Hacker News Reader

Comment by nostrademons | Hacker News Reader

How do you propose to "eliminate the threat"?

The challenge is that Trump is a democratically-elected leader. Democracy sometimes produces results that you don't like, but if the alternative is to get rid of democratically-elected leaders each time one is elected that you view as a threat to the republic, you've just killed the republic to avoid potentially killing the republic.

View on HN

No, Trump is most emphatically not a democratically-elected leader, and I'm not just splitting a hair. The "technicality" alistproducer2 mentions is the electoral college, a process whereby the person getting the most votes, i.e. Hillary Clinton, does not necessarily become president. What people have proposed is dispensing with the electoral college so that we may have democratically-elected leaders. But, as with most things in politics, it's not quite as simple as that since the United States is a Federal Republic.

That doesn't change nostrademons' point at all. True democracy sometimes produces results you don't like, too. (In fact, the founding fathers thought that it was more likely to produce bad results than a more republican form of government, because it was more susceptible to demagogues and populists.)

You are correct - any voting process will sometimes produce results you don't like. I simply took umbrage with nostrademon's assertion that Trump was democratically-elected. Your comment that the founding fathers thought that "true" democracy was more likely to produce bad results is duly noted, that's why they setup the electoral college in the first place, even though today's electoral college has been perverted from its original intent. Sigh. That's part of why this problem is so complex!

Let me be clear that I was not calling for violent removal of the president. I would like to see people with the power and influence of Musk do more to pressure those who have the responsibility and duty to protect the republic to actually do so.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com