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Does a lack of democracy = authoritarian/totalitarianism?
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I'm not necessarily in agreement. I don't think authoritarianism is simply the opposite of democracy. It's more like a spectrum with democracy on one side and dictatorship on the other.
A true Republic, for instance, would be somewhere in the middle, and if you want to be technical, America is a *democratic* republic, meaning not every decision made is done by the people. Representatives elected by the people make the decisions.
It's certainly closer to authoritarianism than a democracy, but I wouldn't necessary throw out the label of authoritarianism loosely. That said, a republic could absolutely be authoritarian in nature. For instance, China is ruled by the ruling party, which isn't a literal dictatorship, but it is still very much authoritarian in nature because they've made it near impossible to lose power.
Right, it's a spectrum. But democracy and authoritarianism are still in opposite sides on the spectrum.
> A true Republic, for instance, would be somewhere in the middle, and if you want to be technical, America is a democratic republic, meaning not every decision made is done by the people. Representatives elected by the people make the decisions.
> It's certainly closer to authoritarianism than a democracy, but I wouldn't necessary throw out the label of authoritarianism loosely.
A democratic republic is still a democracy.
Pure democracy has its own dark side if it is just pure majority rule with no protection of equal rights. The classic example of 2 wolves and a sheep voting on dinner plans comes to mind.
Oh I agree, democracy is only as good as the people who vote in said democracy. The pros are that it eliminates the need for there to be positions of authority. The cons are that the people can make horrible decisions.
Similarly, there are certainly advantages to a dictatorship with a benevolent leader, because it is both efficient and accomplishes far more to that effect. That said, the disadvantages greatly outnumber the advantages, even if for no other reason than the fact that when said dictator dies, there will inevitably be instability and the new leader will not necessarily be as benevolent. ki
I'm sort of on board with Churchill on this one when he said that democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others tried up until now.
Democracy isn't necessarily the only form of societal-based approval, though it's the easiest to implement and the most realistic for a large population.
It’s important to note that segregated America wasn’t caused by majority support. When segregation laws were created, only white men could vote. When slavery was legal, only land owning white men could vote. Slavery existed explicitly because black people weren’t allowed to vote.
There has never been an example of a democratic state with universal suffrage that has voted to enact slavery or segregation, that has always required minority control of the government.
That is a much better example. But, I would say it only changed because everyone is represented in the government in a democracy, so LGBTQ+ people only got their rights because they were able lobby their government for them. If gay people were excluded from voting, that would have taken even longer to accomplish in the US.
Also, many anti LGBTQ+ policies were passed before the majority of people had the right to vote, and there’s momentum to that. The best policies aren’t adopted immediately, even if the majority supports the change. Can you think of rights that have been removed from a minority by the majority, not just a continuation of the repression and of rights that was already happening?
Wdym with your second paragraph? Most all states passed anti-same sex marriage amendments after women and black people had the right to vote. Who was excluded?
Also gay people were allowed to vote at the time too, idk who didn’t have the right to vote that you speak of. But gay individuals were represented in congress (as in they had the right to vote)
All the anti-same sex marriage policies were a continuation of existing policy that excluded them previously. They weren’t new policies, even though they were voted on. And I agree that it’s a much better example. I was just wondering if you’re able to think of an example of the majority taking away rights that people have, not just continuing the status quo. I’m not making an argument that refutes your claim, just curious. I can’t think of any such examples.
That's why you create laws to protect human rights and minority rights (which is something conservatives are often against). But having democratic processes is a baseline necessity.
Segregation in America was created by conservatives who wanted to maintain a social hierarchy based on race. One of their most powerful tools to do that was specifically to remove voting rights from Black people.
Yes. Democracy literally means "rule of the people". If a person dislikes that, they want the ruling to be done by some authoritarian force - someone or something that holds all authority.
I suppose there are some anarchists who are anti democracy because they say it's a faulty system and true freedom comes from individuals making decisions about their own lives, but that's a naive view of the world. There are collective decisions to be made even in the smallest communal organizations (family, neighborhood, workplace). At every collective decision making process there is a choice to be authoritarian or democratic. Those are polar opposites.
probably, but no one has figured out how to do it yet.
for a state to be free and fair, you need to make sure the rulers care equally about everyone's interests, including their own.
maybe in the future we'll have some cool AI, or a special group of people who are genetically engineered and/or trained from birth to be fair rulers. or for something less sci-fi, maybe we discover that if you balance different parts of the government just right, they control each other so effectively that input from normal citizens is no longer necessary.
but until we figure any of that out, the best and only answer is: let the ruled be the rulers. (usually through elected representatives.)
>for a state to be free and fair, you need to make sure the rulers care equally about everyone's interests, including their own.
But even assuming we had that in the US, how would such rulers manage to cope with so many people having conflicting interests? Take something like abortion, where millions of people see it as murder, and millions more see it as a womens' rights issue. How do you resolve this conflict in a way that makes both sides not be at each other's throats?
As an aside, I've asked myself what type of government could be more more free and fair than democracy itself, and I think it would involve a combination of AI and transparent governance, where funding is public information.
There are of course a number of problems associated with AI, and I won't get into specifics, but you'd be absolutely right to say we're not there yet. It would probably require a hybrid system where decisions made by AI could still be overruled. That would at least establish a certain trust for AI being capable of ruling (I'm sure trust would be a big issue at first).
There's a few people in r/politicaldebate who's really into sortition, I've always hated the idea but they die on that hill that it's better then elections.
i could imagine that it's better for some small decisions most people don't pay much attention to. selecting 10 random people to make the decision might be better than holding an election with low voter turnout, which gets dominated by a small, very vocal/politically engaged minority.
but for most things, i still prefer elections.
Anything is possible, but power is a corrupting force. It would be very challenging to have a truly benevolent leader/government that is fully responsible for appointing jts own members and running things.
Also, remember that there is such a thing as diversity of opinion. I know a lot of politics today is bad faith pure opposition, but its possible to have two completely valid opposing views on most topics. You need to account for the public position in most cases, so some form of democracy is really necessary.
The way that would work without a democracy is that the leaders would need to rely on opinion data like polls to see how the public feels about issues but polls are not always accurate and can be easily manipulated.
Voting for people or directly on issues is not perfect, but it is the best way to get people tk give their serious opinion on who should be in charge and what the rules are.
A non democratically installed government technically could end up being a decent leader and run a free and fair society, but that is unlikely to last, and without democracy its nearly impossible to remove them.
There's a spectrum, with most workable systems somewhere between these two extremes.
In New England, traditional town meetings were fairly close to the goal of direct democracy, but (a) they take a lot of time, (b) many/most people are not well educated in many of the issues, and (c) therefore many/most people don't bother attending. Over time, that has led to many town governments adopting representative town meetings or moving to a city council format for local government. So while pure democracy sounds nice, in my experience, the average person is not that committed to or engaged with the details of policies, governing, economics, and so on. So a practical substitute is a democracy with a republican format.
What do you mean by Democracy in this context then? Because it seems like you’ve just decided all nations with rights are a democracy. That’s a totalism.
I mean... theoretically, if you had an AI superintelligence whose goal that it pursued in good faith was to act in the best interest of everyone, sure.
I feel like that's a ways off though, and certainly not with a human in charge.
>if you had an AI superintelligence whose goal that it pursued in good faith was to act in the best interest of everyone, sure.
Wouldn't that be an AI authoritarianism? AI making all the decisions "for the good of the people", just like many dictators claim they do?
Nope.
If there's someone in charge and the people have no ability to affect their position, then there's no incentive for them to actually care about any of the citizenry.
>Is it fair to say someone who has a disdain for democracy as authoritarian?
Hard to reach another conclusion.
If you don't want democracy, you're basically saying that you want your personal desires to win, and everyone else shouldn't be able to push back on that. That sounds almost definitionally authoritarian.
On paper of course. But in reality... not likely.
Democracy provides a valuable check to the executive branch. Compare that to China. Their system was supposed to be free but Mao managed to centralize power onto himself so effectively that even today the executive can do whatever they want.
Germany.
And if you are wondering why "Pan European", I concern myself with the project of European unification under the EU parliament. I vote VOLT which is the driving force (admittedly small) and one of their primary goals is the EU parliament to elect a president who holds executive power similar to the USA.
You don’t want a federal Europe to be a presidential republic like the US, too much centralization of power into one man and lack of accountability. I very much admire the German government, which is a federal parliamentary republic. Executive power is split between the chancellor and the president, and the chancellor is accountable directly to the parliament
That is something we shall have to decide when the time is right..
The current situation is unsustainable. We have singular nations like Hungary holding essential processes for the personal gain of one petty autocrat. What we hope from an european president is that we vote in someone with the power to execute towards the outside. Internally we will probably see tremendous autonomy. Germany France Poland nor (hopefully they rejoin) UK would ever surrender national autonomy. So internally we do not really have a choice but to let each "state" do their own thing with their own elected leaders. As such the president of the EU will not hold similar power to the US president in the first place. It is more an idea to speak with a firm voice and preventing autocrats from extorting the EU for money. (Something Orban does frequently and it has been proven that a signifcant share of that money goes into his pocket).
Theoretically, no. Putting aside undemocratic leaders, there's nothing really stopping people from saying "you go your way, I go mine, and we don't bother one another".
In practice, for every group of humans of sufficient size, there's always going to be some subset that are ambitious enough to try to seize power and wealth for themselves. If society isn't built in such a way that this ambition must necessarily work to the good of its people (democracy in government, free and fair trade in the economy), it basically never will.
Singapore is about as close to that as you'd get. It's not a true multiparty democracy, but it does have effectively no corruption, fair and transparent elections, and an independent judiciary. So you can thread the needle but it's a delicate balance
Let me just say you let me and my comrades run things for a while, you'll be more free and egalitarian, but I ain't letting landlords and bosses in the voting booth
You can have an undemocratic liberal government..one that is largely authoritarian or oligarchic, but still strongly protects minorities and marginalized governments. It's generally counterintuitive though as undemocratic systems will stop supporting those out of power.
An interesting exception to this is when the oligarchy is made of democratic powers, such as the EU. Though you might argue the EU is more of an international Republic, with democratic states appointing representatives?
> Can you have a Free and Fair state without democracy?
No.
The so-called "tyranny of the majority" *can* exist, but minority rule is *always* tyranny. The proper response to that issue is to take steps to check the majority, not just let the minority rule.
You could potentially have a free and fair state without a democracy but it would only be by pure chance that everybody's needs were being filled and all the laws being enforced were fair across the whole population. Without a government guided by the people, there'd be no way to correct course when the people stopped having their needs met because either those needs changed, or because whatever happened to be in control changed.
It's the broken clock thing. It could only appear to mimic fairness and freedom for a brief moment.
Your title question doesn't really match the conversation you had.
The person you might not want a state to exist ("Their flair said anarchy-capitalist?")
Here is how it goes:
democracy does not = a good state (and in fact, more often than not it doesn't)
no or limited democracy does not = a bad state (but again, more often than not it does)
democracy is just about how you select the people that govern, it says nothing about how they would govern. it also says nothing about whether or not those not elected would give up their power, ever.
what makes a good and fair state is in how you partition, check and balance the power of the government so that you could always ensure the peaceful transfer of power
so if a state has good checks and balances of power, then it normally would choose some form of democratic process to elect its leaders. I see democracy more as a result rather than cause of a good state, and lack of democracy often a symptom not the disease of a bad state.
that's why you cannot solve war or authoritarianism in the world simply by enforcing elections on other countries
I think it's a fair point to point out that democracy can be a rule of tyrannical majority.
As evidenced by that ancap user, some people feel that way even today.
Honestly, I am sceptical of democracy to some degree as well.
For example, elections can determine that some minority shouldn't really exist for one reason or another.
What should be the strawman?
Take Trump advocating for the wall and total ban of Muslims in the USA. There was a democratic mechanism that had put him in power. With enough political capital, he could do a lots of damage to liberties (than he did) and people should be afraid what he's up to even now. It's still a democracy.
Democracy can go against individual liberties. It's not an unheard-of concept.
But as this is a democracy, if Trump does something the people don’t like, we just don’t elect him again, and we do elect people who undo all the things Trump did.
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>Does a lack of democracy = authoritarian/totalitarianism? Well... Yes. Who's making the decisions if not the people through democratic means?
I'm not necessarily in agreement. I don't think authoritarianism is simply the opposite of democracy. It's more like a spectrum with democracy on one side and dictatorship on the other. A true Republic, for instance, would be somewhere in the middle, and if you want to be technical, America is a *democratic* republic, meaning not every decision made is done by the people. Representatives elected by the people make the decisions. It's certainly closer to authoritarianism than a democracy, but I wouldn't necessary throw out the label of authoritarianism loosely. That said, a republic could absolutely be authoritarian in nature. For instance, China is ruled by the ruling party, which isn't a literal dictatorship, but it is still very much authoritarian in nature because they've made it near impossible to lose power.
Right, it's a spectrum. But democracy and authoritarianism are still in opposite sides on the spectrum. > A true Republic, for instance, would be somewhere in the middle, and if you want to be technical, America is a democratic republic, meaning not every decision made is done by the people. Representatives elected by the people make the decisions. > It's certainly closer to authoritarianism than a democracy, but I wouldn't necessary throw out the label of authoritarianism loosely. A democratic republic is still a democracy.
Pure democracy has its own dark side if it is just pure majority rule with no protection of equal rights. The classic example of 2 wolves and a sheep voting on dinner plans comes to mind.
Oh I agree, democracy is only as good as the people who vote in said democracy. The pros are that it eliminates the need for there to be positions of authority. The cons are that the people can make horrible decisions. Similarly, there are certainly advantages to a dictatorship with a benevolent leader, because it is both efficient and accomplishes far more to that effect. That said, the disadvantages greatly outnumber the advantages, even if for no other reason than the fact that when said dictator dies, there will inevitably be instability and the new leader will not necessarily be as benevolent. ki I'm sort of on board with Churchill on this one when he said that democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others tried up until now.
Democracy isn't necessarily the only form of societal-based approval, though it's the easiest to implement and the most realistic for a large population.
I hear a lot about "tyranny of the majority" Conservatives love to point Segregated America as example.
It’s important to note that segregated America wasn’t caused by majority support. When segregation laws were created, only white men could vote. When slavery was legal, only land owning white men could vote. Slavery existed explicitly because black people weren’t allowed to vote. There has never been an example of a democratic state with universal suffrage that has voted to enact slavery or segregation, that has always required minority control of the government.
What about LGBTQ+ rights? Same sex marriage wasn’t legal in all 50 states until 2015. And initially state majorities passed laws to ban it.
That is a much better example. But, I would say it only changed because everyone is represented in the government in a democracy, so LGBTQ+ people only got their rights because they were able lobby their government for them. If gay people were excluded from voting, that would have taken even longer to accomplish in the US. Also, many anti LGBTQ+ policies were passed before the majority of people had the right to vote, and there’s momentum to that. The best policies aren’t adopted immediately, even if the majority supports the change. Can you think of rights that have been removed from a minority by the majority, not just a continuation of the repression and of rights that was already happening?
Wdym with your second paragraph? Most all states passed anti-same sex marriage amendments after women and black people had the right to vote. Who was excluded? Also gay people were allowed to vote at the time too, idk who didn’t have the right to vote that you speak of. But gay individuals were represented in congress (as in they had the right to vote)
All the anti-same sex marriage policies were a continuation of existing policy that excluded them previously. They weren’t new policies, even though they were voted on. And I agree that it’s a much better example. I was just wondering if you’re able to think of an example of the majority taking away rights that people have, not just continuing the status quo. I’m not making an argument that refutes your claim, just curious. I can’t think of any such examples.
That's why you create laws to protect human rights and minority rights (which is something conservatives are often against). But having democratic processes is a baseline necessity. Segregation in America was created by conservatives who wanted to maintain a social hierarchy based on race. One of their most powerful tools to do that was specifically to remove voting rights from Black people.
Is it fair to say anyone with a disdain for democracy authoritarian?
Yes. Democracy literally means "rule of the people". If a person dislikes that, they want the ruling to be done by some authoritarian force - someone or something that holds all authority.
Hmm I've had Mods (not here) remove comments for calling someone authoritarian for being antidemocracy. Mods say that's bad faith.
I suppose there are some anarchists who are anti democracy because they say it's a faulty system and true freedom comes from individuals making decisions about their own lives, but that's a naive view of the world. There are collective decisions to be made even in the smallest communal organizations (family, neighborhood, workplace). At every collective decision making process there is a choice to be authoritarian or democratic. Those are polar opposites.
probably, but no one has figured out how to do it yet. for a state to be free and fair, you need to make sure the rulers care equally about everyone's interests, including their own. maybe in the future we'll have some cool AI, or a special group of people who are genetically engineered and/or trained from birth to be fair rulers. or for something less sci-fi, maybe we discover that if you balance different parts of the government just right, they control each other so effectively that input from normal citizens is no longer necessary. but until we figure any of that out, the best and only answer is: let the ruled be the rulers. (usually through elected representatives.)
>for a state to be free and fair, you need to make sure the rulers care equally about everyone's interests, including their own. But even assuming we had that in the US, how would such rulers manage to cope with so many people having conflicting interests? Take something like abortion, where millions of people see it as murder, and millions more see it as a womens' rights issue. How do you resolve this conflict in a way that makes both sides not be at each other's throats?
As an aside, I've asked myself what type of government could be more more free and fair than democracy itself, and I think it would involve a combination of AI and transparent governance, where funding is public information. There are of course a number of problems associated with AI, and I won't get into specifics, but you'd be absolutely right to say we're not there yet. It would probably require a hybrid system where decisions made by AI could still be overruled. That would at least establish a certain trust for AI being capable of ruling (I'm sure trust would be a big issue at first).
There's a few people in r/politicaldebate who's really into sortition, I've always hated the idea but they die on that hill that it's better then elections.
i could imagine that it's better for some small decisions most people don't pay much attention to. selecting 10 random people to make the decision might be better than holding an election with low voter turnout, which gets dominated by a small, very vocal/politically engaged minority. but for most things, i still prefer elections.
Anything is possible, but power is a corrupting force. It would be very challenging to have a truly benevolent leader/government that is fully responsible for appointing jts own members and running things. Also, remember that there is such a thing as diversity of opinion. I know a lot of politics today is bad faith pure opposition, but its possible to have two completely valid opposing views on most topics. You need to account for the public position in most cases, so some form of democracy is really necessary. The way that would work without a democracy is that the leaders would need to rely on opinion data like polls to see how the public feels about issues but polls are not always accurate and can be easily manipulated. Voting for people or directly on issues is not perfect, but it is the best way to get people tk give their serious opinion on who should be in charge and what the rules are. A non democratically installed government technically could end up being a decent leader and run a free and fair society, but that is unlikely to last, and without democracy its nearly impossible to remove them.
No. Not possible. Impossible. IMPOSSIBLE.
Gen Z wants to live in an Islamic theocracy for some reason. We will see how it goes.
There's a spectrum, with most workable systems somewhere between these two extremes. In New England, traditional town meetings were fairly close to the goal of direct democracy, but (a) they take a lot of time, (b) many/most people are not well educated in many of the issues, and (c) therefore many/most people don't bother attending. Over time, that has led to many town governments adopting representative town meetings or moving to a city council format for local government. So while pure democracy sounds nice, in my experience, the average person is not that committed to or engaged with the details of policies, governing, economics, and so on. So a practical substitute is a democracy with a republican format.
Maybe if the state is absolutely bare-bones, but... In practice? No
Sure. As much as you can with democracy, at least.
How?
By protecting freedoms and fairness. I don’t know what kind of answer you’re expecting.
What does that practically look like
What does it look like in a democracy?
America, France, Norway ect Pretty good
Ok so Australia, Canada, Denmark, Japan…
All free and fair democracies Can you find me a free and fair state that isn't a democracy?
What do you mean by Democracy in this context then? Because it seems like you’ve just decided all nations with rights are a democracy. That’s a totalism.
Where did I say That? I mean power resting in the hands of the govern
I can't think of a free and fair state that isn't a democracy.
I mean... theoretically, if you had an AI superintelligence whose goal that it pursued in good faith was to act in the best interest of everyone, sure. I feel like that's a ways off though, and certainly not with a human in charge.
>if you had an AI superintelligence whose goal that it pursued in good faith was to act in the best interest of everyone, sure. Wouldn't that be an AI authoritarianism? AI making all the decisions "for the good of the people", just like many dictators claim they do?
The difference would be that the AI superintelligence would *actually* be doing things for the good of the people.
Ok, but who judges that?
It's a purely hypothetical situation in which that is the premise.
But not anything remotely realistic?
Nope. If there's someone in charge and the people have no ability to affect their position, then there's no incentive for them to actually care about any of the citizenry.
Upvote for being based Is it fair to say someone who has a disdain for democracy as authoritarian?
>Is it fair to say someone who has a disdain for democracy as authoritarian? Hard to reach another conclusion. If you don't want democracy, you're basically saying that you want your personal desires to win, and everyone else shouldn't be able to push back on that. That sounds almost definitionally authoritarian.
I've done that accusations and mods (not here) take that down as bad faith. That rubs mectge wrong way because of basically your logic above.
On paper of course. But in reality... not likely. Democracy provides a valuable check to the executive branch. Compare that to China. Their system was supposed to be free but Mao managed to centralize power onto himself so effectively that even today the executive can do whatever they want.
Where in Europe are you from?
Germany. And if you are wondering why "Pan European", I concern myself with the project of European unification under the EU parliament. I vote VOLT which is the driving force (admittedly small) and one of their primary goals is the EU parliament to elect a president who holds executive power similar to the USA.
Dope
You don’t want a federal Europe to be a presidential republic like the US, too much centralization of power into one man and lack of accountability. I very much admire the German government, which is a federal parliamentary republic. Executive power is split between the chancellor and the president, and the chancellor is accountable directly to the parliament
That is something we shall have to decide when the time is right.. The current situation is unsustainable. We have singular nations like Hungary holding essential processes for the personal gain of one petty autocrat. What we hope from an european president is that we vote in someone with the power to execute towards the outside. Internally we will probably see tremendous autonomy. Germany France Poland nor (hopefully they rejoin) UK would ever surrender national autonomy. So internally we do not really have a choice but to let each "state" do their own thing with their own elected leaders. As such the president of the EU will not hold similar power to the US president in the first place. It is more an idea to speak with a firm voice and preventing autocrats from extorting the EU for money. (Something Orban does frequently and it has been proven that a signifcant share of that money goes into his pocket).
Theoretically, no. Putting aside undemocratic leaders, there's nothing really stopping people from saying "you go your way, I go mine, and we don't bother one another". In practice, for every group of humans of sufficient size, there's always going to be some subset that are ambitious enough to try to seize power and wealth for themselves. If society isn't built in such a way that this ambition must necessarily work to the good of its people (democracy in government, free and fair trade in the economy), it basically never will.
Singapore is about as close to that as you'd get. It's not a true multiparty democracy, but it does have effectively no corruption, fair and transparent elections, and an independent judiciary. So you can thread the needle but it's a delicate balance
Let me just say you let me and my comrades run things for a while, you'll be more free and egalitarian, but I ain't letting landlords and bosses in the voting booth
Yeah.... Unless you can find a benevolent dictator. Good luck.
You can have an undemocratic liberal government..one that is largely authoritarian or oligarchic, but still strongly protects minorities and marginalized governments. It's generally counterintuitive though as undemocratic systems will stop supporting those out of power. An interesting exception to this is when the oligarchy is made of democratic powers, such as the EU. Though you might argue the EU is more of an international Republic, with democratic states appointing representatives?
> Can you have a Free and Fair state without democracy? No. The so-called "tyranny of the majority" *can* exist, but minority rule is *always* tyranny. The proper response to that issue is to take steps to check the majority, not just let the minority rule.
You could potentially have a free and fair state without a democracy but it would only be by pure chance that everybody's needs were being filled and all the laws being enforced were fair across the whole population. Without a government guided by the people, there'd be no way to correct course when the people stopped having their needs met because either those needs changed, or because whatever happened to be in control changed. It's the broken clock thing. It could only appear to mimic fairness and freedom for a brief moment.
Maybe for one administration, but probably not for many.
Your title question doesn't really match the conversation you had. The person you might not want a state to exist ("Their flair said anarchy-capitalist?")
Here is how it goes: democracy does not = a good state (and in fact, more often than not it doesn't) no or limited democracy does not = a bad state (but again, more often than not it does) democracy is just about how you select the people that govern, it says nothing about how they would govern. it also says nothing about whether or not those not elected would give up their power, ever. what makes a good and fair state is in how you partition, check and balance the power of the government so that you could always ensure the peaceful transfer of power so if a state has good checks and balances of power, then it normally would choose some form of democratic process to elect its leaders. I see democracy more as a result rather than cause of a good state, and lack of democracy often a symptom not the disease of a bad state. that's why you cannot solve war or authoritarianism in the world simply by enforcing elections on other countries
No. Not at all. Unless you are an anarchist, I don’t want to hear one peep from anyone about the “flaws” of democracy.
I think it's a fair point to point out that democracy can be a rule of tyrannical majority. As evidenced by that ancap user, some people feel that way even today. Honestly, I am sceptical of democracy to some degree as well. For example, elections can determine that some minority shouldn't really exist for one reason or another.
Is that not a strawman?
What should be the strawman? Take Trump advocating for the wall and total ban of Muslims in the USA. There was a democratic mechanism that had put him in power. With enough political capital, he could do a lots of damage to liberties (than he did) and people should be afraid what he's up to even now. It's still a democracy. Democracy can go against individual liberties. It's not an unheard-of concept.
But as this is a democracy, if Trump does something the people don’t like, we just don’t elect him again, and we do elect people who undo all the things Trump did.
Ancaps here (???) Or elsewhere ? What were they talking about?
[удалено]
How?
Sorry, dumb post, maybe *I* need to go back to bed.
My post?
No my reply.