that I don't really feel like trimming down, sorry in advance for the length.
I mentioned the Greek polis system as my inspiration for this thread earlier. I will admit to not having an especially deep understanding of the Greek polis system, so if I am misrepresenting some aspects of it, my apologies in advance.
It's my understanding that the Greeks restricted voting and citizenship to certain individuals within a particular polis. How and why exactly they chose their restrictions isn't something that interests me here, so much as whether those restrictions are per se incompatible with a Western republican form of government.
I think we can all agree that certain fundamental rights belong to all people living in a Western republic, irrespective of any other characteristic of their being (citizenship, race, sex, so forth). Part of being "Western" is the intrinsic recognition that all people should have the right to free speech, for instance, or free practice of their religion. Even if the West has a lurid history of not respecting those rights, we did eventually come to recognize these rights as universal and worthy of respect, and have shed a lot of our own blood to prove it.
Regarding the specific consideration of slavery that DemonOverlord mentioned, I feel pretty safe saying that we can possibly still glean something useful from the Greek polis, even if we recognize that slavery is obviously incompatible with a normal understanding of what it means to be Western in the current age, and that in this respect the Greeks were "behind" us.
My concern, and the reason for this thread, is that I think the current Western democratic states are facing an existential crisis of participation. I can only really speak from direct experience with America, but I've gotten anecdotal confirmation from friends living in Canada and various European states that similar trends are showing up. There is a deeply-entrenched sense of apathy among many people living in Western societies toward their governments, which in my mind is extremely dangerous for the long-term health of a democratic society.
There was a stat that a lot of liberals trotted out in the aftermath of the last presidential election here in the US that stuck with me and made me think. There are roughly 245 million people living in the United States that are of the legal age to vote. Only about 63 million of them voted for the current president. Just over half of them voted at all... both of those stats are evidence of a crisis to me.
There are myriad reasons for this particular statistic to come out this way, and I don't want to wander deep into the weeds on this one stat, but I remember civics classes in high school, and the alleged importance of adults being, if not politically active, then at least politically aware. I think it is safe to say that there's a crisis of awareness here.
Further, even among those who voted, how many put more thought into the election than the name of the party next to each candidate? Than to what their preferred news anchor or late night comedy host or preacher told them to vote?
I am wondering if perhaps the right to vote is taken for granted. The Greeks seemed to have a strong belief that the vote should be reserved for people who are actively invested in their polis, and not merely granted to every adult living in it; that there was a danger in allowing people uninvested in the polis to have such an important say in its direction. This concern seems only magnified to me in the modern era, where the average person is more atomized and less connected with the broader society in which they find themselves than any Greek could ever be within the polis. I wonder if we would be better off by not granting the vote to any adult who registers, but instead by requiring some kind of societal service -- military service is the most obvious one that comes to mind for me, but obviously there should be some path for civilians to earn the vote as well. The key is that by doing some kind of extra work for society in order to gain the ability to vote, the resulting voter will be more invested in the political future of the country they live in, and will thus be more likely to make informed decisions and to participate more frequently in making those decisions via voting.
The big philosophical issue that I see with this, from the standpoint of Western republics specifically, is that it blatantly flies in the face of the most famous treatise in Western republican history. "We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal..."
If all men are created equal, then how could one ever justify not giving all men the right to vote?
There's an interesting apparent contradiction here, in that the Founders didn't actually extend this logic to voting rights anyway. They did originally limit the franchise to land-owning white men. A cynic might argue that that's because they didn't see men who didn't own land or weren't white as people (to say nothing of women, who are left out entirely), but it's also possible they didn't believe that this idea of equality necessitated that everyone have the right to vote.
In any case, whatever they believed, the subsequent expansion of the franchise to all adults who register came in part because of a strong, and very justified, belief that the idea that "all men are created equal" *does* necessitate giving all men the right to vote.
Ultimately I guess what I'm asking is -- does it? Can all people be equal in a Western republic that limits the franchise beyond "all adults who register to vote"?