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Comment by vintermann | Hacker News Reader

Karl Popper considered a government democratic if it could be replaced without violence, and while that's not exactly my definition, I think it's a good start - a bare minimum.

A provision in the constitution for military coups doesn't excuse it. That just means the Turkish constitution is a bad one, that doesn't offer its citizens democracy. Handing over control to the people "once the situation is stable again" is a joke - then the people the military disapprove of will have been purged, their parties outlawed and the public sufficiently intimidated from supporting them for a while.

Which is not to say Erdogan is any friend of democracy, obviously. I don't think his recent reliance on free media during the coup will provoke any change of heart in him. It's just that Turkey's democracy was always a bit of a sham.

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Keep in mind those military coups have generally been relatively peaceful. Erdogan called the coup leaders a "junta" but that evokes the wrong images. The military is sworn to uphold the ideals of the Republic. The police is sworn to serve the government. The military has always tried to keep civilians out of the conflicts.

As a German and knowing my country's history I think a violent escape hatch is always necessary and justified. Both Germany and the US have something quite similar except they don't have a designated protector but instead put that duty on their citizens -- which means the citizens would have to fight against professional soldiers, which is exactly what a military coup would avoid.

You cite Popper, I cite Clausewitz: violence should be avoided, but if all else fails it should be regarded as the continuation of politics with other means. The important distinction is that it must be temporary and it must be avoided if at all possible.

The coups wouldn't be necessary if it weren't for autocrats like Erdogan who try to corrupt the ideals they were supposed to uphold. Turkish military coups are the equivalent of law enforcement using lethal force: it should never happen, but when it becomes absolutely necessary it will save more lives than it costs.

I'd even go so far as to say that if post-WW1 Germany had been modelled like Turkey, the nazis could have never risen to power. Unless the government, like Erdogan did, corrupted the military by replacing its leadership with its conspirators.

"Both Germany and the US have something quite similar except they don't have a designated protector but instead put that duty on their citizens"

and that's a fricking huge difference. Speaking of the military's freedom to topple governments as a duty, as if it was a burden and not a pure power of privilege?

Imagine that the military fails in its "obligation" to topple governments. They let a government stay that should have been toppled. Will they pay? Will anyone punish them? Of course not. You say it "must be avoided if at all possible", but who gets to make that call? That's right, only the generals themselves.

But for the people it's completely different. They - we - have skin in the game, it's we who will suffer if a tyrannical government is allowed to stay. Which is why we, and only we, none of our high-minded "protectors" internal or external should have the final word on whether revolution might be "worth it".

> Unless the government, like Erdogan did, corrupted the military

You think that the default status of a military is to be uncorrupt. Interestingly enough, that is a mistake the US founders didn't make - although their opposition to standing armies has fallen by the wayside long ago.

> Keep in mind those military coups have generally been relatively peaceful.

I hope that this is ignorance. In '61 the prime minister and two ministers were executed. In '80 there were about 600 thousand arrests, thousands of torture cases and thousands of killings. The sufferers were mostly communists and leftist alike, and extreme-right.

I'm from Turkey and I'll tell you this: If we have all these problems, it's because Kemalist revolutions. I would certainly love to live in his dream country (except for the extra-nationalism part), but the revolutions were without tolerance and impatient. Most of the people sort of swallowed it, when muslim reformists got power, they had the army in front of them. Up until the mid-90s bloodshed solved everything. But since one and a half a decade, they have asserted themselves, they now think that they have the power. Erdogan and the like know how to speak to them. He shows them the carrot, all run. They believe they'll get back the old glorious days, except they don't know nothing about the old glory, thanks to century long assimilation and constructed history. Thus, being already ignorant, and in the spell of The New Glory, they believe what they are told on the TV. This ignorance has been created by the anachronism and traditionmaking of the post-WWI regime and sequent politics of nationalism, fed also by the coups, inventing an anatolian people that came from central asia, and that only remotely knows what happened between 10th and 20th century.

Now the people is at the hands of them to be manipulated. They have forgotten the reality of pre-40s, and they are searching an identity, that's honourable and clean, and they follow whomever that invents likeable things. Why are the potent are shouting to the US now? Because it pleases who thinks «The US runs the world, and there are 5 rich jewish families behind them,» i.e. ignorant conspiracy-theory lovers. Why are they this ignorant? Because the past was intentionally distorted by the nationalist and patriotist elite, the revolutionists, the coupists and the like.

No existing democracies are pure democracies, in the sense that the have non-democratic elements, often enshrined in a constitution, that constrain the government. In the US, unelected judges with lifetime appointments strike down laws passed democratically, in accordance with a constitution that none of us alive had any input in writing. We've all gotten used to that idea, but it was extremely controversial when it first happened ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marbury_v._Madison ).

Why do you think having an element of the military providing a check on democracy is obviously less legitimate? (Regardless of whether it's sensible.) If coup-leaders were formally separated from the military and wore black robes, would this make it better?

I am very much against the thing you describe, whether they call themselves supreme courts or guardian councils or defenders of the constitution. Yes, I am a radical democrat. I think the safeguards supposedly provided by such institutions are largely illusionary.

All sorts of minorities, for instance, may be protected in flowery words, but it isn't worth the paper it's written on unless the majority (of power, sadly, not of individuals) actually care about it. A constitutional safeguard that doesn't have the support of actual power is worked around, it's just a question of lawyer rhetoric. In the end, the only check that can exist on us is ourselves.

That said, at least supreme court judges in the US (and other countries) don't have the power to topple the government, execute ministers, outlaw political parties etc. That's one way the military providing "a check on democracy" is even worse.

> That said, at least supreme court judges in the US (and other countries) don't have the power to topple the government, execute ministers, outlaw political parties etc. That's one way the military providing "a check on democracy" is even worse.

Right, so I doubt anyone in this thread would claim the Turkish coup system is better than the US system, except perhaps by making a strained appeal to a very different culture necessitating more drastic checks on democracy (or something). So you don't really need to argue this.

And the rest of your argument for radical democracy doesn't have much to do with Turkey per se, the topic of this thread.

> All sorts of minorities, for instance, may be protected in flowery words, but it isn't worth the paper it's written on unless the majority (of power, sadly, not of individuals) actually care about it. A constitutional safeguard that doesn't have the support of actual power is worked around, it's just a question of lawyer rhetoric. In the end, the only check that can exist on us is ourselves.

Flowery words are actually better than nothing, and at least the US constitution tried to set up institutions that made sure that law complie(d/s) with that supreme law of the land. Radical democrats would do well to look at the kinds of Jim Crow laws that appeared after the Civil War which were completely unconstitutional and were judged so and overturned against popular demand by judges given the power to strike down laws.

I really don't have faith in the mob. It's clear the framers of the Constitution didn't either, and there are plenty of examples of the tyranny of the majority that should give us pause.

The only alternative to "the mob" of majority rule is some form of minority rule. Words can't rule on their own.

Minority rule has all the problems of majority rule, and then some.

Yes, once in a blue moon the guardian councils of the world may be right when public opinion is wrong. But it seems to me ten times as often, it's the other way around.

And even then, you must remember that public opinion is far from democratic. Some people have far more power to make themselves heard, influence how people see things, etc. I'm for majorities of people, not majorities of power-shareholders.

The US is hardly a good comparison: the US constitution is deeply anti-democratic when compared to other liberal democracies, and even when compared to the States of the US because it is almost impossible to amend ( http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/view_from_ch... ). The fact that judges are forced to invent new rights in the U.S. because a bunch of long-dead guys couldn't predict the future is, in itself, a symptom of a flawed system.

That's really not germane to the point I'm addressing.

The idea that unelected judges or putschists are required to keep a political system sane indicates that the system is flawed (in IT terms, they are hacks rather than features), so I think it is, at least somewhat germane.

All systems at that scale are flawed, and even the founders knew this. Thus they biased decisions toward conservatism (in the classic sense--resisting change) but actually _did_ amend the Constitution, right away, with a Bill of Rights to make it even clear the construction of the document was to protect people from their government. The process is difficult, but it's happened _27 times_ (the first 10 times in bulk).

27 times out of 11,000 proposed amendments, and as you point out, the first ten happened in bulk. I doubt that the founders planned for 2% of the population (as conservative Antonin Scalia pointed out) being able to block an amendment.

Unless you can tell something about the distribution of the quality of constitutional proposals, then the percentage is meaningless. Besides, it's designed as a document that is a scaffolding for the rest of law, and shouldn't require a high rate of change.

Why do you assume that it's easier in other countries? The Netherlands has about the same safeguards for its constitution:

It provides that an amendment can be proposed either by a two-thirds majority in both the House and the Senate or by a convention, called into being by Congress, after a request from two-thirds of the states.

In NL: it requires a simple majority in both houses, but we don't have the escape hatch of initiating such a change from lower government tiers.

then comes step two: ratification by three-quarters of the states.

In NL, step two is harder: the proposal must wait until the next parliament term (or parliament can dissolve itself and trigger early elections). Now it requires a supermajority (of 2/3rds) in both houses to pass.

This is going to be controversial, but where is the proof that "democracy" is the biggest value to be pursued?

In my opinion democracy is only a tool, not goal. And I think sometimes (Kemalist Turkey is one example) it's better for a society to not implement "pure" democracy in the name of better values like secularism, freedom etc.

UK/Brexit is also a good example of majority of people being stupid and hurting themselves by using democracy.

Indeed "democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.…"

You don't "prove" a value. You just value a value. I value political equality, that everyone should have equal power to influence collective decisions that affect them. It's not a question delivering outcomes, or even of facts.

That said, I do think you're awfully quick to assert that people don't know what's best for them (re. Brexit)

re. re. Brexit: Really? Even after the whole circus that's unfolding during the past few weeks?

No violence when one Castro passed power to the other nor when Maduro continued Chavez. Democracy means nothing. Republic means everything.

And was those genuine changes of government, you think? Or just a new face on the same old one?

Anyway, that's one way Popper's definition is insufficient. Democracy is not just about whether a government can be replaced, but about how different the government we replace it with can actually be. Replacing a government isn't worth much if what you can replace it with is functionally identical in every way.

For the screwed up constitution that Castro established it was perfectly genuine and legal. You have to remember that everything that was done in Nazi Germany was legal.

Being legal or coming from the State is orthogonal (means nothing) to being moral.

I said nothing about legal or not. By genuine I meant just that - was it a genuine change of government, in the sense that policies changed in meaningful ways?

If not, then I still call these countries non-democratic.

Neither change was prompted by the citizenry, which really is the unstated core of Popper's definition (which has other problems, eh, but is a decent start).

As start I prefer ~2000 years predecessors of Ancient Greece who invented The Republic to keep bread and circus at bay.

Never mind Turkey. Could you name three Western governments that satisfy Popper's criterion?

? Most western governments hand over peacefully after elections.

That is exactly the point. Holding elections, even peaceful, transparent elections, is not the same thing as "replacing the government." Most government employees and non-employees who heavily influence policy are not elected and can't be replaced through elections.

This reduces into a linguistic question of what Karl Popper actually meant, which is kind of .. unfalsifiable.

At least in UK politics, 'government' explicitly means "Her Majesty's Government", ie the Prime Minister and those they appoint to assist them. Not the Crown, not the permanent state.

Sure they can be replaced peacefully, in theory. Governments do occasionally fire civil servants for loyalty reasons, though it's controversial, since those positions aren't supposed to wield political power. Think of Bush's prosecutor purges.

Though I agree that Popper doesn't focus enough on degrees of change or feasibility of change (if the only parties essentially agree on everything, is government really replaced?)

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