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It was put to vote for stupid reasons. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Causes_of_the_vote_in_favour_of_Brexit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Causes_of_the_vote_in_
by nextaccountic 4mo ago
It was put to vote for stupid reasons. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Causes_of_the_vote_in_favour_of_Brexit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Causes_of_the_vote_in_favour_o...
> The referendum was originally conceived by David Cameron as a means to defeat the anti-EU faction within his own party by having it fail.
After that, another issue is that the leave campaign was heavily based on lies and misleading the British voters.
Couple that with a extreme form of policy lock-in / hysteresis: you need just to form a small margin in a majority at a single point of time. After that point of time, the popular opinion doesn't matter anymore because getting back to EU isn't as easy as leaving. So the misinformation campaign need to work just once. By the time voters realize what happened, it's too late.
This situation is a critical failure of democracy. Not just direct democracy, representative democracy can't work in a post-truth world either.
- teiferer 4mo ago> representative democracy can't work in a post-truth world either. Truthful public debate is a central ingredient to democracy. If you don't have that then you are severely lacking in democratic qualities. In other words, your statement is akin to saying "democracy can't work in an undemocratic environment", which is obvious. If anything then the Brexit vote shows that democracy is lacking in the UK. Not having asked the people would not have made that better though.