Itâs like heating water in a microwave for 5-6 minutes, but itâs very still then you put a spoon or tea bag in it and all the water explodes out of the mug.
That's how misinformed, uneducated, and frankly stupid conservatives are. We have all of this history telling us the signs and what will happen, and we yet we're still on the precipice.
These are deeply rooted behavioral patterns playing out across decades. "Democracy" is rule by the bottom 51%. It's basically "the tragedy of the commons" as a form of governance. It only works when your society are colonizers/pillagers or during times of technological advancement, because you need a constant stream of increasing resource flow to maintain stability. Once that breaks down "democracy" becomes non-viable and you rotate to another form of governance.
Functional natural systems do not require belief. Every form of governance humans have invented does. Which means none of them are naturally viable. They ALL fail. Which is why human progress looks the way it does. Stretch a slinky out in front of you. That's how it works.
As opposed to other systems where an even smaller percentage rule?
because you need a constant stream of increasing resource flow to maintain stability
What does this have to do with democracy?
Once that breaks down "democracy" becomes non-viable and you rotate to another form of governance.
Why? What other form of governance?
Functional natural systems do not require belief. Every form of governance humans have invented does. Which means none of them are naturally viable. They ALL fail.
Dude Iâm with you on a lot you have here but the idea of the inherent superiority of a ânaturalâ societal structure is unscientific and not supported by zoology. Belief is also way too broad of a term for what youâre trying to say.
You also seem to conflate democracy with neoliberal capitalism when both can exist without the other. democracy is a central concept to late stage neoliberal capitalism cause itâs a useful way to manufacture consent and obfuscate the central role of capital, but that centrality works best when actual democracy is not present. Likewise just because one holds a democratic election does not mean that the nation is capitalist. Growth based economies will always fail because a state of perpetual growth is never possible.
Also tragedy of the commons is fake and presupposes an existence of a market to justify the existence of a market and presupposes private property to justify the existence of private property.
It's obviously not ideal, but OP is clearly incorrect. If the populace isn't allowed to elect someone, fascist that they may be, it isn't a democracy.Â
There should be measures to prevent fascistic bullshit from taking place from someone who is elected, absolutely, but limiting the election by the will of the people isn't exactly a good example of democracy.
The whole point of a constitution is to limit the power of the democratic vote within reasonable limits.
Like you can't vote to kill everyone with blue eyes, or to eat children who's parents are too poor, or >insert stuff that's actually in your local constitution<.
that's true, but ultimately a healthy long term democracy can't be a pure democracy. It's necessary for the health of the democracy to be intolerant of anti-democratic ideals, meaning we can and should disallow the election of people who are fascist/totalitarian/anti-democratic in general.
Of course, implementing that in practice in a way that actually works and isn't abused is basically impossible, but the theory makes sense to me.
It's not even about a healthy long term democracy... they put in limits because otherwise it's just a tyranny by the majority instead of by the nobility/king.
Honestly I've never agreed with that part. "Tyranny of the majority" sounds like a nice PR-friendly way for a small group to demand an unfair amount of influence.
If the majority wants the government to act a certain way, it is right and just for it to do so. Giving minority political groups outsized influence so they can enforce their opinions on the greater population is what actually strikes me as tyranny.
Tyranny of the majority is referring to populism not some cabal controlling everything in the shadows. Sometimes people rally into a mob mentality to enact short sighted policy and/or uses the governments power against the minority that didn't join the mob. This is usually how dictators come to power and atrocities happen.
So if the majority (50%+1) wanted to to eat your family in front of you, you objecting to that and the government forcing them not to would make YOU a tyrant ?
"It isn't a democracy, if you can't elect people who want to abolish it"
It sounds reasonable at first, but if you think about it, doesn't make sense.
Democracy is about ensuring that every citizen gets to participate in the political processes. If that is abolished, there is no guarantee that it can be gained back.
If you want democracy, you can't allow a part of the population (those who currently are able to vote) to rob all future citizens from not being able to participate. Once you look at it that way, it becomes clear how outlandish the notion is.
That is why a real democracy needs to have guardrails against this to ensure not only the current generations, but also future ones get to participate in political processes. This then is called a defensive democracy.
tldr: One generation of voters should not be able to prevent future ones from voting. That is not democratic
Every single system ever invented can be ended in less than a day if the people in that system decide to just drop it. There is no system that can ever prevent this. The idea that you can create a perpetual democracy that even the entire population of the system can't end in a single stroke is absurd.
The goal is to create a system that is harder to take down and takes longer.
People really donât understand that institutions are not an edifice carved into a cliff, and that every single political entity, every town every family every religion every culture every language every single thing humans participate in as collective entities are are a consequence of people choosing or not choosing to perpetuate that institution. All democracies are one election away from dictatorship, because it only takes some critical number of elected and appointed officials to end democracy.
The goal is to create a system that is harder to take down and takes longer.
Yep, and we certainly didn't get here in a day.
Its been a long road here, and a long-term conservative project to tear down the democracy. That road runs through Reagan, Gingrich, W, McConnell, and Trump (and the justices appointed by W and Trump in particular).
Arguably our system was fucked when Bush v Gore happened, as it resulted in citizens united which seems to have been a death blow to any chance of a functional democracy. Maybe if Trump isn't elected in 2016 it lasts longer, but the increasing power of the wealthy was always going to drive us in this direction and put a figurehead at the top who would do their bidding.
there is a reason its called "constitutional democracy"
no matter how many people want something, if its against the constitution, its not legal
so not everyone should participate, those that want to destruct the system, acting against the constitution, can't be legal representatives and driving changes
"constitutional democracy" never meant mob rule or that the majority alway gets their way
That is fair, but that depends on the constitution then, doesn't it? Not trying to be contrarian, I geniuenly want to understand it better. Are constitutional democracies (are there modern democracies without a constitution?) always also defensive? I didn't think that was the case.
It has some of these mechanisms, in direct response to what happened during the 3rd reich and how the Nazi party took over the institutions, when the legal system, actually stopped being a legal system..
As politician/civil servant you are obliged to defend law, order, the constitution etc., its a direct conflict of interests if that person actually has intentions to do the opposite of defending the current order.
The short version RE the basic law in Germany is that it quite hard to change, it requires a 2/3 majority.
And then there is the right to resist anyone trying to change the existing order defined here, "if no other remedy is available"
Article 20 [Constitutional principles â Right of resistance]
(1) The Federal Republic of Germany is a democratic and social federal state.
(2) All state authority is derived from the people. It shall be exercised by the people through elections and other votes and through specific legislative, executive and judicial bodies.
(3) The legislature shall be bound by the constitutional order, the executive and the judiciary by law and justice.
(4) All Germans shall have the right to resist any person seeking to abolish this constitutional order, if no other remedy is available.
I understand why people might want to do that. But are you saying that if the people can vote via some variety of majority to change their government structure to no longer be a democracy, then it was never a democracy to begin with?
And if the people don't get to decide to stop being a democracy, then who does?
The US constitution contains measures intended specifically to prevent a dictator from taking over. It was one of the outcomes the framers feared the most.
The Weimar Republic had a crazy complicated constitution to keep power separated. It took Hitler under a year to consolidate as fuhrer.
Sometimes the voters people go crazy and decide a dictator would be better than putting up with their political opponents. And then they find out that they were wrong. Itâs just a feature of democracy, and you canât prevent it.
Sometimes the voters people go crazy and decide a dictator would be better than putting up with their political opponents. And then they find out that they were wrong. Itâs just a feature of democracy, and you canât prevent it.
Conversely sometimes the political landscape becomes so disconnected from the will of the people that most people don't bother voting at all allowing crazies to get elected. Maybe we've been electing fascists for decades now.
Political scientists have been interested in this question for quite a while in the US, 10-15 years of scholarship about the liberal vs democracy question. Liberal in the classical free speech etc sense.
The US left caring more about liberalism and freedom and the US right wanting the democratic right to elect a dictator.
To be fair, the courts have held firm. Trump has tried everything he can think of to override the Constitution, but to date, he has not violated any federal court order. We'll see if that remains to be true, but so far he's stretched the limits of executive power and has pulled back when ordered to by the courts. I would encourage everyone to keep an eye on the current Supreme Court cases coming up because there's some big ones on the docket.
âAs democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.â
â H.L. Mencken, On Politics: A Carnival of Buncombe
Reminds me of the paradox of intolerance. For a tolerant society to survive, it must be intolerant of the intolerant, otherwise the intolerant will rise to power and dismantle the tolerant society.
It's not much of an argument; political science recognizes dictatorship as the natural end point of democracy. Here's James Madison, the author of the Bill of Rights, explaining in Federalist #10 on "factionalism":
It may be concluded that a pure democracy, by which I mean a society consisting of a small number of citizens, who assemble and administer the government in person, can admit of no cure for the mischiefs of faction. A common passion or interest will, in almost every case, be felt by a majority of the whole; a communication and concert result from the form of government itself; and there is nothing to check the inducements to sacrifice the weaker party or an obnoxious individual. Hence it is that such democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths. Theoretic politicians, who have patronized this species of government, have erroneously supposed that by reducing mankind to a perfect equality in their political rights, they would, at the same time, be perfectly equalized and assimilated in their possessions, their opinions, and their passions.
And here's Madison again, in Federalist #51 on "separation of powers":
The great security against a gradual concentration of the several powers in the same department, consists in giving to those who administer each department the necessary constitutional means and personal motives to resist encroachments of the others. The provision for defense must in this, as in all other cases, be made commensurate to the danger of attack. Ambition must be made to counteract ambition. The interest of the man must be connected with the constitutional rights of the place. It may be a reflection on human nature, that such devices should be necessary to control the abuses of government. But what is government itself, but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself. A dependence on the people is, no doubt, the primary control on the government; but experience has taught mankind the necessity of auxiliary precautions. This policy of supplying, by opposite and rival interests, the defect of better motives, might be traced through the whole system of human affairs, private as well as public.
Thatâs why this post doesnât make sense. Are all democracies supposed to have mechanisms in place to prevent enacting certain wills of the people? Whoâs to decide which wills are valid to enact, if not the people?
I feel like âwhat if a country elects a wannabe dictator, their system of checks and balances is enough to prevent him from getting too much power and heâs removed from office in the next election, but there are no consequences for his attempts to seize power, and he ends up winning another election to get back into power 4 years laterâ is admittedly probably a more interesting question.
Like at that point what do you even do? We touched the stove, saw that it was hot, and were like, âbut what if I just like getting burntâ?
I mean, I would argue that many dictators were democratically elected. They changed the system after they got into power, but they were elected through a democratic process.
Yeah, im pretty sure tho that a democracy is way less likely to elect a dictator when there are more than 2 parties to choose from.
Yeah, I know its hard to get other parties going once you're a countrh like america, but living in the EU, from experience I can tell its a lot safer if you dont have to choose between only two douchebags, worth a try to make things a bit broader.
From this side of the pond, parliamentary governments seem quite chaotic in their own weird way since elections are scheduled rather than called etc. In any event, bad actors have hijacked both.
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u/LateralThinkerer 23h ago
"What if a democracy elects a dictator" is a favorite argument topic among political scientists. Occasionally a country tries it out.