This distinction is useful, because one of the biggest trends of the technological age is the capital-D version supplanting and erasing the small-d version. Almost all of the institutional “defenders of democracy” have essentially no interest in small-d democratization processes, because they are themselves in the driver’s seat in the political democratic system.
This leads them to ignore or disregard the issues of everyday people, which leads to populism, which is of course the biggest global political trend of the last decade.
This is kind of a shame for tech in particular, because for the most part technology has been a democratizing (small-d sense) force throughout history. Phones, computers, cars, on and on: all examples of expensive exclusive technologies that became democratized and accessible to everyone. And yet that same force doesn’t seem to have been applied to the political system itself.
One could say it was always the case, you can cut through bs and have a productive dialogue if you define the meaning of words before the message, i.e. scientific papers do that. The problem with that is that most people won't do it because its hard and on the other end you will get ostracized most of the time if you try doing that in casual conversations. This problem is even bigger in politics which is a game of large numbers and you have to be as stupid as possible for your message to reach the masses.
Another example (this is a hard one imo) "discrimination". It is used in the US in an important legal document, a part of a powerful legal social right.
It's both the NEGATIVE and unjust social process of dividing minorities, often segregating them away from the resource-plenty enjoyed by majorities -- basic 'good favor', low prices, neighborhoods with food oases.
And it's also the POSITIVE or NEUTRAL term of "making a fine distinction and discerning". Such as, "The experienced journalist listened intently to the politician's statement, applying a keen sense of intellectual discrimination. She was able to quickly discern the subtle ways in which key facts were being selectively highlighted and crucial context was being omitted, allowing her to call out the misrepresentation rather than accepting the narrative at face value." (gen'd by ai <3)
It was once an efficient term for identifying careful critical thinking. I speculate we do less of this as we have fewer words to do this with, nowadays.
I suppose "bigot" and "bigotry" ought to have been used by the US when it made its civil rights advancements.
Even now they are finding that the Constitution does not in fact allow civil rights, and the Civil Rights Act is being pared away.
You can call it out by whatever name you want, but in the end a lot of Americans want that and you don't have the overwhelming political force required to override them.
The one small upside: they'll tell you that you're only making it worse by name calling. That's not actually true. It may not make things better, but it is not the cause of it. Arguing about words is just a common tactic to get you to stop talking about the actual subject.
But in addition to that extremely reliable and enthusiastic vote are a lot of allies who say things like "I'm not racist but...". Often followed by "I just happen to have totally non bigoted reasons to always vote with the bigots".
Funny how they're always espousing Republicans as the way to go. Once upon a time, that may have made (some) sense, but the modern Republican party is ... "not very close" ... to libertarianism.
Therefore in a two party rule, libertarians should do what they can to pit one arm of the government against the other. Sometimes this will mean voting D, and sometimes R, whichever better disrupts single party rule.
They "should", but somehow they always seem to find themselves voting R...
I checked ngram viewer, and it showed this document from 1937 that first used it in that context:
https://www.google.com/books/edition/Jews_Jobs_and_Discrimin...
When the state cannot get rid of a popular idea that benefits the people, the state puts on a mask with that idea and then hollows it out. The most cartoonish example is the "democratic" republic of north korea.
Words don't have objective meanings. Words are indirect references to ideas in your head. They are like named memory addresses that can be de-referenced. That's why "woke" can have different meanings to different groups of people who speak together. Words are sociologically derived, not objectively meaningful. Eventually these words can even become shibboleths which can be used to determine whether you are part of a group or not.
People deeply underestimate the power of linguistics, especially in the hands of those who wish to exploit it. Control/influence over language and it's mapping is political power.
Power sure, but knowledge? Nope. If anything it’s the opposite.
I don’t know for who the literacy is declining. But the people who yap about democracy are the educated intelligentsia.[1] So it’s the educated that narrow and widen definitions.
> Not so long ago there was a common distinction between capital-D Democracy the political system and small-d democracy the process of power or knowledge being diffused through the masses. You don’t see this idea expressed much anymore, and even the expression “making something more democratic” almost always implies a reference to the political system, not the the second sense.
That’s not true. When people talk about “democratizing X” where X is distant from the political process they mean people participation and power. Like “democratizing social media” could mean user-controlled and driven social media as opposed to everything being controlled a by corporation or something.
> This distinction is useful, because one of the biggest trends of the technological age is the capital-D version supplanting and erasing the small-d version. Almost all of the institutional “defenders of democracy” have essentially no interest in small-d democratization processes, because they are themselves in the driver’s seat in the political democratic system.
Pretty much true.
> This leads them to ignore or disregard the issues of everyday people, which leads to populism, which is of course the biggest global political trend of the last decade.
Pretty much. That there are a group of people who can ignore or disregard the issues of everyday people means (by its very premise) that there is no democracy.[2]
People who then might have tolerated that then have enough and turn to the correct political theory: elites rule the commoners. Again the premise proves the theory correct.
> This is kind of a shame for tech in particular, because for the most part technology has been a democratizing (small-d sense) force throughout history. Phones, computers, cars, on and on: all examples of expensive exclusive technologies that became democratized and accessible to everyone.
This is a bit of a vulgar[3] conception of democratization. Democracy is about power, not access to X. If a car indirectly gives you political power by being able to travel and organize then it indirectly has that effect. But if it only gives you the opportunity to commute one hour each way to your workplace then it has got nothing to do with democratization.
And if your phone just makes you addicted to social media—as the technologists on this board so smugly like to point out—then it doesn’t give you power.
> And yet that same force doesn’t seem to have been applied to the political system itself.
Democracy is about governing your own life in harmony with the rest of the people under that democracy. The political system is a big deal there. But there are other spheres of life the workplace.[4]
[1] Parochial way of referring to relatively wealthy people who set the intellectual agenda
[2] Although people can call it “liberal democracy” if they want since the Liberal in that is much more important to the system (according to its defenders) than the Democracy part
[3] Tongue in cheek!
[4] Referring to socialism
Are you a time-traveler or something? Nowadays the language is shaped by privately owned bot farms and media - be it social or legacy. They work for pay, the truth is social or not for pay, etc. "The educated intelligentsia" is being defunded and investigated to help them shut up sooner.
* But there are other spheres of life like the workplace.
Obviously this is all politics so you needn't worry about the specifics of what actually is populist.
But, imagine two "responsible" politicians.
One who believes in lowering taxes as a worthwhile thing, and acknowledges cuts to services as a negative impact that is outweighed by the good.
The other believes in higher public spending, with the negative being higher taxes, outweighed by the better services.
Both would be angered by a third candidate that came along promising both lower taxes and higher public spending - just the "popular" parts of their respective manifestos.
So, you don't really have orinciples or a cause, apart from 'I should be in charge'. It also means voters, if they are capable of judging that, cant really trust you, because you will switch causes whenever it suits you.
In my own country, I could name politicians who always carried the same color as the reigning political movement, and who would switch when the winds change, because their real principle was 'be on the winning side'.
Of which citizens, by what measure and in what direction? Up or down? "Quo bono" is never answered. Well, it's clear if you look at the charts - the curves never change direction regardless of who's in charge.
> "letting voters try whatever a large majority want to be tried"
Washing hands with the will of the voters is demagogy. Trump promised stopping the U war in 24 hours, bringing prices down and unseen prosperity from day one but all that was replaced by "it was a joke" and endless "necessary pain" (for you, not him). The spin now is that the voters elected a person, not his promises, and if he lied and joked... it's voters' fault. As if there was ever a choice without jokers in it.
Of course it is never that easy.
That’s just democracy! Your definition seems to have an unstated premise: you think certain kinds of “fear and discontent” are legitimate, and others aren’t. But the whole point of democracy is that it’s a mechanism for the people to resolve questions like that.
What you’re really drawing is the distinction between republicanism and democracy. You want elites to decide what the important issues are and propose solutions, and voting to be limited to picking between those approved worldviews. That’s republicanism! That’s the system the founders created when we had states appoint electors and senators, and a limited franchise.
I don't. Fear and discontent exist, and I'm not interested in the degree of their justification here. The unstated part is my disdain for the populist's overeagerness to leverage them, offering emotionally satisfying but often practically dubious or outrightly deleterious policies and actions.
I'm not sure the OP said anything that implied they wanted this, but on the other hand it's unambiguously true that many politicians characterised as "populist" do want this upon getting into power. It's just that their justification for interfering with court cases or removing elected officials who disagree with them or banning opposition altogether is "they represent the elites/immigrants/Jews but I am on your side", which distinguishes them from people justifying similar actions on the basis of national identity or religion or divine right or technocracy...
Your statement makes no sense. The elected politicians are the ones who are supposed to be deciding the political issues.
The problem is that, throughout the western world, judges and bureaucrats are not staying in their lane. The New York Times did a good podcast on how the immigration system we have is one that nobody ever campaigned on or voted for: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/29/podcasts/the-daily/electi.... The immigration system has been created through litigation and bureaucratic action--e.g,, taking an asylum system enacted in response to Jews fleeing genocide and applying the eligibility criteria so broadly that it covers general unrest in a country, or even just crime and gang violence.
Don’t forget, the judicial system is quite consciously an anti-democratic check. judges were put there to make sure that voters don’t vote themselves other people‘s property. That’s a legitimate function, but you have to keep an eye on it. The more and more issues you have decided by judges the less and less democratic your system becomes.
The idea that tearing the political system down and starting from scratch will fix things is just as much of a fantasy as the idea that a greenfield rewrite of code will produce something with all of the desirable features of the original and twice as fast.
Though it's true that they may know it's a trap. Ulterior motives aplenty.
It is often not clear when that is.
But since you've decided to make this about the current US administration then yes, it's a matter of fact that the current system is a republic with limited democratic participation in the decision making process. A situation in which a single individual holds all the power and permits bureaucrats like ICE to do what they wanted to any individual for any reason with noone else being able to intervene would also be a republic with limited democratic participation in the decision making process, though not one I would prefer, particularly not if I was a law-abiding citizen who understood how legal processes worked but had the sort of ancestry ICE and Trump seem a bit suspicious of...
No systems in the US look like what people campaigned on and voted for. What would policy look like in with true public votes on anything and everything? Well judging by approval ratings, Trump's decision to singlehandedly cause a recession with his tariff policy is something the public overall do not back, no matter how much Trump claims that he's acting for them and against globalist elites. Similarly, it seems that what Trump's newly created bureaucracy is doing to other government departments doesn't meet with wide approval, no matter how much the world's richest man appointed to head after giving him lots of money it claims to be tackling elites and corruption. Trump is a populist, but like many other populists he and many of his actions are not at all popular at the moment: it's a feature of the design of republics rather than the popular will that he remains in power nevertheless. Perhaps that's why the executive's power is supposed to be checked...
But yes, the one area in which his approval ratings stayed above water in some polls is in his handling of immigration. Whether this includes every decision the unelected bureaucracy that is ICE makes to select random non-citizens and citizens for detention or even deportation to to foreign concentration camps for wrongthink or wrong tattoos is another question; seems like public opinion sides with the courts rather than the admin on deporting a legal immigrant for no reason and then not bringing him back because that would mean admitting error. In a republic like the US it's actually not the job of the official elected in the belief he'd get the price of eggs down to overrule courts, and it seems hollow to claim it'd be more democratic to skip the process of legislative change in favour of executive fiat when the public doesn't agree with him on many of the details.
It would, of course, technically be more democratic to have people's right to remain in the country based not upon law but upon the prevailing fashionability of their skin colour and surname with a wider public that got to vote on mass deportations to third countries whenever they felt like it. Even as someone with reason to be completely confident this wouldn't jeopardise my right to remain in the country I was born in, I'd hesitate to say that supplanting citizenship law with a public popularity contest would be better though it would be more democratic. But this has nothing to do with what is going on in the US, which involves the president insisting his his yuge popular mandate places him so far above the law that bureaucrats whose actions he favours don't have to follow it, never mind other populists like Maduro or Mao or Mussolini who didn't even worry too much about the mandate bit.
We literally just had an election. Both candidates ran promising to close the border, and Trump additionally promised “mass deportations.” Immigration was literally the first two issues on his platform: https://www.donaldjtrump.com/platform. He won the popular vote. He’s got the mandate, and four years to implement it and see how the public feels then.
What we are seeing with the judicial and bureaucratic resistance to deportation is not the “rule of law.” In fact, the immigration laws are designed to facilitate deportations quickly and to punish those who facilitate or encourage illegal immigration. What you’re seeing is elites try to use the republic’s anti-democratic checks to impose their preferred immigration policies, according to their peculiar affinity for immigrants.
The courts are not saying that the administration can't deport illegal aliens. They are saying that, in order to deport illegal aliens, the administration has to follow the law.
Do you have a problem with that? If so, what and why?
And some of the actions have been simply lawless. For example, after the Supreme Court ruled that Judge Boasberg lacked jurisdiction in the deportation flights case, the proper course would have been to dismiss. Instead, he initiated contempt proceedings based on failure to follow an order that was void ab initio, citing case law that applies to private litigants but makes no sense in a case where a district court exceeds its jurisdiction to compel a co-equal branch of government to act. Sanity prevailed and the DC Circuit administratively stayed those contempt proceedings. Judge Howell, in one of the law firm EO cases, asserted that firms had a first amendment right to pursue “progressive employment policies”—even though the first amendment obviously doesn’t apply to race-conscious employment policies. Other courts are insisting that Trump can’t revoke temporary authorizations by executive fiat that Biden granted by executive fiat.
More generally, courts are abusing their injunction powers. Read Marbury v. Madison again. The court goes out of its way to avoid enjoining the secretary of state even to perform the “ministerial” task of delivering a letter the president had already signed. Marbury makes clear that, while courts have the power to declare the law, and overturn Congress’s laws, its power to compel the executive branch to act is extremely limited.
The Supreme Court correctly ruled in the deportation flights case that the administration must allow detainees to file habeas petitions in the districts where they’re detained. That’s a proper exercise of district courts’ jurisdiction to adjudicate alleged deprivations of individual rights. It’s not proper for the courts to try and use that authority to enjoin entire executive policies that offend a judge’s sensibilities.
If Germany gave you a visa, would you consider it necessary to start a debate about whether such actions were authoritarian? How about if when you got there, they locked you up without trial?
How did that happen? It was because Biden and Mayorkas did not “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.” He ignored laws that required him to keep immigrants out. He also interpreted the law in ways that were not “faithful” to Congressional intent. For example, he took a law that allows parole on a “case-by-case” basis, and gave blanket parole to hundreds of thousands. But then judges will say that these blanket protections must be revoked on a “case by case” basis.
People are prattling on about the Impoundment Act and whether Trump has statutory authority to reorganize executive departments. Meanwhile, Obama created an entire amnesty program (DACA) nowhere in the INA, after failing to get the same amnesty through Congress. All of this stuff about “the rule of law” is rank hypocrisy from people who don’t believe in rules or law.
Course he did, by your own arguments not only did he have precisely that mandate as the president that people voted for [on a manifesto of broadening pathways to citizenship], but nobody else should have had any right to try to stop him.
It's interesting that you regard Biden's administration pursuing a policy in their manifesto (but ceasing part of the parole-in-place programme as soon as the unelected judges of a state court ordered them to do so) to be a more egregious violation of the rule of law than Trump rocking up in El Salvador to sneer at the idea of abiding by a rare unanimous Supreme Court verdict. Much like your insistence that whereas Trump has a mandate to disregard court orders, Biden didn't even have a mandate to undo executive orders on border control he said he was going to undo, the "rank hypocrisy from people who don't believe in rules of law" displayed in this exchange is all yours...
Sorry, I was unclear. I was mirroring the language in the post to which I was replying, which assumed that the margin of Biden’s win meant he didn’t have a mandate. I think Biden had a mandate to do most of what he did. My only quibble would be that Biden didn’t campaign on opening the border, but Trump clearly campaigned on mass deportations.
And yes, I view the introduction of millions of illegal immigrants as being the more egregious violation of the law than what Trump is doing. The former reflects millions of instances of the administration violating american law and americans’ right to determine the kind of society in which they want to live. The latter applies to a small number of individuals, and reflects mostly administrative flubs involving people who are undisputedly non-citizens.
Now regarding Kilmar, probably yes his rights were violated as happens routinely. I am not sure I am going to lose sleep over it because millions of people came here in one of the largest human migration events in history and we're still at this point where we can't talk about that but instead we debate about whether this clerical error was the event that turned us into a fascist dictatorship. I think it's all disingenuous. I don't know if there's a term for it in the law but our country created an extraordinary legal situation and there's bound to be mistakes made and I think significant political bias is present among judges and lawyers in what should be a neutral court. Do they really care about rights or is this more about keeping immigrants here at any cost?
Actually in 2018 Trump deported an elderly guy who may have had dementia who was accused of being a Nazi war criminal, his name was Jakiw Palij you can look it up. There wasn't strong evidence he was evading war crimes though and he wasn't accepted as a citizen anywhere in Europe because of border changes. I suspect his rights were violated in some way but no one cared for obvious reasons. None of the lawyers you see now jumped to defend this guy. So might there be political concerns ahead of rights? absolutely.
The fact that he has four years left to make appointments and executive orders and the public can't do anything about is an implementation detail of a republic, just as anti-democratic as similar quirks meaning that other presidents' appointees are around to thwart him in certain areas. Most of those decisions have absolutely nothing to do with issues that got Trump elected, but the rules let him get his way on many of them anyway. Contra populism: democracy /= the guy who got a plurality of the vote once getting his way on everything even when the rules and votes aren't in his favour.
I do think your sequence of posts is as good an indication of the difference between populism and popularity as we're ever likely to see though. Populism isn't about making political arguments that are popular, it's about making arguments of the form that if an ultraconservative Supreme Court of presidential appointees (three of them his) determines that part of Trump's bureaucracy sending legal migrants to foreign concentration camps without even deigning to provide a reason might not be constitutional, it's because "elites try to use the republic’s anti-democratic checks to impose their preferred immigration policies, according to their peculiar affinity for immigrants...." even when the best available evidence suggests the public widely supports the court in this instance. Trump won a vote so anyone not deferring to him is guilty of overreach.
The reason we have elections and not issue polls is because voters balance the totality of the circumstances in reaching their decisions. People may or may not like this or that incident in the moment, but that doesn’t mean they disapprove of the overall arc of the policy. So, for example, polls show that virtually no Trump voters regret their vote and he’d probably win a rematch: https://emersoncollegepolling.com/trump-100-days/ (Emerson is a good pollster, its final 2024 polls nailed Trump’s actual share, and overestimated Harris only by 2). Issue polls taken in the moment also suffer from response bias—e.g. people who approve of the overall arc of Trump’s immigration policy are less likely to respond to polling about a flub than people who are outraged by the policy itself. (The 2024 Harris bounce should be a good lesson in response bias!)
And a rule based on second guessing election results based on issue polling would never be applied even handedly—judges are definitionally elites and such a rule would be applied to favor their preferences. Issue polling showed the ACA under water for quite some time. Roberts had ample basis for finding the statute unconstitutional—far less of a stretch than the expansive interpretations of asylum laws—but he admirably saved it. And I’d argue that, contrary to the issue polls, Obamas’s reelection ultimately bore out that the ACA had a mandate.
No, the reason the United States places issues in the hands of a small elite of people elected for fixed terms and some of it in a single individual is a practical feature of the design of a republic which is obviously less democratic than alternatives, like having ballots on most issues or absolutely every implementation detail. It's also a feature designed for practical implementation and less disruptive governance, but so is the separation of powers and rule of law (the "anti-democratic" separation of powers and rule of law having much stronger and more enduring support than actions of any individual president suggests that wasn't a decision the Founding Fathers got wrong...). A rule based on letting the public decide exactly who got to stay in the country and who won each court case would obviously be more democratic than delegating that power to judges, but it would not function particularly well. A rule based on letting ICE elites rather than the judiciary rule on the rights and wrongs of particular immigration cases and giving the president the right to ignore people's constitutional right to due process if they found it inconvenient would not be more democratic and would, I suspect, also not function very well. And suffice to say migration policy is not the only area where Trump is or was arguing that rules shouldn't apply to him or that he should have more power.
Again, the difference between popular sovereignty and populism is quite well illustrated by your argument that if Trump's deportation policy is underwater even in the poll you picked showing him with neutral favourability overall, the "totality of the circumstances" means that deportation decisions he approves and laws he chooses not to follow must be him enacting the will of the people, cheerfully disregarding details like the people explicitly wanting him to do something else and overwhelmingly endorsing the right of institutions ordering him to do something else to make those orders. The belief that the people should have some say in the decision making process is quite different from the belief that the people's will is manifest in every action of some guy they elected on some issue that seemed salient.
populism is telling people that there's a nice easy clean solution to their fear and discontent, when in reality problems are complicated and difficult to solve without causing other equally valid problems.
How do you decide if they are "pandering to discontent and fear of some portion of the populace" or "standing up for neglected people"?
Proposed policies being realistic vs vague broad strokes that are unlikely to be legal to implement would be another indicative axis.
When Biden ran against Trump, he tried to appeal to voters who were unhappy with Trump, but nobody called him a populist. He was just a normal politician. Trump isn't. Neither is Bernie Sanders.
How do you decide? I can't give you a clear answer there. Still, there is a difference. (Maybe "do they talk like a normal politician"?) Most out-of-office politicians are on the Biden side; only a few are on the Trump/Sanders side.
At least on the GOP side, it’s because they care only about cheap labor. Free trade to harness cheap labor abroad, and mass immigration to harness cheap labor for what can’t be outsourced.
I don't think many people would say Biden was anti-establishment. In 2020, Trump hadn't been in office long enough to change the establishment very much.
Populism is not inconsistent with pluralism, though it is incompatible with the elaborate anti-democratic machinery that’s been created to manage pluralism: administrative bureaucracy, elaborate laws, racial political machines and interest groups, etc.
“Pluralism” as it exists in places like New York City and Chicago are failure states of democracy, where you’ve got divided populations managed by ethnic political machines, with politics consisting of horse trading between interest groups. Yes, populism is quite at odds with that version of pluralism.
To put it differently, you characterized populism as a rejection of pluralism. And my point is that, insofar as populism has anything to do with pluralism, it’s more a rejection of the anti-democratic structures that have been installed to manage pluralism. Which just makes it democracy.
It's not necessarily a bad thing but it's almost always reported negatively because the media is owned by the elite. Even elites who claim to care about the people don't want to be cast as the villain or lose power themselves.
Ironically, a successful populist movement becomes the new elite and creates an opportunity for other people to be populists.
Generally the first part is the defining feature of a populist movement: a leader or faction that seeks to insist that the only solution to elites or other hated minorities or purported threats is to assume that anyone trying to stop them accumulating more power is an agent of the elites. Naturally this rhetorical style suits people that want to accumulate a lot of power and wealth and don't want to give too many straight answers to questions about what they're doing with it.
That's why Maduro, an oligarch who's been in power for over 12 years and decides exactly who is and isn't "elite" in his country is characterised as "populist" because his rhetorical style is all about claiming that he's on the side of the poor against [what's left of] the middle classes, whilst a civil war or coup which usually leads to elites being deposed may not involve populists at all.
Who is characterizing him as populist? His supporters in India or the global elite? (Honest question, I don't know much about India.)
That may be needed, it may be justified, but we still need to ask what the replacement system is. It is easy to criticize, but harder to offer a better alternative. It is easy to destroy; hard to build. The populist's answer to what comes next often boils down to "trust me, bro" - there isn't a concrete, workable plan. As a result, the net result often winds up worse than what came before, not just for the elite, but even for the people the populist claimed to represent. This is true even if the populist was honest, that is, sincerely had the interest of the common people at heart.
Liberals are often about taking down (liberating) the current system. But for some reason they often don't want or don't get the populist labels. For example, I don't think anyone ever called BLM a populist movement.
If The People selected you as their Chosen Leader, who needs pesky Elites in the courts and the Corrupt bureaucrats holding you back, the Chosen One? All opposition to what The People want is elitist gatekeeping and needs to be violently eradicated.
Mass deportations, without more context, in and of themselves are more a policy and less a political style.
You can execute this policy in a democratic or populist fashion.
Those are all explicitly anti-democratic institutions! You can argue that we’re not a democracy, but rather a constitutional republic, and those are appropriate checks on democracy. But that is a different argument.
It’s important to keep the terminology straight so you can think of the situation clearly. To address the mass deportation hypothetical: judges are very different from the people. They are cognitive elites with degrees from elite institutions. Insofar as judges interpret laws to check deportation efforts—for example, expansively interpreting the criteria for asylum, which they have done—you should understand that what’s happening is a conflict between voters on one hand, and elites who are far more sympathetic to immigration.
In a functional democracy, these anti-democratic checks should be maintained within their proper scope. For example, judges should avoid allowing the pro-immigrant sympathies of their class to color their legal opinions.
We often use the word "democracy" as the vast eco-system underlying and upholding modern liberal societies in general, not just the elected parts. Whether that's correct use of the word - I suspect you think it's not - I leave open for discussion. If you want I can use the narrow definition in which case we are mostly in agreement.
Judges should exercise due caution and be mindful of their obvious biases.
However, this works both ways. Officials cater to their often not so well-informed electorate and this group, The People, is as susceptible to biases - if not more - as the so called elites are. Both should exercise restraint and be mindful of their biases, not just the judiciary. It takes a populist to claim The People are always right.
As you can tell I am also very much an amateur. I suggest you don't approach me as someone who has studied political science because I'll have a hard time keeping up.
> People, is as susceptible to biases - if not more - as the so called elites are. Both should exercise restraint and be mindful of their biases, not just the judiciary. It takes a populist to claim The People are always right.
But the biases of people are legitimate, while the biases of the elites are illegitimate. If the people vote for mass deportations, for example, the only job of the elite should be to figure out how to do it efficiently while protecting legally recognized rights (but not trying to undermine the policy by invoking protecting rights as a pretext). As usual, the scandinavians have figured this out.
> But the biases of people are legitimate, while the biases of the elites are illegitimate. > [...] > while protecting legally recognized rights
Agreed, provided that by "elites" we mean the branches of government not just "successful people". I guess we're mostly in agreement. I'm just cranky about The People because in my country they are quite ... self-destructive, but that is a topic for another time.
I guess "elites" [sic] don't qualify as "people," then. And given your personal background, I'm also guessing that the range of types of "people" in your life experience might not have been all that broad.
> If the people vote for mass deportations, for example, the only job of the elite should be to figure out how to do it efficiently while protecting legally recognized rights (but not trying to undermine the policy by invoking protecting rights as a pretext).
Objection, assumes facts not in evidence: Whence came these "legally recognized rights"? The odds are, it was from the "elites" that you profess to scorn, with "the people" — gradually or otherwise — being convinced that those rights were a good thing.
Edit: ... in your life experience in the U.S. ....
A little-d democrat might argue that the legal system not being immediately responsive to the expressed policy preferences of the majority of voters is anti-democratic. But a populist argument would add that this discrepancy is because judges as individuals are members of an elite class entirely separate from the common people because they're smart and went to school and stuff.
The populist argument here is an unnecessary rhetorical flourish. The platonic ideal spherical judge of uniform density rules entirely based on laws that by definition do not immediately change based on the results of elections. The idea that judicial rulings may at times oppose popular opinion as expressed in the most recent election should be taken as a given when the system is working as intended, whether that's democratic or not, rather than as evidence of ideological opposition from judges as individuals. But in populist framing, everything must be in terms of elite opposition to the common people, so arguments about the inherent inertia of the legal system are insufficient.
Populism vs democracy aside, I'd also argue that at least in the US, the federal judicial branch is no less democratic than the legislative or executive branches. There are plenty of avenues for the voters to change the outcome of legal decisions. They can vote for representatives who will change laws, Presidents who will nominate different judges to the bench, and there is even a democratic process to amend the Constitution. Of course none of those processes are quick or obtainable with a simple majority at a moment in time, but by that standard the legislative and executive branch don't fare much better. Voters can choose the President, but they only get to do so ever four years regardless of how they feel about the President's actions at any point in those four years unless they can meet the incredibly high bar of impeachment and conviction. There's a distinct lack of responsiveness there as well.
This is a gross redefinition of democracy.
But we can go down this path if you wish. If a judge rules that only men can vote by their interpretation of the constitution, is that democracy?
First of all no single judge will be capable of upholding this, but let's say the entire judiciary has indeed decided to disenfranchise half the population I'd say they are grossly failing at their job. But anyway, your question was: is that democracy?
Well, it depends. In my democracy it would not be, because freedom is a big part of what democracy means here - even if The People decide freedom is unimportant. That's what we don't like about naked democracy, it easily leads to mob rule in which freedom is stripped and the tyrannical majority overrides all other concerns.
In my mind democracy is a broad system of checks, balances and institutions in which the will of the people is just one element. An important one, but definitely not the only one.
Just for entertainment consider this: if The People vote to keep women out of the electoral process, is that democracy?
The objection to illegal immigrants is that they’re here. While deportation efforts should follow the law like everything else, there’s nothing about illegal immigration that makes the legal process especially important compared to other things.
I'm pretty certain that is not what most people mean when they say "illegal immigrant".
Illegal immigrant = an immigrant who is here illegally/against the law. What other stronger definitions of the word are there?
I'm confused. This is how most people define the term, and is not what you said before. What you said before is "due process has been already run and determined they are illegal".
There is a vast difference between someone that broke the law and someone that was convicted of breaking the law.
When the average person says "illegal immigrant" they mean someone that broke immigration law. Nothing about whether due process has been applied. So if you start rounding up "illegal immigrants" and deporting them right away, that's a big problem, because not all of them had due process and you'll inevitably grab innocent people.
Aren't you contradicting yourself here? How can you break immigration law but be innocent?
Immigration is pretty binary, you either have valid visa to be here or you don't, so you either broke the law or you didn't. What's there to argue about here? Yeah, we can say immigration laws suck sometimes, but that's an argument for changing the laws, not for removing the enforcement of the law.
If you try to round up everyone that committed a crime, you're going to make mistakes. You'll get people that did not commit that crime. So no, there's no contradiction in that sentence.
> Immigration is pretty binary, you either have valid visa to be here or you don't, so you either broke the law or you didn't. What's there to argue about here?
The way you check, properly, is with due process.
It's pretty easy to do due process on immigration. It can be done efficiently. But you still have to do it.
Yeah there is contradiction. They either committed the crime or they did not. Which is it? Do they have valid immigration papers or not. That IS the due process. Where do you see the potential mistakes? It's very binary. When you enter the movie theater, you either have a ticket or you don't.
And mistakes happen with all the due process in the world. Jails everywhere have people who are there even if they did not commit the crime simply because the prosecution was stronger than the defense.
Then there is a lot of law around asylum seekers. Some of the people who entered the country illegally still might have rights to stay here.
The current laws aren’t as simple as “if you don’t have a paper we can send you outside tomorrow” right now.
And on top of it ones deportation order might have conditions (I.e don’t deport this guy to El Salvador since it’s unsafe for him there) which also can make deportation of illegal illegal. And this one, as you might know, already happened.
The whole El Salvador thing with first two planes having people without final order of removal is illegal.
That’s to answer how deporting illegals can be illegal.
On top of it what’s called deportation might be not exactly deportation in my opinion – it’s unclear why US can send people to foreign prison for entering country illegally.
Not everything involving breaking the law is a crime. At least from legal perspective.
But I also want this to happen according to the law. And this is more important to me than having these people in the US. Person who entered the country illegally, or, for example, overstayed their visas, might have rights to stay here according to our laws (again, look at asylum seekers). And I want those laws to be followed (or changed).
I also realize that what's really complicated is to find illegal immigrants. And ultimately it's a trade off between how efficiently we find them and how much we turn into police state. And for me it's much more important not to turn into police state, rather than get rid of unlawful immigrants.
Hate towards unlawful immigrants scares me, government induced hate - terrifies me (see https://x.com/WhiteHouse/status/1919552538447097970), that's where comparison to fascism comes into conversation. Under the pretense of hate towards particular group of people the worst things are happening. Hate and dehumanization are tools for such regimes.
Most of the unlawful immigrants aren't criminals (at least in the way you apply this word to your fellow Americans), and they came here because it was bad for them back home and they wanted better life. The life they're pretty much ready to work a lot for.
I can't help but notice how much this is the story of America itself. Your ancestors probably were this kind of people. It is part of the American DNA.
As of being bigot and hateful: "kick them out" and your insistence on them being criminals pretty much uncovers your feelings toward these people.
It’s not hateful to be a law abiding citizen. Please stop using hyperbole and using those words because it’s wrong and you have no evidence. It’s an ad hominem attack which isn’t allowed on HN
Where did I say this? Who is this "you" here? Why are you making accusations in bad faith trying to demonize people you don't know using words they haven't said and arguments they haven't made?
Let's set facts here: you are arguing for a position held by the dictator in charge of the USA today, and it is plenty transparent that you voted for him and you love everything he's doing. Everything else is just misdirection so you can try and confuse any bystanders, abusing the very same 'niceness' and 'non-political' messaging you accuse others of breaking all the time.
Let's not mince words here anymore. Everyone can see through you. If you're doing it deliberately, congratulations.
What elites call populist voters are picking the candidate that they think will do the best at the job they want done.
Look at the People's Party's policies and that's what it stands for. The shorthand is that the policies prioritize wage laborers and small business over massive entrenched interests and insiders. The way the term has been used since then (always by people who disapprove) means "whatever the rabble are asking for now." Or "appealing to the lowest common denominator voter."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/People's_Party_(United_States)
So the term is really meaningless, just a slur used against people whose ideas sometimes overlap with People's Party policies, used by people who would have hated the People's Party at the time.
https://risk.princeton.edu/img/Historical_Collapse_Resources...
some time ago i discovered Wardley maps [1] (about company's "landscape" and strategy there), and one thing that stick with me was this:
there are 4 levels/stages of development there - genesis, custom-built, product, commodity. With three transitions, made by different kind of people - Pioneers, Settlers, Town-planners. And the last one, mass-production, is about "ruthless removal of deviation".
i guess these "diminishing returns" in keeping long-time same-thing (democracy?) have something in common with the removal of deviations/variety..
[1] https://feststelltaste.github.io/wardley-maps-book/#_the_fir...
Yes, the Democratic-Republicans and the Federalists know that they cannot be replaced because of the two party system. (Likewise, neither faces the threat of, if it fails to be replaced, being completely re-oriented in a political realignment.) It's not as if, currently, scholars disagree about whether the US is in its Sixth or Seventh Party system -- the two major parties are dominant, stable, and forever unchanging.
The study of how different kinds of voting systems work and their advantages, disadvantages and consequences is called social choice theory. There's an interesting theorem called Arrow's theorem that proves that given a certain set of assumptions, there can be no voting system that works exactly as we would like. Sometimes this is used to argue that all systems are equally bad, but I think this is not true at all - even while imperfect, some systems are much better than others.
Previous to 1988 the League of Women Voters[0] handled presidential debates. A fully independent outside organization.
Since then, the Commission on Presidential Debates[1] set rules for admittance to president debates. The CPD was founded jointly by Republicans and Democrats and is controlled solely by both parties.
At best, there _appears_ to be a large, gaping conflict of interest when it comes to admitting candidates to presidential debates. In 1992 Ross Perot was invited to the debates as a third option. In 1996 Clinton and Dole successfully argued for Perot to be excluded from the debates as he had no "realistic chance to win" [2]. Perot aside, what happened was downright anti-democratic and further enforced the two party system.
Now that I'm on this...I'll do another example of this abuse of power. Candidates from third parties have been arrested for protesting outside presidential debates [3,4]. Even if the protests broke the law, arresting opponents for asking to be given a podium to speak at feels bad.
---
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commission_on_Presidential_Deb...
[2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1996/09/18/p...
[3] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/oct/18/jill-s...
Other majoritarian democratic systems often also converge into two party (or two and a bit party, or two parties per region systems) but few seem to normalise voting for the same party every time in quite the same way.
If there would six parties to choose from, for example, I think it would be hard to argue that closed primaries are harmful. But since we have a duopoly, they exclude a significant portion of the voting population from participating until late in the process.
Six is a not-uncommon number of parties qualified for ballot access in a US state, though some have fewer and some have more.
https://ballotpedia.org/List_of_political_parties_in_the_Uni...
Many European countries use varieties of proportional representation (most commonly either party list proportional or mixed member proportional), and have a parliamentary system (so that there is not a separately-elected executive administration -- there may be an elected President but they tend to be a head of state and not head of government -- whereas in the US the executive election is even more heavily tilted to support two-party dominance than the legislative system, though the legislative election system is still the more important piece of the problem.)
The only elective part is which "faction" of the party the person will be coming from, i.e "Zürich"/"Bern for UDC/SVP.
A "parliamentary system" is not about just having a parliament (an elected legislature), it is a name for a system where the elected parliament is the paramount power in government, including choosing the head of government. The French have something close to that, the US does not.
The French have a semi-presidential system where, as in a parliamentary system, the head of government is the PM elected by the parliament and formally appointed by the President who is the head of state, the US has a (very strong) Presidential system, where the President is head of government (as well as having a Presidential election system that, even ignoring the role of the President, inherently favors duopoly more than the two-round French system.)
The direct vote gets a better chance at subverting the system radically and that's a good thing. Regardless of criticism from the losers about "populism". The end result is great for democracy and actual change.
Edit: I get that people downvote this comment since it's always controversial to ask.
I personally always ask when I am more curious about the answer and am willing to burn any potential karma over it.
Asking for feedback is more important.
I'm just genuinely surprised about the other one.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Democratic-Republican_...
Then apparently the party just kind of split up and re-organized into the "two-party" system that has continued to dominate ever since.
There was no threat until decades later when the Free Silver parties arose based strongly on reversing the trend where increasing economic opportunity was being systematically pushed further beyond reach of average citizens, in the face of bonanza precious metal discoveries that would have been able to pull the whole population ahead of Europe decades sooner if the Free Silvers would have had their way. Bipartisan effort was resurrected as if from a single party again, and the third party was crushed by a well-maintained machine which was bigger than either one of the major parties on their own. Before the citizens could be allowed to get a little taste, the Silvers were assimilated by the Democrats in a platform expansion that was over-dramatized but badly diluted their objectives. It does seem to be the first real big platform deviation between the Democrats & Republicans to start off the 20th century with, but the Silver supporters continued to be systematically disadvantaged for decades to come.
No third party movement has presented that level of threat to include such economic clout, but if so, deeply rooted underhanded countermeasures would be deployed, it would apparently take more than anyone could imagine, so no third party for you.
The Democratic-Republicans formed before the Federalists, actually.
> There were actually 4 candidates on the ballot though
Unlike the modern system, there weren't even ballots in a quarter of the states (a popuar election for electors is not a Constitutional mandate, and it wasn't a statutory requirement to have such an election for a states' electoral votes to be considered regularly-given until much more recently.)
And the candidates weren't on the ballots that existed, party electors were (unlike modern ballots, where the Presidential candidate is listed and you get the associated electors if they win, the actual electors -- and not usually the candidate they were pledged to -- were listed on the ballots, where they existed.)
And in most states, there were not electors for all four candidates on the ballot, the four are just the candidates that received electoral votes from somewhere in the country.
> In that case none had enough electoral votes, so Jackson won that one when it was decided by the House.
Jackson won a plurality—but not the required majority to win outright—of the electoral vote, but the House elected John Quincy Adams in the contingent election required to resolve the absence of an electoral vote winner, not Jackson.
> He had a total nationwide popular vote of 151,271, so you have to figure that each vote had so much of a stronger voice back then under a system quite similar to today.
As discussed above, the system was not "quite similar to today".
> Then apparently the party just kind of split up and re-organized into the "two-party" system that has continued to dominate ever since.
The new Whig Party which was its initial main opponent did form in part from dissident offshoots of the Democratic-Republican Party, but a lot of its strength was from bringing in existing regional parties that were never competitive national parties (like the Anti-Masonic Party) as well.
> There was no threat until decades later when the Free Silver parties arose
Kind of leaving out the entire rise of the Republican Party and the displacement of the Whigs...I could go on with responding to the blend of oddly selected facts and complete distortions, but I'll just note that it doesn't get better.
What do you think it would take for a third party to become viable over the short term, and what would inhibit or enable them to become a contender?
For a long time, the common practice in live coding, which you might see on platforms like Flok.cc (https://flok.cc) supporting various interesting languages, has been like this: Everyone gets their own 'space' or editor. From there, they send messages to a central audio server to control their own sound synthesis.
This is heavily influenced by architectures like SuperCollider's client-server model, where the server is seen as a neutral entity.
Crucially, this relies a lot on social rules, not system guarantees. You could technically control someone else's track, or even mute everything. People generally restrain themselves.
A downside is that one person's error can sometimes crash the entire server for everyone.
Later, while developing my own live coding language, Glicol (https://glicol.org), I started exploring a different approach, beginning with a very naive version: I implemented a shared editor, much like Google Docs. Everyone types in the same space, and what you see is (ideally) what you hear, a direct code-to-sound mapping.
The problems with this naive system were significant. You couldn't even reliably re-run the code, because you couldn't guarantee if a teammate was halfway through typing 0.1 (maybe they only typed 0.) or had only typed part of a keyword.
So, I improved the Glicol system: We still use a shared interface for coding, but there's a kind of consensus mechanism. When you press Cmd+Enter (or equivalent), the code doesn't execute instantly. Instead, it's like raising your hand – it signals "I'm ready". The code only updates after everyone involved has signaled they are ready. This gives the last person to signal 'ready' a bit more responsibility to ensure the musical code change makes sense.
I'm just sharing these experiences from the music-making side, without judgment on which approach is better.
Brilliant, and provides a foundation for an idea that I've seen elsewhere: that the true test of a new democracy is not the first democratic elections, but the first transition of power, i.e. the first subsequent election where the incumbent loses.
Take any governance system that is in power for too long. It becomes rotten and it serves its own purposes. Democracy breaks that downwards spiral.
It is not a stable system, it is not predictable, it is not cheap to operate, heck it’s not even guaranteed that it will work. But it prevents the certain path to self-destruction.
In TFA, the author wrote:
Democracy, then, will be stable so long as the expectation of costs and the uncertainty of the future give the losers sufficient incentive to accept that they have lost.
Democracy works within the tolerances of reliable information, demonstrable co-operation, and the rule of law.
The US implosion is not yet irreparable, but it is a societal failure.
Even if democracy in some strict sense means that majority decides, you still need to care about the minorities to keep the system credible.
Otherwise any minority will soon realize that they will never win and break out of the system.
David Graeber wrote how in Sparta everyone carrying weapons meant that they couldn’t afford to displease even a small fraction of them. So they had to resort to 100% consent and not majoritarian voting.
And then goes on to assert that the majoritarian voting process works only in a system where the state apparatus has an absolute control over violence with which the disgruntled minority opinions are suppressed. I think it sort of helped to resolve some of my internal contradictions around democracy as it exists today.
Of course, one can bicker about what the constitutional amendment process actually is, and obviously about the actual content of the constitution. But the central point remains: minority (and majority) rights are protected by a constitution that cannot be altered by a (simple) majority vote.
.... the problem comes, however, when the minority decides it wants more than the constitution provides.
Or when the majority decides this? If the system is defined to put checks on the majority power as well as the minority, there's no reason that the majority might not decide to try to push the boundaries of the system with similar incentives. I think there's a reasonable argument that this sort of boundary pushing is more responsible for the erosion of constitutional norms historically compared to when the minority wants more rights; we have headlines literally from this morning talking about how the American president claimed that he doesn't know if he needs to follow the constitution due to the mandate of his election[0]:
> WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. — President Donald Trump, asked during an interview on NBC News’s “Meet the Press with Kristen Welker,” whether he believes that he needs to uphold the Constitution during his presidency, responded, “I don’t know.”
> The comment came as Trump remained adamant that he wanted to ship undocumented immigrants out of the country and said it was inconceivable to hear millions of cases in court, insisting he needed the power to quickly remove people he said were murderers and drug dealers.
> “I was elected to get them the hell out of here, and the courts are holding me from doing it,” he said.
> Pressed on whether he still needs to abide by the Constitution, he said, “I don’t know.”
[0]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2025/05/04/trump-nbc...
On the other hand, electing leaders who simply decide to not follow the constitution (perhaps because they believe they have "a majority" at their backs, or perhaps not) is something entirely different.
But I also don't see the US constitutional amendment process as anything particularly praiseworthy either, and do not think it is capable of being used as a way to rise to the occasion of, for example, the current president.
Of course, it goes beyond the amendment process to the wider US political and social culture, and we are currently living in the midst of an experiment to see just how much power can be simply taken by a president who wants to do so. As the line goes: it's not about who is going to let me, it's about who is going to stop me. The USA does not appear to have particularly robust mechanisms in place to stop a power grab by the administration when there's something roughly approximating a majority in Congress who do no oppose it.
But at some point, if enough people believe the constitution doesn't do what they want it to do, they can always replace it altogether.
A candidate's personal expectation of costs must also be factored in. When a candidate faces criminal charges (to pick an example totally out of the blue) if they lose but can eliminate those if they win, the calculus changes for them.
democracy does not work. Or first, we should clarify the meaning of "it works". IMO, it did not prevented us from burning the world, this is sufficient to say that in a parallel universe i would bet differently.
[0] according to Invisible Doctrine, a history of capitalism by Monbiot and Hutchison (2024)
it definitely speaks out to me.
though, it looks likes another of those illusions to entertain you, us. You may want to consider that possibility some day, at least out of curiosity.
- ostracism, where the people voted to ban a person who was too mighty or dangerous from the city of Athens for a period of 10 years;
- random selection of (some kind of) representatives. This has predictable downsides, but ensures fair representation and prevents the existence of a political class.
It isn't a terrible idea; I've long liked that sort of plan as a fallback in very tight elections to randomly decide between the candidates. But it isn't really a compromise with the sortition folk because it doesn't have the properties they're looking for.
Thirty electors were chosen by lot, and then a second lottery reduced them to nine, who nominated forty candidates in all, each of whom had to be approved by at least seven electors in order to pass to the next stage. The forty were pruned by lot to twelve, who nominated a total of twenty-five, who needed at least nine nominations each. The twenty-five were culled to nine, who picked an electoral college of forty-five, each with at least seven nominations. The forty-five became eleven, who chose a final college of forty-one. Each member proposed one candidate, all of whom were discussed and, if necessary, examined in person, whereupon each elector cast a vote for every candidate of whom he approved. The candidate with the most approvals was the winner, provided he had been endorsed by at least twenty-five of the forty-one.”
However, if a leader remains in power for decades, it’s highly probable that the establishment has a firm grip on the reins and is unlikely to relinquish control.
The very short version is that 'dictator' refers to two different things. One version is the dictator appointed by the Senate in the early Republic to solve a particular crisis, who had absolute power within their sphere of responsibility and who uniformly relinquished power when their job was done.
The later dictators towards the end of the Republic were Sulla and Caesar. They seized Rome by force, then claimed the long-disused title of 'dictator' to give their actions an appearance of legitimacy.
1. https://acoup.blog/2022/03/18/collections-the-roman-dictator...
If I have to judge what is a democracy, I am going back quite a while to what I learned in high school as the definition of a democracy. "A democracy is a form of government where the three branches of government, the legislative, the executive and the judicial branch are separated and the legislative branch is in the hands of representatives elected by the people."
This seems like it's overfitting quite a bit to the American political system; I've never heard of a definition of a democracy that required exactly these branches before, and it's hard for me to agree with the idea that something with two our four branches (or the division between the branches being slightly different) is somehow impossible to be a democracy by definition.
The more I think about it, the more I like it. This would allow a sampling of all groups in a country to have access to power and decision making without the need to be exceptional in some way. It would also remove the self-selection bias of all elected officials.
This depends one whether you consider the existence of a political class to be purely negative.
Seems like random selection of candidates who have no influence over what happens after their term selects for all the negative aspects of a political class (ability to enrich themselves and their friends at others expense, tendency to be ignorant of and ambivalent about issues that don't really affect them) and against the [at least arguably] positive aspects (institutional knowledge of how things operate, some sort of political philosophy which has some public support, some level of skill and drive to get things done, and the motivation to try to keep the public happy enough to reelect them or their compatriots)
Unless a dictator is some kind of super-popular national hero or has managed to convince everyone that they have a divine right to rule, they depend on the support of a group of elites to maintain their power, and have no choice but to prevent other ambitious people from concentrating power themselves. This means that even in cases where the dictator happens to be wise, skillful, and benevolent, their regime will suffer from corruption and fragility, because they have to keep doing favors for their support group to keep them loyal or else risk a coup.
Being a dictator is a position that tends to invite well-grounded paranoia and suspicion, because you know that ambitious and bloodthirsty people want your job. So you need to keep files on people.
They can't defer too much independent authority to talented bureaucrats or military generals or private business leaders, at least not without some guarantees on their loyalty, or else they run the risk of those people attempting to seize power. They can mitigate this by developing a cult of personality, but that makes it impossible to gracefully admit mistakes, and in conflict with maintaining a free press.
This is why things are so concerning in US - we've already lost this benefit, even though the elections are still genuinely free for now. I don't think they will remain so for long now that the stakes for their losers are so high.
You could look at it that way if you believe that there is a unique right policy answer and government is the solution to finding it, but that's not what democracy and separation of powers are about, in terms og why they have historically been adopted. It can certainly be viewed as a reason to prefer democracy and separation of powers.
But, really, democracy is about people having the right to make their own decisions and how to incorporate that into a collective government (or, more cynically, about people rebelling when they feel they have been deprived of that right and how to prevent it for the sake of domestic peace), and separation of powers is about protecting democracy by preventing the concentration of power in a particular institution within a representative democacy being leveraged to make a dictatorship.
"You either die a hero, or you live long enough to become the villain". Stay in power long enough and you are likely to become the villain, because power corrupts many people.
So people who stay in power may have the wrong policy (because their approach quit working), or they may just become corrupt. Either way, there needs to be a way to get rid of them that is more peaceful than assassination or civil war.
History presents us with far more examples of successful autocracies.
”Although great new ideas are articulated by individuals they are nearly always generated by communities.”
Unless we ever address the issue of rampant capital accumulation in the hands of the few, we are condemned to suffer fascism, propped-up by an all-powerful oligarchical class, every 80 years or so.
Economic disparities were at their lowest after WWII, and have been steadily rising ever since. They have now surpassed what they were at their worst, before FDR and his New Deal.
Discontent is rising, and neither party is addressing the real issue. Not the weakly neoliberal democrats, and certainly not the republicans, too busy scapegoating migrants and LGBT people.
A democracy doesn't exist in a vacuum; there are competing nations that are at work to undo or subjugate yours, and this never stops. We've lived a charmed life these past 80 years that are unlike any in the history of the planet.
American wealth and power are what brought this unprecedented stability to the western world, but it has been eroding.
As it erodes, the flaws in the American system begin to show, and then fray. The very means by which Americans elect automatically pushes it into a two party system, which is by nature polarizing, especially when external pressures come to bear.
It's also incredibly difficult to change course safely when so many people are involved (this affects all organizations, which is why startups can eat their lunch). Assuming that you can dynamically rise to the challenge is naive at best.
Federation only amplifies the problem, as you simply add more uneven competitors to the national riches.
The linked solution isn't as interesting, mainly because the idea of there being a solution seems the simplistic part. It is a system and it will play out.
The entire world has seen greater technical advances in the past 80 years than any time before, but zero percent of that is related to the politics of any one nation: either causally or effectually.
Well I do know he's politically active and worked with Yanis Varoufakis and Noam Chomsky. So it's more than a little cheeky.
In music his works can sometimes be considered way different than most, because of even further distance from the familiar composer/songwriter/conductor/bandleader paradigm.
Even more so than things like pure jazz improvisation which can be one of the most "democratic" combos where each person has equal creative input and a wider-than-average freedom of expression. Sometimes the bandleader here is actually voted into position as the one most qualified to do the unavoidable "guidance" tasks of leading even free-form musicians.
As "opposed" to classical orchestral works where each musician's part is well-prescribed, they may have an equal voice among themselves but this is art intended to express the composer's efforts, overwhelmingly more than each individual musician's talent. The conductor here can be more like a dictator and get away with it more often because this tradition has much closer roots to medieval practices.
All these ways, it's the resulting sound that counts to the most significant degree, and it can be a wonder to behold across the spectrum.
Now if there's one type of conductor or bandleader who would be most suitable under all conditions, I would have to describe their most valuable quality as being "magnanimous". Otherwise you can not expect the music to be as satisfying as it could be from the same talented underlying musicians.
I like this, but a more general point is that at all scales, we need to resolve the tension tension between the singular and the plural, the individual and the group, the `int` and `[int]`.
Results vary between Milton Friedman's famous pencil to the devastation of war.
Asserted without evidence.
> the answer is very, very , clearly that most wish to meddle and decide about every little thing
Asserted without evidence. Most people don't want to be involved in decision making at all - witness participation in civic institutions and groups. Most people simply want a working system which gives them the right amount and the right kinds of liberty (in all possible senses) and safety. They may choose to "meddle" when they perceive these goals as not being met.
Same with Agile in the form of Scrum.
Humans are very good at playing games.
So... clickbait.
No useful theory of democracy involves game theory. As a democrat the idea of social scientists maintaining a quasi-mechanical machine offends me. Politics needs less eggheads.
Then there’s the part about humility about Trump coming to power. Well by your own admission then your theories were just bad. People ranging from Richard Rorty to Noam Chomsky had predicted that someone like Trump could come to power if the current trajectory of the time kept on going. That was in the 90’s.
The quote about parties losing power isn’t true. America has an undemocratic duopoly. But I guess “fear” might be the keyword. Since neither party seem to truly fear it.
Contrary to common sentiment, there is nothing about democracy that makes it inherently correct. democracy isn't a religion and the form of governance a nation chooses should be adjusted and tuned over time.
I won't comment on current matters, but I will say that education and press should have been fundamental institutions of the American republic, the same way the supreme court and the house of reps are. It isn't enough that the freedom (and responsibility!) of the press is a right, an organization to manage and protect it should have been established, as should have an organization to maintain and police education.
Policy in a complex system like society is infinitely debatable and no amount of education will ever find a "right" or optimal answer to the hard questions a society faces. Division and partisanship is guaranteed in a democracy that allows free debate and expression, regardless of the level of education among the people. The most acrimonious debates often take place among the most educated of the citizenry. Therefore something else must sustain the people as a community and bind them together.
> Policy in a complex system like society is infinitely debatable and no amount of education will ever find a "right" or optimal answer to the hard questions a society faces.
You are right on the first part, which is why voters need to understand policy that affect them and vote for the people they want. I didn't mention anything about the policy or their vote being correct, just that they should understand it when voting.
> Division and partisanship is guaranteed in a democracy that allows free debate and expression, regardless of the level of education among the people.
The purpose of education is not to avoid those things you mentioned but so that debates and disagreements happen between well informed voters, not deceived voters that vote and disagree based on vibes and manipulation by malicious forces and deceptive demagogues. More debates and disagreements between actual well informed voters is a sign of a very healthy democracy. Hatred, treason and violence are not.
> Therefore something else must sustain the people as a community and bind them together.
Yeah, actually liking their country and educating themselves enough about the policy and choices being made on their behalf, that's what. Education here doesn't mean a phd in chemistry, it means reading,writing, critical thinking skills and being able to consume news and information and discerning facts from fiction.
"Least bad" is all anyone claims.
The difference in election outcomes around the 1930s, 1990s and 2020s can be mostly explained by these factors.
That's a hell of a dangerous phrase. Usually, it means that the speaker is frustrated that the broader public is not curatedly informed in a way that makes them vote how the speaker wants them to vote.
The great, and terrifying, thing about democracy is that everyone can be informed however they're informed and usually we don't literally burn everything all the way to the ground.
That is what is dangerous. People can get their news from different outlets with different priorities and that is all well and good.
What has happened at a large scale more recently is that bad actors actively feed people factually wrong stories and those are increasingly the only stories they get.
There were always those who sought to do this but the vaccine was that they could never monopolise people’s attentions the way that has become possible lately.
It is perfectly fine for people to have different opinions and vote differently, it is just very important that it is based on factual representation of the world.
Powerful actors spreading incorrect information to serve their own ends is nothing new. Remember when the consensus was that the Earth was the center of the solar system? And when Galileo was prosecuted for spreading misinformation? That was about 400 years ago.
"Misinformation" implies "It is inconvenient for someone to hold the perspective because it threatens my power". Otherwise, we just call such notions wrong, incorrect, lies, falsehoods, invalid, etc.
"Misinformation" is just as dangerous as "well informed". What we now collectively know as a species was not infrequently once wrong according to some powerful historical consensus.
And yes, that is what misinformation is, lies and falsehoods presented as news.
Remember, honest reporting of events can emphasise different aspects. That is well and good. It’s the dishonesty and disregard for truth that makes misinformation.
> "Misinformation" is just as dangerous as "well informed". Much of what we now collectively know as a species was once wrong according to some powerful historical consensus.
This is just like saying that ignorance is just as good as education because sometimes theories are invalidated when better information comes along. So why bother at all then, kind of mindset.
"Informed" and "falsehoods" serve perfectly well. Inform people don't fight misinformation. Correct falsehoods don't well-inform the public.
You opened by saying that democracy is not ideal unless the populace's information diet is carefully controlled.
By whom and in what way? Who gets to determine what is misinformation? What happens when they deem misinformation rampant or the public not well-informed?
> I think you might be projecting...
I am indeed projecting. I find those specific words only in use among unreasonably self-sure people who aren't terrified by the implications/risks of concentrating power to answer those consequent questions.
> The difference in election outcomes around the 1930s, 1990s and 2020s can be mostly explained by these factors.
But my projecting isn't unjustified. Quoted above, you also began by stating the 2020s electorate was duped with misinformation. Had they only known better, understood their own best interests as seen through the eyes of the self-assuredly enlightened, listened to the nascent Ministry of Truth, etc.
The only way to ensure the existence of truth is to give people a choice in what to believe. There are no wildflowers (truth) without also permitting weeds (lies). Certainly, no "organization to manage and protect" can be trusted to manage and protect truth.
The democratic ideal is that people are permitted to come to their own conclusions, given all arguments. Not that the arguments are institutionally restricted.
What happens when your ideological opponents suddenly come into control of the "truth police"?
Freedom to choose is the only protection, unless one's goal isn't democratic.
there is no way to ensure the existence of a thing until there is first some consensus on how the thing is defined.
with the conservative right adopting and extending foucault-era post-modern epistemology ("alternative facts", "that's just, like, your opinion"), it isn't even possible to discuss what "the truth" is, because the agreement on what how we would arrive at an answer is has been undermined (intentionally so, IMO).
for some period of time, much of the west's population bought into the idea that truth was arrived at using some variety of evidence collection, falsification, logic, experimentation and debate. this consensus has been undermined to the point where questions like "do vaccines cause autism" can be asked without any willingness to engage with the historical definition of how a true answer would be arrived at.
You're arguing for active assurance of truth, assumedly forced on people, which isn't possible in principle. While using pseudo-intellectual refences to Foucault and the scientific method in an attempt to slyly imply that, in the end, truth has to be defined by your party interests.
I argue for freedom of individual choice, which is the fundamental democratic principle. You're arguing for the need for society wide consensus in belief, which is not a democratic principle.
Does a willingness to engage with the historical definition of how a true answer "would be arrived at" include the functional banning of future science and debate?
For the record, I wrote a graduate paper on the best evidence for the cause of autism. Not that the then-current best evidence definitely revealed the cause, but only that it was the best evidence at the time. Although the evidence did not point to vaccines, I would hold anyone who wanted to ban such debate as being too academically compromised to be a member of the scientific community. In private, I would be more direct.
No, this is the opposite of what I'm arguing for. I'm saying that if a community agrees on a definition of what truth is (the old consensus was "something arrived at via a process mostly like <this>"), then "truths can exist" within that community. By contrast, if they do not agree on a definition what truth is, then no truths can exist within that community.
I'm not using references to Foucault to talk about what I think about defining truth; I'm making those references because that's what the public intellectual underpinnings of the alt-right relies on. Personally, I think that some of what Foucault had to say is insightful and interesting, but the extension of his observations to knowledge in general is unsupportable. And not just unsupportable - utterly destructive of a consensus about truth-generating processes that in turn is vital for functioning (democratic) communities.
> You're arguing for the need for society wide consensus in belief
No, I'm arguing for a society wide consensus about how we choose between beliefs. Societies in the past have had this and still accomodated different beliefs. Most of the time this is resolved by noting that the beliefs can't be resolved via evidence. For example: what is the correct role of the state? There is no truth-generating process that can provide an answer to this question, but there can still be multiple different beliefs about the right answer.
> anyone who wanted to ban such debate
The issue is not "ban such debate". The issue is unwillingness to tackle in good faith the debate that has already taken place. No truth-generating process can involve an ever-present willingness to endlessly discard things already accepted as true. Clearly, it cannot refuse to ever reconsider either. So the actual path followed is a compromise between these two: if you don't have radically divergent and NEW evidence or data explanations for something considered settled, you'll have to wait a while. We're not going to relitigate whether the earth is round or not unless someone comes along with either major new data that is incongruous with our current "truth" about this, or someone finds incongruities within the data/"truth" we already have. That doesn't mean "debate is shut down" - it's a reflection of "extraordinary claims require extraordinary whatnot to be worthy of spending any time on".
I don't think anyone serious claims to know the cause of autism; I don't think anyone serious claims it is vaccines, which is in turn a reflection of what the the truth-generating process (the one we had consensus about until recently) says about that.
An analogue might be how a CEO and board of directors are limited by law about what they can say publicly, so that they do not mislead shareholders.
If that’s not how it works then the framework isn’t useful which is why it isn’t taken seriously.
> However you can see its success in China, Vietnam and Laos, countries that happen to now significantly cripple the world hegemon's economic foundation.
What do you think these countries are doing that has significantly crippled the American economy?
Politicians who cast such doubt into the democratic principle that a government can lose its power, those politicians are up to destroying democracy and the very principle that they have to step down.
I think this line of argument requires some self-scrutiny. If you're suggesting that people are being manipulated into believing there's a ruling class of elites that span the traditional parties then you have to be willing to examine the possibility that you have been manipulated into dismissing that concern prematurely yourself. Propaganda absolutely exists, but assuming that it is the driving force behind opposing views in a democratic system turns valid concerns into illegitimate concerns which leads to disaffection by those who legitimately hold it.
> There's only two parties really in Germany left, according to the AfD, the "real opposition party" namely the AfD, and then there's the other party, a hegemonial woke block of "Altparteien".
This isn't unique to Germany. In the US, many call it the "uniparty" which consists of establishment/neocon Republicans and Democrats. In the UK the Reform party portrays both Labour and the Conservatives as indistinguishable. France's National Rally makes similar arguments from what I understand. It seems to be a recurring pattern.
The rise of these alternative parties across Western democracies suggests that a significant portion of the electorate feels under-represented politically. From their perspective the political establishment dismisses their concerns while simultaneously labeling the alternative parties that address these concerns as being anti-democratic. I think this is a very dangerous place for any sort of democracy to be in.
2 peoples saying 1+1 = 10 and a human saying 1+1 = 2
In democracy theory 10 is very correct answer. They don't consider the answer 2 even as experiment. Now you will argue for the answer 10 only. That's crime in general. But technically you can use the loop hole to argue for Democracy.
Democracy = Demo Crazy!
Even Barbaric system far better than democratic system. You don't care about the decision just because of it's taken by majority peoples on your own life!
Another alternative is auction system. Auction conducts between parties, so whoever has money that company will hold ruling rights for some years. It's kinda lease. It's far better system the Democratic Election bribe for Votes & of curse the auction money given to citizens but it's official.
If you don't know about bribe election, check it out. https://www.google.com/search?q=tn+election+bribe
And that's better? That's what we have now, effectively, but 2 simple changes could "fix" the system significantly:
1. Campaign finance reform 2. Ranked choice voting (or similar, as RCV is not without its issues).
I'd also like to see some sort of "understanding test" so that you can only vote if you can demonstrate that you understand the arguments of the proposition in question. There's no way to do that, but it makes me happy to wish it were so.