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I'll restate something that's often misunderstood about democracy. The use of elections is not to find the "best" leader (for any definition of "best" that you

• ben_w 7y ago
  > For this it needs to offer a credible and legitimate path towards political changes. This, but it also needs to be trusted. The losers need to feel that they lost, not just be told they have by the winners. This is why American democracy was stable after GWB’s initial election. Also, one of the reasons the UK voted to not change its voting mechanism in a recent referendum was that STV was portrayed as too “complicated”, while FPTP has an intuitive definition of “winner”.
  • nl 7y ago
    This is why American democracy was stable after GWB’s initial election. I don't understand this comment. I agree American democracy was stable after GWB (George W Bush)'s election (although I'm unclear if you mean the end of the vote counting or the judicial process here?). But I don't think the Gore camp felt they had legitimately lost at all. recent referendum was that STV was portrayed - what is STV? while FPTP has - FPTP = First past the post.
    • afarrell 7y ago
      Single Transferable Vote - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l8XOZJkozfI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l8XOZJkozfI
    • ben_w 7y ago
      > But I don't think the Gore camp felt they had legitimately lost at all. My memory may be false or incomplete, but I thought Gore ultimately said he’d lost and that Bush has won?
      • nl 7y ago
        Yes he conceeded after the court case "for the good of democracy" but his supporters felt the case decision had holes.
        • Iv 7y ago
          Holes? He lost to a recount overwatched by the GOP in a state where Jeb Bush was governor. He lost by 537 votes in a national election. Non-official post-election recount show that the counting criterion chosen could easily make one or the other the winner: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2000_United_States_presidential_election_recount_in_Florida#Post-election_studies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2000_United_States_presidentia...
          • nl 7y ago
            Like I said - his supporters were not convinced he lost...
        • ben_w 7y ago
          That concession is the point.
• harimau777 7y ago
  That's a really good point. I hadn't thought about it in those terms before. An issue that I see is what to do with groups who are two small to achieve their aims via democracy but large enough that they can cause unrest. The textbook answer would be that the constitution places limits on democracy in order to protect the rights of the minority. However, looking at current American culture it seems like that hasn't worked since society outside of government is still free to punish minority views and lifestyles.
  • gwright 7y ago
    What do you mean by "punish minority views"? An important component of the classical notion of "state" power is that the government has a monopoly on the use of force. When coupled with the limits to the power of the majority (i.e. individual rights and limited government), holders of minority views should be protected from "punishment" that involves any use of force related to their protected rights.
    • harimau777 7y ago
      Things like losing a job, being excluded from community organizations, or just generally shunned by society. While things like gender, sex, race, and religion are often protected; things like political views, worldview, and way of life generally are not.
      • gwright 7y ago
        That just sounds like normal consequences. I don't think it is reasonable to think that the government is going to protect you from the private-actor consequences of your "political views, worldview, and way of life". To do so would require the government to become an arbiter of those things, which would be antithetical to the protection of individual rights such as freedom of speech, freedom of association, and in general individual liberty.
• deleted 7y ago
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• Vinnl 7y ago
  This realisation almost made me somewhat pessimistic about the fate of democracy. Leaders always have to do the bidding of their citizens to some extent - if they cross the line too far, the citizens might overthrow them violently. They have incentive to respect democracy, because that will allow them to avoid physical violence when the citizens want to get rid of them. The flip side of that would be that this means that there's an equilibrium to be found, i.e. the point where citizens are not dissatisfied enough (but as close as possible to it) to revolt, or are not powerful enough to. In other words, we're getting less and less democratic in search of that equilibrium.
• MuffinFlavored 7y ago
  At the moment though, it leaves 50% of the country happy and the other 50% pissed off given how polarizing red versus blue has become. Also... I feel like a ton of people shouldn’t be allowed to vote based on lack of intelligence/understanding of political issues.
• modwest 7y ago
  Thanks for restating it, because that’s a very useful reframing I’ve not heard before.
• litoE 7y ago
  I think Karl Popper ("The Open Society and its Enemies") puts it best: a democracy is not defined by how the governed elect our leaders, but how they get rid of them. Popper came to this idea when looking at Hitler's Germany. Hitler came to power through elections and then used the existing laws to become absolute dictator. But clearly his government was not a Democracy, so clearly the fact that elections had been held did not define a democracy.
  • watwut 7y ago
    Illegal and violent methods played large role in Hitlers ascent to total power. Hitler did not just used existing laws, he ignored them where possible and suited him, he used threat of violence and violence to ensure he will have power. Existing law did not defended democracy enough and we're easy to be exploited, but did not allowed actual complete take over of power.
  • AnimalMuppet 7y ago
    I note in this context that threatening to lock up either Hillary or Trump are not helpful. Say that in 2020, Trump loses the election, and feels that if he leaves office, his political enemies will find a way to imprison him. He therefore has very strong incentive to find a way to stay in power. That really might not be what you want...
    • Iv 7y ago
      I think it was a retired diplomat who was defending the highly criticized policy of offering retired dictators a comfortable and protected life in France. He was explaining that this was a condition to many peaceful transitions. This is balanced by the desire to keep leaders accountable and is a compromise against the rule of law. Saying that this applies to the US is really saying you have dictators who abuse their powers and are willing to bend the law in the name of a democratic transition. It can be an exceptional temporary measure, but certainly not a sustainable norm.
      • AnimalMuppet 7y ago
• sovietcattle 7y ago
  That's just one way to look at it. Another point of view is that elections are way to make people believe they are represented and therefore won't fight a state that maintains the monopoly of force, which can impose taxation, arbitrary laws, and a lot of other attacks to individual freedoms that people wouldn't be keen to accept naturally.
  • Iv 7y ago
    Yes, that's a common view among several schools of anarchism. Reading Makhno's criticism of democracy, and his alternate proposals, which to my eyes seemed to be a railroad towards dictatorship, made me realize that I was not an anarchist but a social-democrat. Which is often a slur in anarchist circles. A society where democracy can not work because it would be "corrupted by bourgeoisie" has even lower chances of making anarchism work IMHO. We HAVE to make democracy work.
    • int_19h 7y ago
      Anarchists generally criticize representative democracy, not democracy in general. Makno's own experiments in the territory that his forces controlled were basically a form of very distributed and localized council democracy.
      • Iv 7y ago
        Having read the proposals he made after his defeat, his "Organizational Platform of the General Union of Anarchists" [1] I disagree. He just talks about democracy, indeed talking mostly about representative democracy, but the system he proposes has no voting of any sort. Actually, reading it reminded me of another such book I had read a while ago. Qaddafi's Green Book, where he lays down his ideal system, the Jamahiriya. On paper, it is pretty cool: every matters of state are decided by local assemblies that can call for a higher level assembly when deemed necessary. But devil is in the detail. The Guide has a final say, in a bit of an unspecified way, exactly how Maknho stays pretty vague on the whole decision process. I am sure that if Qaddafi had been defeated in his youth, many anarchists would be musing about this system in the way we do Makhno's. [1] http://www.nestormakhno.info/english/newplatform/org_plat.htm http://www.nestormakhno.info/english/newplatform/org_plat.ht... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Green_Book_(Muammar_Gaddafi) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Green_Book_(Muammar_Gaddaf...
• deleted 7y ago
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• Wowfunhappy 7y ago
  It also optimizes for leaders who will maintain a middle class. I thought CGPGrey laid this out very well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rStL7niR7gs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rStL7niR7gs
  • 0x445442 7y ago
    Nice; a sufficient high school civics curriculum in 18 minutes.
  • erichocean 7y ago
    > It also optimizes for leaders who will maintain a middle class. And yet, since the early 70s, the middle class in the US has continually eroded—with no end in sight. So much for theory.
    • Wowfunhappy 7y ago
      Yes, but put that in perspective. The middle class in the US today is significantly larger and better off than in most dictatorships in the world, and there are structural reasons for that.
      • TheOtherHobbes 7y ago
        Most of the middle class in the US is one serious health issue away from bankruptcy - and doing far less well than in many European countries. The real trick is keeping the middle class in the US convinced that its situation and prospects are much better than they really are. When that trick stops working, so will democracy.
        • TheCoelacanth 7y ago
          Those European countries are also democracies, though. In many cases, they are more democratic, because they don't have undemocratic features like the Senate.
          • 7y ago
• erichocean 7y ago
  That reminds me of a truism I heard about protesting: The purpose of protesting is to demonstrate the need for violence to the fence-sitters. If protesting results in change non-violently, so much the better. But the purpose is to demonstrate that violence is absolutely necessary.
  • SmirkingRevenge 7y ago
    It's a measure that's a few steps before violent revolutions - its a "we could, if we wanted to, but we hope there's another way", sort of statement. I think a more correct way to put it/think about it is: protesting is a threat, not a statement that "violence is absolutely necessary". If violence were absolutely necessary, then they'd all just skip the protesting and do the violence.
  • shaki-dora 7y ago
    I really don't understand how protests became conflated with violence (mostly in the US, as far as I can tell). Protests are a basic right in every democracy. The vast majority of protests (as in: >99%) is peaceful. Protests are among the basic set of methods and institutions that form the public sphere where democracy actually happens. They are no better or worse than newspapers, public libraries, TED talks, Trump rallies, call-your-senator-campaigns, Twitter, Sunday sermons, bumper stickers, the NAACP, triple-A, or, yes, even the Star Wars franchise. Each of these forums has different strengths and weaknesses, and protests are somewhat unique in being basically free and accessible to everyone (as active participants, not just consumers). Not a single protest since the Civil Rights Movement got anywhere close to being large enough to threaten the sort of overthrow-the-system violence that would be required in an outright confrontation challenging the US government.
    • drjesusphd 7y ago
      And what protest movement since has had significant success? (I include Vietnam War protests as meeting the threshold).
      • 7y ago
• brownbat 7y ago
  Malcolm X's speech on the ballot or the bullet puts this really profoundly. History is full of bloody revolutions. It takes democracy to make them bloodless. https://youtu.be/Sc4BPYIqm6k https://youtu.be/Sc4BPYIqm6k
• zepto 7y ago
  Similar to police and prisons. They are terrible, but they avoid everyone taking the law violently into their own hands.
• narrator 7y ago
  It's also why we have the tort system. It is a credible alternative to violent methods of conflict resolution.
• cslarson 7y ago
  Yes! I want to say that the good flows from this stability. But I'm not sure there is enough of a track record to make the claim. Another fun way to put this and make the point perhaps a bit provocatively is to say there are no wrong outcomes from a [free and fair] election - even if your choice didn't win.
• germinalphrase 7y ago
  Similarly, police do not exist to prevent - or even punish - crime. They exist to prevent vigilante justice because vigilantism is unreliable and destabilizing.
  • anoncake 7y ago
    Then why do politicians push for giving police more powers or funding it better even when there is no vigilantism problem?
• DubiousPusher 7y ago
  Agreed. One of the best features of small "d" democracy is that it lends the government a pretty powerful argument for legitimacy. Which is perhaps the most important feature a government needs to last. Edit: Consent of the Governed is probably the most powerful legitimacy arguments there is beside maybe Divine Right.
  • ALittleLight 7y ago
    I disagree that democracy provides consent of the governed. To write with broad strokes: Half of people don't vote. Half that do don't get what they want. Half that do don't understand the issues, and without understanding can't give consent. You don't know what laws your representatives will write. You don't know how the obtuse legal language will be interpreted through a myriad of other legal artifacts by unelected judges. You don't know how the administrators of the executive branch will selectively enforce whatever does get written. How does giving an almost entirely symbolic vote (for national elections) in any way convey the consent of the governed?
    • Aeolun 7y ago
      You give consent for a given group of people to govern you, not for every decision they make. That would be direct democracy (and probably a clusterfuck).
      • DubiousPusher 7y ago
        > probably a clusterfuck Why do you believes this? I'm not an advocate of direct democracy but I have no idea why this valuation is so ubiquitous.
        • zxcmx 7y ago
          Have thought about this a bit. Moving towards DD used to seem like an obvious evolution to me, particularly with modern technology. Following recent political developments I see a lot more risks now. First of all is how do we choose what to vote on; a lot of power is rests on whoever drafts and sets the "framing" of votes. If we also do this "directly" in some manner then the filtering mechanism is vulnerable, and if we try to crowd source all the things we are likely to get "government by reddit". Direct democracy moves power away from politicians and towards media (traditional and social), celebrities, opinion makers. If you believe we live in a world of misinformation now, there is a potential for direct democracy to make that much worse. It's also not obvious in a direct democracy how you would control for holistic things that result from many decisions. The obvious one is how do you balance a budget without making the voting process very complicated.