How Stable Are Democracies? ‘Warning Signs Are Flashing Red’ | Hacker News Reader

How Stable Are Democracies? ‘Warning Signs Are Flashing Red’

nytimes.com

40 pointsjostylr46 comments

I think the problem with democratic governments today is the fact that they're winner-take-all. And it's taken to such a extreme that even city governments which have been more socially liberal in the past decade are being overruled by state governments being dominated by socially conservative politicians. They claim that such actions are "needed" to "preserve order." Yet, what I'm seeing here is the antithesis of order since to overrule a city government which is closest to the community of citizens they represent is inherently anti-democratic. This has been a common thread through this election cycle in the United States where communities that are clearly not in step with their state governments are being forced to conform. I'm just waiting for the same social conservatives to make it a mandate that corporations have to abide by government approved "social conventions" to just negate the non-discrimination clauses in employment contracts (just as a way to ensure total compliance to their view of reality). Because the only solution I see for any of this is a radical form of local democracy with proportional representation at higher levels of government to take hold and overturn the current system as it is.

> I think the problem with democratic governments today

Was this not a problem with democracies in the past?

Yes, but I think those in the past are irrelevant beyond giving us lessons as to how to fix ours.

Democracy are only stable as long as the surplus generated bribes everyone into holding still. This is gone.

If only we had used the time, to craft tools that will keep a minima of society, science and education going even in troubled times.

> the surplus

What are you referring to? If you mean economics, the major democracies are wealthier than ever.

Wealth doesn't matter in itself as much as the distribution of total wealth (and relative wealth). Humans are social animals, they don't just want something to munch and some cover over their head (not to mention that millions don't even have those), they want to do at least as good as what's perceived as average for their society.

If that's truly the case, then all societies everywhere have a permanent and insurmountable Lake Woebegone ( where all the children are above average ) problem.

I don't see how. For one, "at least as good as what's perceived as average for their society" is totally feasible without everybody being "above average".

Second, even that was meant as the thing people strive for and want to have. That doesn't mean that they are only satisfied if they accomplish it and then some, they can also be ok with being below, but close, to the average.

But even more importantly, the key word is "perceived average". They want to be close to what they consider average ("middle class") family lifestyle at least. Not necessarily close to its absolute mathematical definition.

Particularly chilling are the responses to the question of how essential it is to live in a democracy. They graph the answers by the decade in which the respondents were born:

* U.S.: 1930s: 75%, 1980s: ~30%, with a straight line between them.

* U.K.: 58 - 30% (with a jagged line)

(See the graphs in the article for more.)

Democracy doesn't feel like democracy when people with your culture (political party, part of the country, etc.) lose power. When some other culture is running the show and antagonizing you every day, non-democratic solutions can look pretty appealing. You might be willing to do anything to fix the situation. You justify it, because the alternative is WRONG in your mind.

BTW, this applies to both sides. Don't imagine that one culture in your country -- especially your own -- is immune to this sort of thinking.

But this is not a problem of democracy. It is a problem of radicalisation. Everything is fine as long as all sides are confident that the other side consists-despite disagreement-of decent people. Up until recently it was quite rare in the west for an election outcome to instil an end-of-days kind of fear in 50%+ of a country's population. It happened in the US and it may also happen in a lot of European countries soon, where what we would have called fascism in the good old days, is on a steady rise.

>Up until recently it was quite rare in the west for an election outcome to instil an end-of-days kind of fear in 50%+ of a country's population.

That fear was based on falsehoods and instilled deliberately. It has more to do with a splintering media that allows people to marinate in their own biases than a change in US political institutions.

With respect, that is BS. Non-American media has looked at the US election with less wailing and nashing of teeth than the US media, yet those journalists also have not been shy of talking about a new Fascism growing in the US. The media has not created Trump's statements nor his transition team appointments.

Yes, and they're being idiotic. Fascism? Come on. What are these people going to say when actual fascists arrive?

Non-US media may have to deal with actual Fascists. ( Is LePen an actual Fascist? Or is he just "sitting athwart history, yelling stop")?

Since Brexit and the rise of LePen, I'm loath to call this a purely U.S., electoral-college-inspired "problem".

I only can tell about german media. Their reporting was just as partisan (all for Hillary) as the "mainstream" U.S. media. It was less about giving the facts then about creating a sentiment.

Certainly, it seems appealing and, worse, people feel disenfranchised when they see polls that show the majority of people support something while the government rejects it (because people of a higher economic class or special interest side against it). This leads to them not participating in the system, which leads to further feelings of disenfranchisement. It is a negative feedback loop.

Democracy only works if people actively participate and make their voices heard. Not voting, campaigning, etc. only leads to further entrenchment of the lobbyist nightmare.

Further, rejecting democracy because "your side lost" is idiotic. When your side loses in a democracy, you get to try again in however many years when hopefully your side's arguments bear out in the negative impact of actions of the other side. When your side loses in a military dictatorship, if you try again, you go to jail.

You don't always get to have a side at all. If you are a member of a minority population, or if your political orientation is just a little bit too far outside the mainstream, you may never get a chance to vote for any candidate who represents your needs. There's that old saw about two wolves and a lamb voting on dinner; just because a political system is democratic doesn't mean it is necessarily just, or that participation would actually produce meaningful results. Abandoning the system and working around it can be the rational choice.

If you live in a society that does not hear your voice, there are ways to make that voice heard as long as the society remains free. Eventually, over time, that voice might resonate with others. Black people were not a majority when integration happened (not saying it solved all problems, but it was a step). But their plea for fairer treatment resonated with the majority and progress was made.

As soon as you abandon democracy because the majority doesn't represent you, you are surrendering your ability to be heard. When you throw out democracy, the majority doesn't disappear and become magically replaced with someone who does represent you. In most cases, a strongman with the backing of extremists in the military will end up filling that vacuum. And that person won't care about anybody's voices except his or her own.

that's sounds like justification for criminality and violence. if you talking about trying to changes peoples minds via various forms of dialog that's still part of the system.

> Democracy doesn't feel like democracy when people with your culture (political party, part of the country, etc.) lose power

In fact, that is exactly what democracy feels like! People have different preferences (as they always do) and so they take a vote, majority wins. It happens on every level, from national declarations of war to a bunch of people deciding on which movie to watch. And it has a very long track record of people dealing with it with no problem.

Every election in history on every level has had a loser. I know that personally: I didn't get to see the movie I wanted on Friday.

What is undemocratic is treating losing like a catastrophe or failure of the system - that is the system. That is democracy.

This is why to me the electoral college is the weak point of the US political system. Twice in recent memory, the majority winner was not put in office. So it's a double whammy: not only is the government not representing the majority of the citizens, it adds to a sense of futility among the citizens that even when they do their duty to vote, and a majority agrees with them, that it's not enough.

The electoral college needs to go. It should have gone before. What is the point of a popular vote if the majority outcome is ignored?

>This is why to me the electoral college is the weak point of the US political system. Twice in recent memory, the majority winner was not put in office.

When the pedants tell you the US isn't a democracy, but rather a republic... well, they're right. The electoral college is working as intended.

As to the "point" of the popular vote: there isn't one. The national popular vote plays no role whatsoever in the US federal system. It's just a set of numbers to fill time during election coverage.

Sure. The electoral college needs to go. Pointing to the popular vote can show reinforce how close the vote was. That said, the plurality winner in a system that uses the electoral college isn't by itself evidence that the same result would be obtained in an election without the electoral college.

Campaigns are run knowing the electoral votes are what matter. Voters vote knowing the electoral college is in place. We know some voters stay home because of the EC. We also know people trade votes because of the EC.

I repeat: I'm not arguing to keep the electoral college in place. I think it's highly likely it should be removed for a lot of other reasons (disproportionate elector/population ratios being a good one). I'm pushing back on the idea that we'd necessarily see the same result in an election without it.

The electoral college isn't a bug, it's a design feature. Cf The Federalist Papers.

A fundamental problem for democracy is how to keep it from degenerating into mob rule. The EC is one of those "checks and balances" mechanisms for a country that is, after all, a collection of individual states.

In its current form, the electoral college does not perform its original role of preventing mob rule. Electors vote in accordance with the popular vote of their state (this is only required by some states; but still almost never happens, as the parties pick their electors).

What ends up happening is that the electoral college just turns into a weird way of counting the popular votes, where some votes count more then others (specifically, voters in less populace states have a bigger vote; and voters in more divided states are more likely to have a meaningful vote).

Many (including myself) would argue that Donald Trump is precisly the failure mode that the electoral collage was designed to prevent.

I disagree. The fact is that Trump convinced a lot of people in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania to vote for him in what Democrats thought was their "firewall". Firewall appears to be political jargon for "we can take those people's votes for granted." Former President Bill Clinton thought that strategy was insane but his concerns were dismissed. Sic transit gloria pooheads.

Realistically, Clinton was always going to carry California. If she had made fewer fundraising trips to the west coast and more campaign visits to the Rust Belt states (without calling people there "deplorables") she might have won convincingly. Instead we got an electoral college message from the Rust Belt telling CA, MA, & NY that despite their population advantage they don't get to dictate for the rest of the country. That's pretty much the way it's supposed to work.

The Federalist Papers are propaganda; the design of the electoral college -- like the per-state representation in the Senate, and the 3/5 compromise in apportionment of House seats, on top of both of which the EC rested -- was to protect slavery by overrepresenting slave states. But that's not the kind of thing you put in the marketing material.

Insofar as it was to prevent "mob rule", it was to prevent the values of the majority of voting citizens from overwhelming the particular minority that was keeping humans as chattels.

It's funny that people who have no problem treating modern campaign ads as self-serving propaganda that needs to be examined critically treat the 18th century equivalent as if it were something more noble.

The Federalist Papers (and the Anti-Federalist Papers for that matter) were public attempts to persuade people it's true. At the time they were aimed at the people of New York on the issue of ratifying the Constitution -- arguably a moot issue given that by the time New York voted 9 other states had already settled the issue.

Casting the arguments as propaganda in favor of slavery seems a reach.

The Federalist papers were trying to sell the whole Constitution -- including bits like the Electoral College and the unequal representation in both houses of Congress that were sops to the slave stakes at the expense of states like New York -- to the people of New York. Needless to say, it would have been an extremely poor sales technique to advertise that the elements that were designed to advantage themail slave states at the expense of states like New York were designed for that purpose.

It just so happened that slave states were lower in population. As slavery waned in terms of population, a mechanism to equalize this was still seen as needed.

Eliminating the electoral collage wouldn't change things at all. Obama got the popular vote, and roughly half the country saw an existential threat take power. An extra 2.2 million votes for Trump, giving him the popular vote, wouldn't change the fact that the other half of the country sees an existential threat with him taking power. The country is split into two factions that hate each other, and neither side likes democracy when they lose. Winning the battle is too important to leave up to democracy.

Winning the battle is too important to leave up to democracy.

What would recommend in it's place? That quote attributed to Churchill comes to mind: "It has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time."

It is not ignored. It is biased into a structure that gives more weight to how people in smaller states vote.

Yes, states used to really be a thing.

So for lack of a better word, I see this as galloping narcissism. It's a "those people" way of thinking.

What is your culture? America is a melting pot of many different cultures. One dominant culture, and many sub-cultures. When the dominant culture is not curtailed we see all sorts of problems, which academia has enumerated. So the dominant people in the dominant culture feel powerless. Because when they are not in this position, according to academia, bad things happen. Take that how you want to take it. Governments are okay with this because they want to dis-empower people, in order to control and manage them better, and this is but one way of doing that.

I'm not sure I understand when you mention academia as some monolithic structure. You mean certain dominant strands of sociology and political theory? I think that's a pretty broad generalization. Also something I notice again and again, and this was especially prevalent in the elections. That when the average US citizen talks about government he or she talks about it as some outside force imposed upon them. You have society and you have government intruding and controlling it. In other developed countries i get the impression the government is seen more as a some entity existing within society, something which can be influenced and entered into.

I don't think there is a dominant culture in the US. The power of the American culture is it's ability to assimilate other cultures and integrate them in.

> I don't think there is a dominant culture in the US.

I think that's a stretch. You will note that most of the country, from business to government to IT, is run by people of the same skin color, socio-economic class, and gender. Those people also fill higher education (sans the gender) the stepping stone to opportunity too. Look at photos of the US Senate, Fortune 500 CEOs, etc.

That doesn't make them the same 'culture', however the word and its groupings are defined (it's always nebulous), but clearly there are cultures that are largely excluded.

In 1930, people would have had living memory of the disaster of the Great War ( WWI ). That puts democracy in the role of a nearly-untried but apparently improved solution.

Remember that the inspiration of Burke wasn't that Liberalism failed but that the French Revolution was pretty hard to take.

there has to be more to these graphs. what are the people that did not choose democracy choosing? I am certain it's not a dictatorship or kleptocracy.

Good question. Looks like the source of the charts is this paper:

Yascha Mounk and Roberto Stefan Foa, “The Signs of Democratic Deconsolidation,” Journal of Democracy

http://www.journalofdemocracy.org/sites/default/files/Foa%26...

I haven't dug into it, but you might find it interesting.

thanks!

What we find is deeply concerning. Citizens in a number of supposedly consolidated democracies in North America and Western Europe have not only grown more critical of their political leaders. Rather, they have also become more cynical about the value of democracy as a political system, less hopeful that anything they do might influence public policy, and more willing to express support for authoritarian alternatives. The crisis of democratic legitimacy extends across a much wider set of indicators than previously appreciated. How much importance do citizens of developed countries ascribe to living in a democracy? Among older generations, the devotion to democracy is about as fervent and widespread as one might expect: In the United States, for example, people born during the interwar period consider democratic governance an almost sacred value. When asked to rate on a scale of 1 to 10 how “essential” it is for them “to live in a democracy,” 72 percent of those born before World War II check “10,” the highest value. So do 55 percent of the same cohort in the Netherlands. But, as Figure 1 shows, the millennial generation (those born since 1980) has grown much more indifferent. Only one in three Dutch millennials accords maximal importance to living in a democracy; in the United States, that number is slightly lower, around 30 percent.1 The decline in support for democracy is not just a story of the young being more critical than the old; it is, in the language of survey research, owed to a “cohort” effect rather than an “age” effect. Back in 1995, for example, only 16 percent of Americans born in the 1970s (then in their late teens or early twenties) believed that democracy was a “bad” political system for their country. Twenty years later, the number of “antidemocrats” in this same generational cohort had increased by around 4 percentage points, to 20 percent. The next cohort—comprising those born in the 1980s—is even more antidemocratic: In 2011, 24 percent of U.S. millennials (then in their late teens or early twenties) considered democracy to be a “bad” or “very bad” way of running the country. Although this trend was somewhat more moderate in Europe, it was nonetheless significant: In 2011, 13 percent of European youth (aged 16 to 24) expressed such a view, up from 8 percent among the same age group in the mid-1990s (see Figure 2).

this is kind of shocking.

Thanks for the quote. A couple things come to mind: how well do those polled understand (a) their own form of government and (b) what life under other forms could be like? I definitely can sympathize with with the feelings of cynicism and futility. I just can't imagine wanting to live under other systems, given what I've read of history.

How much longer before the U.S. sees some event?

Well, the first terrorist attack after Trump takes office, so about 3 months from now.

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