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Comment by jessriedel | Hacker News Reader

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?

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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.

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