Weakening democracy lol

[Tigers!]

The measure of success for democracy isn't the degree of socialism in a society. If a majority of the people would vote for the Nazi party and the Nazis as such got into power that isn't a failure of democracy. That's exactly how democracy should work.

Just to make sure I'm following you, there is a well-known historical instance when a majority of the people DID vote for the Nazi party and the Nazis (as such) DID get into power. It happened in Germany in 1932. Is this exactly how democracy "should" work?

(If you nit-pick that the Nazi coalition won only 44% of the vote and had to mount a "Stop the Steal" campaign to obtain complete control, you lose.)

 Adolf Hitler's rise to power​

(Summarized from above) The Nazi Party only garnered 43.7% of the vote. As you wrote They managed to win a majority of seats by joining with another party to form a government. Even then it is only because President von Hindenburg of Germany feared anarchy if he didn't acknowledge this coalition as winners they never would have won power.

And the Weimar Republic used Proportional Representation.
Welcome to the perils of PR.

 

[lpetrich]

I found which previous column he referred to.
Opinion | Joe Manchin Is a Symptom, but It’s the Senate That’s Sick - The New York Times

It may seem odd to blame the institution for this outcome. It’s not as if there is any alternative to passing legislation through both chambers of Congress. But it’s also no accident that climate legislation has repeatedly been passed in the House only to collapse in the Senate. It is no accident that, as a general rule, the upper chamber is where popular legislation goes to die or, if it isn’t killed, where it is passed in truncated and diminished form, like the recent (and lackluster) bipartisan gun bill. The Senate was built with this purpose in mind. It was designed to keep the people in check — to put limits on the reach of democracy and the scope of representation.

Separate from the issue of each state having 2 Senators, no matter what its population. Founder James Madison wanted a proportional Senate, but JB argues that that would not have made much difference.

... Many of the framers of the Constitution were as interested in suppressing the democratic experimentation of the previous decade as they were concerned with building a more powerful national government. The two, in fact, were connected. “Most of the men who assembled at the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in 1787 were also convinced that the national government under the Articles of Confederation was too weak to counter the rising tide of democracy in the states,” the historian Terry Bouton writes in “Taming Democracy: ‘The People,’ the Founders, and the Troubled Ending of the American Revolution.”

... Bouton argues that they were the popular efforts to make the American economy more favorable to the average person. “Popular calls for a revaluation of war-debt certificates, bans on for-profit corporations, progressive taxation, limits on land speculation, and every other measure to make property more equal promised to take wealth away from the elite,” Bouton writes. “The same was true of the popular resistance that halted tax collection or frustrated creditors in their attempts to foreclose on their debtors.”

Some of the most ardent nationalists were also speculators who had wagered heavily on land and war-debt certificates and feared that democracy would undermine, or even destroy, their investments in property. This elite fear of financial ruin was at its most acute in Pennsylvania, where ordinary people had written and implemented the most radically democratic Constitution in the new nation.

 

[lpetrich]

Back to Opinion | There Are 100 People in America With Way Too Much Power - The New York Times

JB proposes repealing the 17th Amendment and reverting to election by state legislatures. But he also proposes weakening the Senate to make it more like the UK House of Lords and the Canadian Senate.

My Senate could not block House legislation, but it could offer amendments if it chose to take action. Those amendments would then be voted on by a conference committee of House and Senate members, for final approval. If the Senate decides to hold a bill for revision, it has a set amount of time — let’s say 60 days — with which to act. If it does not act in that time, the bill is deemed passed and goes to the president for signing.

The Senate would retain its oversight powers as well as its power to approve treaties and offer “advice and consent” to the president for judicial and executive branch nominees. But “advice and consent” would mean an actual hearing and an actual vote.

The idea is to move the locus of policymaking back to the House of Representatives (which I would like to enlarge to at least 600 members), and to make it the most important chamber in the operation of government. In this scheme, it might be worth extending House terms to three years to reduce the pressures of campaigning and allow members more time to develop expertise, should they seek it.

He neglected making it semi-proportional, like the  German Bundesrat the German upper house.

• Population >= 0: 3 votes
• Population >= 2M: 4 votes
• Population >= 6M: 5 votes
• Population >= 7M: 6 votes

A state can send as many delegates as votes, or else one delegate with all the votes. But each state votes as a bloc, with all the votes the same.

 

[lpetrich]

Having taken on the Senate, JB turns to the House.
Opinion | You Want to Clean Up the House? Same Here - The New York Times

He is correct in recognizing the deficiencies of single-member districts and first-past-the-post voting, but he fails to mention the solution: proportional representation. What he says:

One solution is just to get rid of districts altogether. Or if you’d prefer to keep districts, divide each state into a number of multi-member districts, in which voters elect multiple candidates using a form of preference voting. Ranked-choice voting has made some inroads here in the United States, but I am a fan of approval voting, in which voters can cast a vote for as many candidates as they’d like that are on the ballot. Whoever gets the most votes — or in a multi-member district, the top vote getters — wins a seat in Congress.

Now, approval voting is a little more complicated than this — and there are different forms of approval voting that, for example, allow voters to mark the intensity of their preference — but these are the basics. One advantage of approval voting is that it is more likely to produce winners with broad support across the electorate. Another advantage is that it allows third parties to compete without “spoiling” the election in favor of a candidate who doesn’t have majority support. (Although, in some circumstances, approval voting can produce plurality winners.)

The variation of approval voting he mentioned is called rated or score voting - one gives each candidate a rating.

But for nonpartisan methods to produce proportionality, one needs to elect winners one by one, and downweight the ballots that elected each winner. Otherwise, a partisan vote will make the election degenerate into a general-ticket election, voting for an entire delegation in single-seat fashion.

 

[lpetrich]

Abolish State Senates - The American Prospect

At first glance, California state Sen. Richard Richards might have seemed an exceptionally powerful lawmaker in 1960. The just-completed census revealed that Los Angeles County, home to just over six million people, constituted a whopping 38.4 percent of the entire state’s population. So Richards, as the county’s sole senator, could speak for more than one-third of the state’s residents.

At second glance, however, Richards was no more than a legislative pip-squeak—and, more distressingly, so was Los Angeles. California, like virtually every other state, had shaped its upper house in the image of the U.S. Senate, apportioning its seats not by population but by jurisdiction. Every county was entitled to no more than one senator. As California’s senate had just 40 seats, but the state itself had 58 counties, the smallest counties had to buddy up to get the total down to 40, but that still meant that a senator representing a district with roughly 6,000 residents could, on any given measure, cast the same number of votes (one) as Richards, who represented six million.

That disturbed the U.S. Supreme Court, then under the leadership of Chief Justice Earl Warren and in an uncommonly egalitarian frame of mind. In Baker v. Carr (1962) and Reynolds v. Sims (1964), the Court held that equality under the law meant that state legislatures had to be governed by districts of equal population. No longer could senators from two all-but-unpopulated Sierra Nevada districts outvote the one senator from teeming, gridlocked L.A. In short order, California reshaped its Senate so that roughly one-third of its members came from L.A. County, and all the other states (except Nebraska, which already had a unicameral legislature) did likewise.

The Court’s one-person-one-vote doctrine became the law of the land. And in the process, state senates became entirely redundant.

The bicameral states have nearly identical partisan fractions in both houses. "Nor is there an appreciable difference in the job functions of the legislative chambers."

Yet no state has been made unicameral since the Reynolds decision in 1964. The only unicameral state continues to be Nebraska, made that way in 1934.

This is not at all surprising. Legislators, like most people, are disinclined to vote themselves out of a job. Republicans (and Democrats of a Scrooge-like disposition) may bemoan government profligacy at every turn, but when did you ever hear them call for consolidating legislatures into a single body?

Besides, having two separate houses has proven to be an effective way of shielding the business of lawmaking, or law-derailing, from the public’s eye. Key provisions can morph into something quite different or disappear altogether in transit between the houses, or in conference committees where versions are reconciled and where powerful interests can make behind-closed-doors power plays. Such things can and do happen in unicameral legislatures, too, of course, but the gratuitous complexity that comes with having two houses does the cause of transparency no favors.

Nebraska's change was done by referendum.

The change would likely never have been made but for the nearly dozen-year campaign for unicameralism waged by the state’s remarkable U.S. senator, George Norris, whose other notable achievements include federal legislation outlawing court injunctions against strikes (the Norris-LaGuardia Act) and, as a passionate public power advocate, the creation of the Tennessee Valley Authority, which he championed for years before Franklin Roosevelt became president and pushed Congress to enact it.

Norris’s case for unicameralism was similarly progressive. Bicameralism, he argued, was an 18th-century transposition to American soil of the British Parliament. Like the House of Lords, the U.S. Senate—whose members were chosen by state legislatures until the popular vote requirement of the 17th Amendment, enacted in 1913—was initially devised to enable a quasi-aristocracy to tamp down the popular sentiments of the lower house’s hoi polloi.

A body so conceived, Norris contended, ran against the American grain, particularly for state legislatures, whose creation had required no equivalent to the compromise between small and large states that created a bicameral Congress at the Constitutional Convention of 1787. “The constitutions of our various states,” Norris declared, “are built upon the idea that there is but one class. If this be true, there is no sense or reason in having the same thing done twice, especially if it is to be done by two bodies of men elected in the same way and having the same jurisdiction.” Which, of course, became even more the case after the Warren Court’s rulings.

Then discussing proportional representation and mixed-member systems like in Germany and New Zealand.

In general, significantly changing the legislative system would have to either come from the electorate via an initiative, or begin with a Democratic legislature and then be put before the voters as a referendum. (New Zealand adopted its system only after voters approved it in 1996.) Only 26 states have an initiative or referendum process, but in a state like Michigan, which does have that option and where Democrats usually win statewide but are locked into minority status in the legislature, the party should begin the work of persuading voters to move to a hybrid mode of representation.

 

[lpetrich]

I note a curious shift in the right wing. Richard Nixon appealed to a "silent majority" that didn't demonstrate or riot or do other such obnoxious things. But looking at places like Quora, right-wingers now often sound like they are a persecuted minority. They say that the US is a republic not a democracy, they talk about the "tyranny of the majority", and they like to say that democracy is like two wolves and a sheep deciding on what's for dinner.

Republic not a democracy? The US is both. There are some nations that are republics without being democracies: those with one-party systems, like Communist countries.

Tyranny of the majority? The right wing's solution is to amplify the voting power of their favorite people, but to avoid such bias, one should require a supermajority, more than 50%. This is good for big changes like amendments of constitutions, but not so good for everyday business. The US Senate's filibuster effectively imposes a 60% supermajority for most business. That filibuster is not even a talking filibuster, but over the last half-century, it's been a Senator issuing a hold request. This seems like the fake war in Star Trek Original Series episode "A Taste of Armageddon".

But why a 60% vote to overcome a filibuster? Why not 66.7%? 75%? 80%? 90%? 95%? 99%? 100%?

That last one is unanimity, and it was used in Poland's early-modern parliament, the Sejm ("same"), as the  Liberum veto

But that helped Poland go from a sprawling empire to disappearing off the map. Poland's neighbors obstructed action to stop them, and those neighbors partitioned then Poland out of existence.

Imagine Canada and Mexico partitioning the US out of existence.

 

[Swammerdami]

Apropos of ranked-choice voting, the following at The Hill caught my eye:

While Palin has received Trump’s endorsement, it’s unclear how she will perform in Tuesday’s primary as a result of the new ranked-choice voting system. The new system could benefit candidates such as Begich, given that a traditional primary would have brought out a more conservative base that would likely rally around Palin. Additionally, recent polls show Palin trailing Begich and Peltola.

Because of the new system, the winner of the special election won’t be known for days. Significantly, Palin is on Tuesday’s ballot twice: Once for the special election and again for the at-large House primary featuring dozens of candidates.

Questions:

(1) WHY does ranked-choice voting bring out fewer conservatives? Assuming the journalist isn't confused about the reason for Palin suffering under such a system, is it because "conservative" thinkers only handle binary choices well, and anything more complicated would cause them to stay home in confusion or frustration?

(2) WHY will the ranked-choice delay results by "days"? If tallied by computer the extra processing would take milliseconds, not days. Even counting manually, efficiencies are possible. Do such ballots cause delays in the European countries which have adopted ranked-choice?

(3) So this special election is just to fill the House seat for 2 months while waiting for the November election? Has anyone mentioned how ridiculous some American election recipes seem?

 

[Tigers!]

Has any consideration been given to make voting compulsory? Whilst seemingly undemocratic it does force more electors to pay some attention (albeit reluctantly) to the voting process.

I still shake my head that 1/3 of eligible voters did not bother voting for or against Brexit in the UK in 2016. It would have made a huge difference (one way or the other) if those voters had put down a mark.
Or the fact that a US president often only gets (it seems to me) 50% of 66% of possible ballots. Hardly a ringing endorsement.

PR has some advantages but if a substantial minority of the population, say 25-33%, do not vote then it really is not much different to FPTP.
For all the bagging it gets FPTP works for a 2 or 3 horse race but obviously not for 8-9 candidates.

 

[lpetrich]

The intellectual right contemplates an 'American Caesar' | The Week

Starting off with Ronald Reagan and going ahead to Donald Trump, with his getting the support of far-right militias.

With most Republican officeholders and media personalities refusing to condemn the actions of the insurrectionary mob that invaded the Capitol to stop congressional certification of the 2020 election results — or Trump's decisive role in inciting that mob — and some of them instead endorsing an evidence-free conspiracy involving the "deep state" and the FBI, the GOP has verified that the Overton window has shifted sharply to the right. What would have until quite recently been considered unacceptable forms of political dissent have been legitimized. That's how the once unthinkable becomes a new normal.

Then on right-wingers embracing Trump's Presidency.

The Flight 93 Election - Claremont Review of Books - Michael Anton, who worked for Rudy Giuliani and Condoleeza Rice, "portrayed Trump as a final, last-ditch opportunity for conservatives to wrest control of the country back from those (like Hillary Clinton) who aimed at nothing less than its thoroughgoing destruction."

Two months before the 2020 general election, MA wrote this: The Coming Coup? - The American Mind
Claiming that the left wing was planning a coup in case Joe Biden didn't win.

When events unfolded in precisely the opposite way — with Trump losing the vote, refusing to accept the result, and attempting a hapless coup of his own to stay in power — Anton said nothing to acknowledge either the irony or the error. Quite the opposite, in fact. In the months since Trump left office, Anton has been doing his best to throw open the doors of the conservative intellectual world to ideas once considered far too extreme for American politics.

How extreme? So extreme that in late May, Anton set aside nearly two hours on his Claremont Institute podcast ("The Stakes") for an erudite, wide-ranging discussion with self-described monarchist Curtis Yarvin about why the United States needs an "American Caesar" to seize control of the federal government, and precisely how such a would-be dictator could accomplish the task.

The Stakes: The American Monarchy? - The American Mind

Almost like saying that King George III was right.

 

[lpetrich]

It's important right at the outset to make a few things clear about the Anton-Yarvin conversation. First, Anton doesn't explicitly endorse Yarvin's most outlandish ideas, which blend a far-right love of unlimited executive power with the techno-utopianism of Silicon Valley. (Yarvin created the Urbit digital platform and co-founded the tech company Tion, while also gaining considerable notoriety with the alt-right blog "Unqualified Reservations," written under the pen name Mencius Moldbug.) In fact, at several points Anton goes out of his way to declare in a tone of mock seriousness that as someone affiliated with the Claremont Institute, which has long advocated for a return to the principles of the American founding (including the Declaration of Independence's denunciations of monarchical tyranny), he can't stand behind Yarvin's sympathy for dictatorship. Yet it's also true that at no point does Anton offer a substantive critique of Yarvin's arguments and assertions. He merely expresses pragmatic or tactical objections, as if the primary fault in Yarvin's ideas is that they are unrealistic.

What do they think that the US is now?

Rather, they agree early on in the podcast (around minute 24) that the current American "regime" is most accurately described as a "theocratic oligarchy" in which an elite class of progressive "priests" ensconced in the bureaucracies of the administrative state, and at Harvard, The New York Times, and other leading institutions of civil society, promulgate and enforce their own version of "reality." Anton and Yarvin treat this assertion as given and then proceed to talk through how this theocratic oligarchy might be overturned.

What do they want instead?

 

[lpetrich]

Curtis Yarvin then explains that roughly every 75 years, a "Caesar" takes over and makes "substantive regime changes." George Washington in 1789, Abraham Lincoln in 1861, FDR in 1933. So we are due for another one.

Repeating patterns in US history have been noted by others:  Cyclical theory (United States history) and Peter Turchin Age of Discord II - Peter Turchin

Despite being a revolutionary leader, GW wasn't much of a Caesar figure, it must be noted.


Curtis Yarvin proposed Elon Musk, despite his being Constitutionally ineligible for the Presidency. The two joked that he should simply run, win, and demand that the Constitution be changed to accommodate him. They also joked about how great it would have been for Donald Trump to declare himself the personal embodiment of the "living Constitution".

CY then proposed that a President ought to give himself emergency powers on day one of his Presidency, after running on a campaign promise to do exactly that. He will then take over the National Guard and he will coordinate with sympathetic members of the police. When any Federal agency does not go along, he will ask his followers to besiege its buildings. When MA asked CY what to do about the likes of Harvard and the NYT protesting that this is dictatorship, CY responded that it is essential to "smash it" in one blow. To suggest that a Caesar accept "someone else's department of reality is manifestly absurd." He continued that "when Caesar crosses the Rubicon, he doesn't sit around getting his feet wet, fishing. He marches straight across the Rubicon" and that he uses "all force available." This will help the whole world to be "remade".

The podcast concludes with Anton quoting another Claremont writer (Angelo Codevilla) on how Trump dropped "the leadership of the deplorables," which is waiting to be picked up by someone "who will make Trump seem moderate." Yarvin responds approvingly with a quote by Serbian dictator and indicted genocidal war criminal Slobodan Milošević, who said the goal should be that "no one will dare to beat you anymore."

It's almost like they said "I believe in dictatorship, but with me the dictator."

 

[lpetrich]

Opinion | A New Playbook for Saving Democracy, Defeating Fascism and Winning Elections - The New York Times - by Anand Giridharadas

It is time to speak an uncomfortable truth: The pro-democracy side is at risk not just because of potential electoral rigging, voter suppression and other forms of unfair play by the right, as real as those things are. In America (as in various other countries), the pro-democracy cause — a coalition of progressives, liberals, moderates, even decent Republicans who still believe in free elections and facts — is struggling to win the battle for hearts and minds.

The pro-democracy side can still very much prevail. But it needs to go beyond its present modus operandi, a mix of fatalism and despair and living in perpetual reaction to the right and policy wonkiness and praying for indictments. It needs to build a new and improved movement — feisty, galvanizing, magnanimous, rooted and expansionary — that can outcompete the fascists and seize the age.

Then mentioning the pro-democracy activists that he has reported on in recent years.

In their own circles and sometimes in public, these organizers warn that the right is outcompeting small-d democrats in its psychological insight into voters and their anxieties, its messaging, its knack for narrative, its instinct to make its cause not just a policy program but also a home offering meaning, comfort and belonging. They worry, meanwhile, that their own allies can be hamstrung by a naïve and high-minded view of human nature, a bias for the wonky over the guttural, a self-sabotaging coolness toward those who don’t perfectly understand, a quaint belief in going high against opponents who keep stooping to new lows and a lack of fight and a lack of talent at seizing the mic and telling the kinds of galvanizing stories that bend nations’ arcs.

Telling a good story is essential, like this: A Message From the Future With Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez - YouTube about the Green New Deal. It was a bit overconfident, but it told a good story.

Or AOC's Green New Deal posters, based on parks in cities:

• Flushing Meadows GND Poster – Official AOC Shop - Corona Park, Queens, NYC
• Pelham Bay Park GND Poster – Official AOC Shop - Bronx, NYC
• The Public Garden GND Poster – Official AOC Shop - Boston, MA
• Hart Plaza GND Poster – Official AOC Shop - Detroit, MI
• Plaza Del Totem GND Poster – Official AOC Shop - San Juan, PR
• Griffith Observatory GND Poster – Official AOC Shop - Los Angeles, CA

Only six so far, and I can think of some candidates for future ones.

 

[lpetrich]

The right presently runs laps around the left in its ability to manage and use attention. It understands the power of provocation to make people have the conversation that most benefits its side. “Tucker Carlson said what about the war on ‘legacy Americans’?” “Donald Trump said what about those countries in Africa?” It understands that sometimes it’s worth looking ridiculous to achieve saturation of the discourse. It knows that the more one’s ideas are repeated — positively, negatively, however — the more they seem to millions of people like common sense. It knows that when the opposition is endlessly consumed by responding to its ideas, that opposition isn’t hawking its own wares.

For instance,

Mr. Trump’s wall was a bad policy with a shrewd theory of attention. President Biden’s Build Back Better was a good policy with a nonexistent theory of attention.

Donald Trump could get attention just by being a major-league a-hole. It's like a toddler who throws temper tantrums.

A concept you often hear among organizers (but less in electoral politics) is meaning making.

...
A story, an explanation, a narrative — these form the bridge that transports you from noticing the new Spanish-speaking cashiers at Walgreens to fearing a southern invasion or from liking a senator from Chicago you once heard on TV to seeing him as a redemption of the ideals of the nation.

Like AOC's video.

 

[lpetrich]

There is a phrase that all political organizers seem to learn in their first training: Meet people where they are.

...
Many organizers I spoke to aired a concern that, in this fractious and high-stakes time, a tendency toward purism, gatekeeping and homogeneity afflicts sections of the left and threatens its pursuits.

...
Meeting people where they are also involves a pragmatic willingness to make the pitch for your ideas using moral frames that are not your own. The victorious abortion-rights campaigners in Kansas recently showcased this kind of approach when they ran advertisements obliquely comparing government-compelled pregnancies with government-compelled mask mandates for Covid-19. The campaigners themselves believed in mask mandates. But they understood they were targeting moderate and even some rightist voters who have intuitions different from theirs. And they played to those intuitions — and won stunningly.

...
If the left could use a little more grace and generosity toward voters who are not yet fully on board, it could also benefit from a greater comfort with making powerful enemies. It needs to be simultaneously a better lover and a better fighter.

The Right does concern trolling all the time, so it's good to use their ideology against them.

 

[lpetrich]

Then about Beto O'Rourke, John Fetterman, and Gavin Newsom being confrontational, like JF trolling Mehmet Oz about his residence and his grocery shopping.

Many leading political thinkers and doers argue that the right’s greatest strength isn’t its ideological positioning or policy ideas or rhetoric. It is putting a metaphorical roof over the head of adherents, giving them a sense of comfort and belonging to something larger than themselves.

...
The Democratic Party establishment is abysmal at this kind of appeal. It is more comfortable sending emails asking you to chip in $5 to beat back the latest outrage than it is inviting you to participate in something.

By contrast, some Democratic Socialists of America branches will fix people's cars' brake lights.

As Bhaskar Sunkara, the founder of Jacobin, the leftist magazine, has observed, the political parties most effective at galvanizing working-class voters in the 20th century were “deeply rooted” in civil society and trade unions, “tied so closely with working-class life that, in some countries, every single tenement building might have had a representative.”

AOC does a bit of that in her district, NY-14, I must note.

 

[lpetrich]

Back to telling compelling stories.

There are reasons this is harder for the left than for the right. As the writer Masha Gessen said to me not long ago, it is easier to tell a story about a glorious past that people vividly remember (and misremember) than it is to tell the story of a future they can’t yet see and may not believe can be delivered. It is easier to simplify and scapegoat than to propose actual solutions to complex problems.

It was not for nothing that the Nazis called their regime the Third Reich. They wanted to suggest continuity with past German regimes: the Holy Roman Empire and the late 19th cy. German Empire. Many Nazis, like Adolf Hitler himself, had fought for that Second Reich, and they wanted to bring back something like it. In Italy, Benito Mussolini admired the Roman Empire.

The Soviet Union was different in that it presented itself as building a new and glorious society, and a lot of people believed that in its early decades. That vision faded in that nation's last decades, and Vladimir Putin, despite being raised in the Soviet Union, does not have its future orientation, instead looking back to it as some Good Old Days.

AG suggests some storytelling possibilities.

One could tell the story of a country that set out a long time ago to try something, that embarked on an experiment in self-government that had little precedent, that committed itself to ideals that remain iconic to people around the world. It’s a country that also struggled since those beginnings to be in practice what its progenitors thought it was in theory, because its founding fathers “didn’t have the courage to do exactly what they said,” as the artist Dewey Crumpler recently put it to me. America was blinded by its own parchment declarations to the exploitation and suffering and degradation and death it allowed to flourish. But since those days, it has tried to get better. The country has seen itself more clearly and sought to improve itself, just as people do.

 

[DrZoidberg]

The left in Sweden are now in shock over the big win for the far right party there. They are also talking about weakening democracy. NO. The democracy is fine. This is democracy working as it should. What has changed are people's values and opinions. Because the world has changed. People are now worrying about different things. We can debate why that is. But my favourite candidate not winning is not the same thing as democracy failing. Perhaps it's me who isn't keeping up with the times?

I'm an upper middle class, well educated well off man with a good job. I'm fairly well insulated from economic issues. I have very little worry about in life. That informs my political choices. Caring about other people and being generous is what people who feel safe do. People who feel threatened act defensively. That is what I think is happening. I think the IT economy has been awesome for the world at large. Great wealth has been created. But it hasn't been spread around evenly. While IT advances have benefitted the uneducated rural working class as well. The urban middle class are today, by comparison, fabulously wealthy.

My current lifestyle was unatainable for 99% of Scandinavians in the 1970'ies. Today it's fairly normal. For IT professionals.

 

[Swammerdami]

What does "democracy" even mean? I had thought that it meant MORE than just rule by the majority, that it implied social equality. I checked several dictionaries, but only three of them partly agreed with this, and then only in a secondary definition of "democratic":

Dictionary.com: "pertaining to or characterized by the principle of political or social equality for all."

Cambridge Dictionary: "A person or a group that is democratic believes in, encourages, or supports freedom and equality between people and groups."

Collins Dictionary: "Something that is democratic is based on the idea that everyone should have equal rights and should be involved in making important decisions. Education is the basis of a democratic society."


I like Collins' mention of education. However this was NOT part of the (secondary) definition; it was just the example sentence.

In the olden days, citizens were influenced by eloquent and educated opinion-makers, and usually chose representatives to lead the government rather than making decisions with popular referenda. Brexit is an obvious example of the 51% probably making a bad decision which well-informed representatives would not have made.

The left in Sweden are now in shock over the big win for the far right party there. They are also talking about weakening democracy. NO. The democracy is fine. This is democracy working as it should. What has changed are people's values and opinions.

But surely we can agree that it is NOT democratic for 51% to select a government whose announced intention is to exterminate some religious group within the 49%.

Hitler came to power as a result of processes of a representative democracy. Is there some point where we will agree that democracy did NOT work "as it should" ?

In the U.S., many voters today, in this post-rational era, are influenced by lies about a stolen election, lies about Hillary Clinton, etc. I refuse to believe that this "is democracy working as it should."

Because the world has changed. People are now worrying about different things. We can debate why that is. But my favourite candidate not winning is not the same thing as democracy failing. Perhaps it's me who isn't keeping up with the times?

I'm an upper middle class, well educated well off man with a good job. I'm fairly well insulated from economic issues. I have very little worry about in life. That informs my political choices. Caring about other people and being generous is what people who feel safe do. People who feel threatened act defensively. That is what I think is happening. I think the IT economy has been awesome for the world at large. Great wealth has been created. But it hasn't been spread around evenly. While IT advances have benefitted the uneducated rural working class as well. The urban middle class are today, by comparison, fabulously wealthy.

My current lifestyle was unatainable for 99% of Scandinavians in the 1970'ies. Today it's fairly normal. For IT professionals.

I have no idea what the relevance of these final paragraphs is. YOU may be charitable and happy to be taxed to support the less fortunate in the pursuit of utilitarianism. This does not mean that ALL voters, or even 51%, are just as charitable.

 

[bilby]

But surely we can agree that it is NOT democratic for 51% to select a government whose announced intention is to exterminate some religious group within the 49%.

I certainly don't agree with that. That's the heart of democracy, and perhaps it's most important flaw.

"Democratic"isn't synonymous with good, fair, reasonable or nice.

Despite the tendency in the developed world today to believe that it is.

 

[Tigers!]

But surely we can agree that it is NOT democratic for 51% to select a government whose announced intention is to exterminate some religious group within the 49%.

I certainly don't agree with that. That's the heart of democracy, and perhaps it's most important flaw.

"Democratic" isn't synonymous with good, fair, reasonable or nice.

Despite the tendency in the developed world today to believe that it is.

Democracy is merely the method is which we (the 'democratic') have decided how to choose our governmental representatives. 'Democracy' cannot tell us which candidate, party is the best. It cannot tell us which policy is the best or better. It cannot guide us like that.
It is just a selection method that presents all candidates, parties, policies etc. to public scrutiny. After the digestion of all the available information we make a choice.
We have given the word democracy a burden it cannot bear nor was designed to bear.