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Modi has the highest approval rating, according to western pollsters, of any leader in the world. India’s elections are free and fair. That’s all democracy requ

Modi has the highest approval rating, according to western pollsters, of any leader in the world. India’s elections are free and fair. That’s all democracy requires. Democracy doesn’t mean western democracy or liberal democracy. Shadi Hamid has done excellent work on this issue: https://www.brookings.edu/books/the-problem-of-democracy-america-the-middle-east-and-the-rise-and-fall-of-an-idea https://www.brookings.edu/books/the-problem-of-democracy-ame...; see also https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/jan/18/the-problem-of-democracy-by-shadi-hamid-review-democracy-and-its-discontents https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/jan/18/the-problem-of...

shipp02 2y ago
The Guardian article is interesting because it helped untangle the idea of liberalism and democracy in my mind. How did they become so deeply linked?
- morkalork 2y ago
  Because illiberals, when realizing their beliefs aren't all that popular, don't tend to pack it in and give it up to democracy.
- whatshisface 2y ago
  Democracy means that people can vote. Liberalism means they get to choose who to vote for.
mmooss 2y ago
> India’s elections are free and fair. Are they, when people opposing one candidate are jailed? > That’s all democracy requires. That is certainly false. Democracy isn't mob rule, or as the saying go, it's not two wolves and a sheep voting on what's for dinner. Democracy is about self-determination for each person; if people in minority don't have self-determination, it's not democracy at all.
- rayiner 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - rectang 2y ago
    If majoritarianism is exactly equal to democracy, then a third of the citizenry can be in prison serving as slave labor and so long as they get to cast ballots for candidates promising freedom only to be voted down by the keep-slave-labor camp that's "democracy". I'd like to think that aspiring higher than that is neither western nor non-western.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
  - mmooss 2y ago
    This is the old argument of dicators, going back to the Cold War and before. Like much propaganda, it tries to turn around the enemy's own arguments to disrupt and disconcert - the enemy cares about cultures and freedom, so brutal dictators should be 'free' to do what their 'culture' demands - I don't think their victims see it that way. Democracy, with rights, has prospered and been embraced across cultures and around the world, on every continent. Before Modi, it was embraced in India.
    - rayiner 2y ago
      I have no idea what “dictators” you’re talking about. Both my argument and Hamid’s comes from the experiences with fledgling democracies in the Muslim world, where the model of liberal democracy has been tried and failed repeatedly. What does “democracy, with rights” even mean? Who decides what the “rights” are? In Asia, “democracy, with rights” exists primarily in Japan and South Korea, where it was imposed by the United States. Previously, it existed in Hong Kong, which was a British colony. Singapore also has “democracy, with rights” but again as a result of British colonization. And post-colonization, the “with rights” part is pretty circumscribed. “Democracy, with rights” was a foreign import to India (and Bangladesh), imposed by an Oxbridge-educated Indian elite. Nehru didn’t get secularism and social democracy from India, he got them to England while he was studying at Cambridge.[1] What you’re seeing in India now is the result of India becoming more democratic as British colonial influence fades: https://unherd.com/2021/04/the-culture-wars-of-post-colonial-india https://unherd.com/2021/04/the-culture-wars-of-post-colonial... [1] The last Congress prime minister has degrees from both Oxford and Cambridge. While the current leader of Congress is half Italian and went to college near Orlando, then got his masters at Cambridge.
rectang 2y ago
The definition of democracy as "free and fair elections" alone is subject to tyranny of the majority.
- mk_chan 2y ago
  Ironically, tyranny of the majority is a very very good definition of democracy if you drill the majority down into subcategorical majorities recursively until you reach the individual who might be severely disconnected from the averages.
  - alephnerd 2y ago
    And this is how Indian elections work. The amount of data collection and analysis is insane. Election Consulting Companies like I-PAC and Showtime Consulting would gather extremely granular religious (sect level), ethnic (sub-clan level), age, linguistic (sub-dialect level), economic, and social metrics and poll on a near weekly basis, and work with the parties that hired them to iterate on electoral messaging and promises based on the selected demographic intersection. These consulting firms also pay Microsoft and Google India level salaries so they are attracting the best of the best at top Indian universities.
  - rectang 2y ago
    That's amusing, but silly. A criminal screeching "tyranny of the majority!" as they get hauled away is not a revealing example and does not reflect the phrase's usual meaning.
    - mk_chan 2y ago
      The way I put it was meant to be slightly amusing, but let me put it a different way for the sake of discussion. For this purpose, I like to mentally model a country (or territory which decided to hold an election of some kind) as a collection of points in a multidimensional space of values or policies which are up for election. Each point represents where a voting person would stand according to their personal principles. Now, I’d like to postulate that the act of voting corresponds to finding the center of the cluster of points. In this model, it’s easy to imagine the scenario where a very large portion of people (and possibly even the majority) are deeply dissatisfied with the result because they are too far on many dimensions from the center that was elected. This is actually further exacerbated by many factors in real life like the asymmetry of information between people. The obvious solution would be to create more cluster centers instead of one fat cluster that leaves everyone not very happy. This corresponds to states or provinces within a country in the real world. So coming from that line of thinking, it leads me to believe that sometimes to maintain a democracy, you need to cut the outliers away to move/make the center such that people are happy with the result. Essentially you enforce the will of the majority by cutting away the minority until it is no longer a tyranny to do so. Of course this is gross simplification of real life. It is ignoring factors such as external threats, instability, unpredictability, information availability and so on. However, I think it’s useful to think this way for many purposes. Addressing your extreme example of a criminal, that’s a point so far off in the space that you definitely want to cut it out of the system.
gruez 2y ago
>Modi has the highest approval rating, according to western pollsters, of any leader in the world. India’s elections are free and fair. That’s all democracy requires. Source? According to these sources Bukele beats Modi ~90% to 75%. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion_polling_on_the_Nayib_Bukele_presidency https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion_polling_on_the_Nayib_B... https://www.statista.com/statistics/1456852/world-leader-approval-ratings/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/1456852/world-leader-app...
alephnerd 2y ago
> Democracy doesn’t mean western democracy or liberal democracy It's something I disagreed with you about before, but have come to agree with you about Raynier. Indonesia, Malaysia, Cambodia, Turkiye, and Israel have all begun falling out of the US orbit after we began pressing on the liberalism aspect. We should fight for liberal democracy at home, but it is not something we should necessarily evangelize abroad, as elite and economic consolidation plays a greater role in building lasting ties with a country instead of ideological ties. I had a convo with Mastro and Doshi about this during a seminar a couple months before the election, and it sounded like they also started agreeing with this view as well.
- text0404 2y ago
  > elite and economic consolidation plays a greater role in building lasting ties with a country instead of ideological ties Elite and economic consolidation is a corrupting force, though. A country's actions are just as important as it's stated values - if it partners with others who don't share those values, then it's just performance. If your country signals that it doesn't actually care about its purported values, then why would any country which does care want to create long-term relationships or otherwise ally themselves with you? How would anyone be able to trust you if you compromise your foundational principles for economic gain? How could you trust them?
  - alephnerd 2y ago
    Cambodia used to be American leaning in the 2010s during their transition to democracy, with support for democratic norm building and actual democracy. China on the other hand decided to only conduct outreach to Cambodian economic and political elite [0] The US government funded social infrastructure like health clinics, schools, and sanitation systems, but the Chinese government funded hard infra projects like canals, highways, energy systems, and weaponry without human rights oversight [0]. When Cambodia decided to end their democratic experiment, the US condemned it, but the Chinese government was indifferent. And now Cambodia has solidly shifted to the Chinese sphere of influence. This story has repeated all across ASEAN from Thailand to Malaysia to Indonesia. The reality is it's only the economic, military, and poltical decisionmakers that matter, and if you needle them too much, they will try to find alternatives or build their own strategic autonomy. France did the same thing in the De Gaulle era for the exact same reasons (military regime that didn't like getting needled about democratic backsliding). > then why would any country which does care want to create long-term relationships or otherwise ally themselves with you Cold hard cash, weapons, and legitimacy. Which is what ASEAN countries have begun to do by shifting closer towards China. They don't want or need lectures - they want to maintain their own power. Notice how Europe has grown silent about Turkish democratic decline now that European nations require Turkish support to stabilize Ukraine. And if PiS wins the Polish elections, you won't hear similar complaints about "democratic backsliding" compared to the PiS barely 3 years ago. When push comes to shove, values don't matter much. In an era where great power politics has returned, values matter less than hard power. [0] - https://www.iseas.edu.sg/articles-commentaries/iseas-perspective/2023-101-reviewing-chinas-elite-centric-approach-in-its-relations-with-cambodia-by-chhay-lim/ https://www.iseas.edu.sg/articles-commentaries/iseas-perspec...

shipp02 2y ago

The Guardian article is interesting because it helped untangle the idea of liberalism and democracy in my mind. How did they become so deeply linked?

morkalork 2y ago
Because illiberals, when realizing their beliefs aren't all that popular, don't tend to pack it in and give it up to democracy.
whatshisface 2y ago
Democracy means that people can vote. Liberalism means they get to choose who to vote for.

mmooss 2y ago

> India’s elections are free and fair. Are they, when people opposing one candidate are jailed? > That’s all democracy requires. That is certainly false. Democracy isn't mob rule, or as the saying go, it's not two wolves and a sheep voting on what's for dinner. Democracy is about self-determination for each person; if people in minority don't have self-determination, it's not democracy at all.

rayiner 2y ago
[flagged]
- rectang 2y ago
  If majoritarianism is exactly equal to democracy, then a third of the citizenry can be in prison serving as slave labor and so long as they get to cast ballots for candidates promising freedom only to be voted down by the keep-slave-labor camp that's "democracy". I'd like to think that aspiring higher than that is neither western nor non-western.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
- mmooss 2y ago
  This is the old argument of dicators, going back to the Cold War and before. Like much propaganda, it tries to turn around the enemy's own arguments to disrupt and disconcert - the enemy cares about cultures and freedom, so brutal dictators should be 'free' to do what their 'culture' demands - I don't think their victims see it that way. Democracy, with rights, has prospered and been embraced across cultures and around the world, on every continent. Before Modi, it was embraced in India.
  - rayiner 2y ago
    I have no idea what “dictators” you’re talking about. Both my argument and Hamid’s comes from the experiences with fledgling democracies in the Muslim world, where the model of liberal democracy has been tried and failed repeatedly. What does “democracy, with rights” even mean? Who decides what the “rights” are? In Asia, “democracy, with rights” exists primarily in Japan and South Korea, where it was imposed by the United States. Previously, it existed in Hong Kong, which was a British colony. Singapore also has “democracy, with rights” but again as a result of British colonization. And post-colonization, the “with rights” part is pretty circumscribed. “Democracy, with rights” was a foreign import to India (and Bangladesh), imposed by an Oxbridge-educated Indian elite. Nehru didn’t get secularism and social democracy from India, he got them to England while he was studying at Cambridge.[1] What you’re seeing in India now is the result of India becoming more democratic as British colonial influence fades: https://unherd.com/2021/04/the-culture-wars-of-post-colonial-india https://unherd.com/2021/04/the-culture-wars-of-post-colonial... [1] The last Congress prime minister has degrees from both Oxford and Cambridge. While the current leader of Congress is half Italian and went to college near Orlando, then got his masters at Cambridge.

rectang 2y ago

The definition of democracy as "free and fair elections" alone is subject to tyranny of the majority.

mk_chan 2y ago
Ironically, tyranny of the majority is a very very good definition of democracy if you drill the majority down into subcategorical majorities recursively until you reach the individual who might be severely disconnected from the averages.
- alephnerd 2y ago
  And this is how Indian elections work. The amount of data collection and analysis is insane. Election Consulting Companies like I-PAC and Showtime Consulting would gather extremely granular religious (sect level), ethnic (sub-clan level), age, linguistic (sub-dialect level), economic, and social metrics and poll on a near weekly basis, and work with the parties that hired them to iterate on electoral messaging and promises based on the selected demographic intersection. These consulting firms also pay Microsoft and Google India level salaries so they are attracting the best of the best at top Indian universities.
- rectang 2y ago
  That's amusing, but silly. A criminal screeching "tyranny of the majority!" as they get hauled away is not a revealing example and does not reflect the phrase's usual meaning.
  - mk_chan 2y ago
    The way I put it was meant to be slightly amusing, but let me put it a different way for the sake of discussion. For this purpose, I like to mentally model a country (or territory which decided to hold an election of some kind) as a collection of points in a multidimensional space of values or policies which are up for election. Each point represents where a voting person would stand according to their personal principles. Now, I’d like to postulate that the act of voting corresponds to finding the center of the cluster of points. In this model, it’s easy to imagine the scenario where a very large portion of people (and possibly even the majority) are deeply dissatisfied with the result because they are too far on many dimensions from the center that was elected. This is actually further exacerbated by many factors in real life like the asymmetry of information between people. The obvious solution would be to create more cluster centers instead of one fat cluster that leaves everyone not very happy. This corresponds to states or provinces within a country in the real world. So coming from that line of thinking, it leads me to believe that sometimes to maintain a democracy, you need to cut the outliers away to move/make the center such that people are happy with the result. Essentially you enforce the will of the majority by cutting away the minority until it is no longer a tyranny to do so. Of course this is gross simplification of real life. It is ignoring factors such as external threats, instability, unpredictability, information availability and so on. However, I think it’s useful to think this way for many purposes. Addressing your extreme example of a criminal, that’s a point so far off in the space that you definitely want to cut it out of the system.

gruez 2y ago

>Modi has the highest approval rating, according to western pollsters, of any leader in the world. India’s elections are free and fair. That’s all democracy requires. Source? According to these sources Bukele beats Modi ~90% to 75%. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion_polling_on_the_Nayib_Bukele_presidency https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion_polling_on_the_Nayib_B... https://www.statista.com/statistics/1456852/world-leader-approval-ratings/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/1456852/world-leader-app...

alephnerd 2y ago

> Democracy doesn’t mean western democracy or liberal democracy It's something I disagreed with you about before, but have come to agree with you about Raynier. Indonesia, Malaysia, Cambodia, Turkiye, and Israel have all begun falling out of the US orbit after we began pressing on the liberalism aspect. We should fight for liberal democracy at home, but it is not something we should necessarily evangelize abroad, as elite and economic consolidation plays a greater role in building lasting ties with a country instead of ideological ties. I had a convo with Mastro and Doshi about this during a seminar a couple months before the election, and it sounded like they also started agreeing with this view as well.

text0404 2y ago
> elite and economic consolidation plays a greater role in building lasting ties with a country instead of ideological ties Elite and economic consolidation is a corrupting force, though. A country's actions are just as important as it's stated values - if it partners with others who don't share those values, then it's just performance. If your country signals that it doesn't actually care about its purported values, then why would any country which does care want to create long-term relationships or otherwise ally themselves with you? How would anyone be able to trust you if you compromise your foundational principles for economic gain? How could you trust them?
- alephnerd 2y ago
  Cambodia used to be American leaning in the 2010s during their transition to democracy, with support for democratic norm building and actual democracy. China on the other hand decided to only conduct outreach to Cambodian economic and political elite [0] The US government funded social infrastructure like health clinics, schools, and sanitation systems, but the Chinese government funded hard infra projects like canals, highways, energy systems, and weaponry without human rights oversight [0]. When Cambodia decided to end their democratic experiment, the US condemned it, but the Chinese government was indifferent. And now Cambodia has solidly shifted to the Chinese sphere of influence. This story has repeated all across ASEAN from Thailand to Malaysia to Indonesia. The reality is it's only the economic, military, and poltical decisionmakers that matter, and if you needle them too much, they will try to find alternatives or build their own strategic autonomy. France did the same thing in the De Gaulle era for the exact same reasons (military regime that didn't like getting needled about democratic backsliding). > then why would any country which does care want to create long-term relationships or otherwise ally themselves with you Cold hard cash, weapons, and legitimacy. Which is what ASEAN countries have begun to do by shifting closer towards China. They don't want or need lectures - they want to maintain their own power. Notice how Europe has grown silent about Turkish democratic decline now that European nations require Turkish support to stabilize Ukraine. And if PiS wins the Polish elections, you won't hear similar complaints about "democratic backsliding" compared to the PiS barely 3 years ago. When push comes to shove, values don't matter much. In an era where great power politics has returned, values matter less than hard power. [0] - https://www.iseas.edu.sg/articles-commentaries/iseas-perspective/2023-101-reviewing-chinas-elite-centric-approach-in-its-relations-with-cambodia-by-chhay-lim/ https://www.iseas.edu.sg/articles-commentaries/iseas-perspec...