Thiel is hardly alone in this view. Many libertarians are in favour of a constitutional republic over a democracy where 51% of the people have absolute power.
One can fashion a simplistic thought experiment where a simple majority votes to take resources from the minority, presumably against the minoritys' will. That seems rather unjust, or unfair.
What this glosses over is that governments need to make policy and decisions. Inevitably, there will be winners and losers.
Just because decision making power is taken away from the majority does not mean that more fair outcomes are likely. Some other method of making decisions, let's say by rule of a (hopefully enlightened) monarch, still needs to be implemented. And these decisions will have major consequences on the population, creating some winners and losers in the outcome.
The argument for Democracy is that it, on balance, will protect the population from potential tyranny of a despotic or corrupt ruler, better than other forms of government.
The political structure of the US government has built in protection against a tyrannical reign by the majority of the population over the minority. The system of "checks and balances" is a good idea, however imperfectly it is implemented.
As a practical matter, the "power of the people" is limited in any case. There is an actual "elite" in the US, and members of the elite hold disproportionate power. For better or worse.
It's another thing to propose that where representative government itself is in tension with capital... the problem is representation. Or perhaps even civic/state power in general.
The last election for the POTUS had the declared winner elected by an overall loss of 3mm votes.
The UK is plowing ahead with a hard brexit with a 52% majority on a 72% turnout (38% of the electorate explicitly said they wanted to leave), with a minority government propped up by a bribe with a minor political party from Northern Ireland.
I'm sure I can find more examples (and I'm aware that I'm cherry picking examples too), but to say that that you require a "supermajority" in most western countries isn't strictly true. (excuse the phrasing)
Well, one way to address the problem of the tyranny of the majority is to make minority rule plausible. :b
> to say that that you require a "supermajority" in most western countries isn't strictly true.
A supermajority isn't necessary for many things; a plurality will do for a lot of operations, including becoming POTUS. But in the US there's also some legal concepts that you can only do away with via a supermajority and one spread out over different branches of government at that. Doing away with any of the bill of rights is not happening with a plurality in an election.... because the US already is a republic with a democratically elected representative government based on rule of law set down in a constitution that can't be changed without supermajority buy-in.
Most western democracies that I'm familiar with have some similar sets of principles that aren't up for democratic election (at least, according to the stated rules of the governance game -- unofficially, any principle is always vulnerable to contention and falling out of value, that's a reality of governing human beings, not a flaw in a system of government).
It is in some places - the UK had it in 2010, and technically has it right now too. You can't really do miniority rule in a two party system though.
> a plurality will do for a lot of operations,
a plurality in a two party system seems ironic to me, but I understand your point.
Well, that's how referendums work, there is never 100% turnout. So the amount of people who votes constitute the "100%" and you only need 51% of that to win a referendum.
Your argument is also not good because by following your logic we could say that almost no US president has ever gotten elected by majority, at least from top of my head I am not aware of anybody actually being elected by getting votes of 51% or more of all eligible voters.
For the POTUS elections, trump lost on a count of just shy of 2.9million votes, but won by the electoral college.
By applying that logic to the brexit referendum, breaking up over the 5 countries that voted (england, scotland, NI, wales, gibralter) remain would have won. By dividing up the 382 counting areas [0] I'm sure you get a different result too.
For a UK parliament vote, I'm not sure on what the result would be if you took a voter turnout by percentage across the countries, and then evenly distributed the MPs based on those number of votes, but I'm sure someone has done the analysis somewhere.
To go back on topic, my point was (supposed to be) more about how a tyranny of the majority can happen, and does happen, in western countries (with some slightly alternative points such as the fact that majorities aren't always majorities)
[0] https://www.electoralcommission.org.uk/find-information-by-s...
I hate this argument because you would just not count if brexit had been rejected as you wish it had been. You would just say "sigh it's normal, i'm happy people are not that stupid" and you wouldn't bother arguing with "stupid people".
Even if i wanted to argue on that level, you can say there was - 38% who explicitly said they wanted to leave - 37% who explicitly said they wanted to stay - 25% who had no opinion / didn't care
so it make absolute sense to leave in that case.
EDIT: To be clear i'm not pro-brexit, i just think "echo chamber blah blah biaised opinions" like this one are the reason people "can't understand" election such as brexit and trump and question the legitimacy...
That's absolutely not true. I never said that Brexit shouldn't happen based on that majority. I was simply pointing out that a bare majority in this case _has_ provided arbitrary power. Reading anything further into my comment is disingenuous.
That's one way to look it at it. Another is to take the result and say there is no clear majority either way, and since there is no clear public majority for either option it should be up parliament to decide since that's their job.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/posteverything/wp/2017/0...
It’s probably true that some of the overlap between libertarians and alt-righters can be explained by their companionship as members of the political fringe. But it’s not purely accidental, either. Historically, prominent libertarian thinkers have made the decision to cultivate ties with the nationalist far right, and have viewed racial demagoguery both as an efficacious political tool and an intellectually defensible position. The libertarian-to-fascist pipeline may have been forged partially by coincidence, but it was also crafted and maintained.
I also have no doubt that prominent people who identify and are accepted as libertarian, and sites which are cited as and claim to be libertarian, have cultivated alliances with racist/nationalist/isolationist groups. To those groups, many libertarian positions are appealing: sweeping away all government regulation, for example, would get rid of those pesky laws that make it illegal to discriminate on the basis of race. Holding private contracts to be sacred and doing away with government interference in their performance means exploitative contracts -- close or even identical to actual slavery -- "entered" into on extremely coercive terms become perfectly acceptable. And so on and so forth.
It amuses me to see every article about the "alt right" define it as something different.
http://dalependell.com/essays/remembering-the-regulation-cal...
On the other hand, I am always reluctant to link to social papers since data can be so easily massaged to affirm nearly any presupposed conclusion. Do you have any evidence or logic to support your view that the masses have any substantive and, more importantly, lasting effect on policy? I do not think it's self evident that the masses are having any direct effect on the current themes of net neutrality and PIPA/SOPA/CISPA/CISA. The apparent effect seems more due to the fact that very influential "economic elites" are themselves divided on the issues.
[1] - http://www.princeton.edu/~mgilens/Gilens%20homepage%20materi...