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Put another way: marginilization of fringe positions could be considered a desireable quality of a voting system, as long as sufficient free speech protections

Put another way: marginilization of fringe positions could be considered a desireable quality of a voting system, as long as sufficient free speech protections are in place. In a sense, elections act as a sort of filter between ideas and actions. Freedom of speech can be used to disseminate ideas, and some truly awful ideas will disseminate rather widely. However, they won't usually gain enough adherents to get enough votes to make it past the "filter." That's why there's little harm in letting people espouse "dangerous" ideas with their speech[1]: most people will recognize bad ideas for what they are, and the proponents of the worst ideas generally will not be elected to positions where they can influence policy directly. This "filter" is far from perfect: some bad ideas will become laws nonetheless, and some good ideas will get blocked. More of the former than the latter, though: if an idea is good enough, it will eventually garner sufficient support to become a significant factor in elections. There have been cases in history where entire societies did adopt bad ideas (e.g. fascism). However, I think that when an entire society takes such a dramatically wrong turn, even the most perfect voting system will not save it. [1]It's important to draw a line between espousing ideas and encouraging actions.

omouse 16y ago
You're revising history a bit; when fascism was rising there were a lot of people that were fighting against it such as the socialist and the communists and the anarchists. Unfortunately, other societies were trying to contain those socialist forces and this reduced their power to counter the fascists. You can see this happen in Spain and Italy as well (there were a large number of collectives in Spain and Italy has had anarchists and communists for a long time, in the 1970s they were quite the active movements). The "filter" shouldn't be just at the voting booths. We should be reminded before and after election day why the ideas of those fringe positions is a bad idea. Espousing ideas in such a way as to hide the true nature of them is something that political parties are getting good at. If there are dangerous ideas, they're hidden behind nice language or buried in the back of the political party's plans. So it's harder for people to recognize those bad ideas. I think we would do well to learn from the past and be more active in denouncing ideas such as those of the BNP and other fringe parties.
- lucasjung 16y ago
  I don't see how a statement as brief as mine could be seen as a revision of history: fascism was a dangerous idea that took over entire countries (so was communism). That leaves out a lot of details, but hardly constitutes revisionism. I also wasn't trying to suggest that we shouldn't denounce dangerous ideas, in fact such denunciation is one of the primary mechanisms which prevents bad ideas from garnering enough support to make a difference in elections. Rather, I was trying to say that censorship is not the proper way to marginilize dangerous ideas. Only after reading your post and then re-reading mine did I realize that I never specifically mentioned censorship, but that's what I was thinking about.

omouse 16y ago

You're revising history a bit; when fascism was rising there were a lot of people that were fighting against it such as the socialist and the communists and the anarchists. Unfortunately, other societies were trying to contain those socialist forces and this reduced their power to counter the fascists. You can see this happen in Spain and Italy as well (there were a large number of collectives in Spain and Italy has had anarchists and communists for a long time, in the 1970s they were quite the active movements). The "filter" shouldn't be just at the voting booths. We should be reminded before and after election day why the ideas of those fringe positions is a bad idea. Espousing ideas in such a way as to hide the true nature of them is something that political parties are getting good at. If there are dangerous ideas, they're hidden behind nice language or buried in the back of the political party's plans. So it's harder for people to recognize those bad ideas. I think we would do well to learn from the past and be more active in denouncing ideas such as those of the BNP and other fringe parties.

lucasjung 16y ago
I don't see how a statement as brief as mine could be seen as a revision of history: fascism was a dangerous idea that took over entire countries (so was communism). That leaves out a lot of details, but hardly constitutes revisionism. I also wasn't trying to suggest that we shouldn't denounce dangerous ideas, in fact such denunciation is one of the primary mechanisms which prevents bad ideas from garnering enough support to make a difference in elections. Rather, I was trying to say that censorship is not the proper way to marginilize dangerous ideas. Only after reading your post and then re-reading mine did I realize that I never specifically mentioned censorship, but that's what I was thinking about.