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Comment by busterarm | Hacker News Reader

I hate to say that I don't buy it here, but popular sovereignty (and its close cousin, social contract) is a core belief of liberal democracy. Literally "the will of the people". The people deserve the state they vote for, nothing more, nothing less. If you try to maintain the institutions over the mechanisms that guarantee those institutions, you'll find that those institutions will slip away from you anyway. You risk turning into the very thing you're fighting. As someone who views themselves as more in the center, this is exactly how I see mainstream left politics going right now.

"The concept of popular sovereignty holds simply that in a society organized for political action, the will of the people as a whole is the only right standard of political action"[1]

[1]:https://books.google.com/books/about/The_Massachusetts_Const...

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And the idea of fascism is newer than 1780, as you quoted. Not to mention, grassroots campaigning of this ideology across the internet is also rather new.

And summoning up the specters of fascism isn't a scare tactic. It's what happened last year in Charlottesville. White supremacists of all types had a big march. Even killed a counter-protester. Maybe you saw it? We even had a neofascist group do a march here in my local city. And right now, there's flyers espousing the "goodness" of fascism.

You can argue all you want from people from 300 years ago. I know if these people get say-so in government, I and my friends will lose rights, become disenfranchised, and possibly murdered. They say precisely that. So yeah, I do have a rather strong claim to not want fascists to take hold.

is communist antifa any better?

If the ideological root of your governance cannot withstand a newer competing ideology without its compromise, then at face value your ideological system is 1) flawed, 2) deserves to die, and 3) will inevitably die; with haste.

I do not believe this to be true and representative democracy managed to survive the larger half of a century with opposition from fascism, socialism, communism, autocracy, modern dictatorship and Orwellian totalitarianism. I think this trend will continue but it seems that you do not.

Keep in mind that a full third of the English language comes from German. In the 20s & early 30s, one of the largest and most financially/socially successful groups of immigrants in the US & UK were German. Germany and Fascism were politically very popular here and openly supported until (and on the US side, part-way through) WWII. Even under those circumstances, it was politically untenable. This is even more true now.

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