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Comment by coldtea | Hacker News Reader

>It helps that a tumultuous couple of years in the world’s democracies have made the Chinese political elite feel increasingly justified in shutting out voters. Developments such as Donald Trump’s election, Brexit, the rise of far-right parties across Europe, and Rodrigo Duterte’s reign of terror in the Philippines underscore what many critics see as the problems inherent in democracy, especially populism, instability, and precariously personalized leadership.

In other words, that a democracy might actually function as one -- oh, the horror -- reflecting what people want, instead of what the elites and the well off 10% wants them to want, or present as TINA.

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> what people want

If they gave the people what they wanted then everybody (and nobody?) would be elites, right? Or maybe the majority of people just want those 10% to be rich. And since Brexit was brought up, can you think of any huge promise that was made in order to get the vote but won't be kept? Must be that what people really want is to be lied to. [1]

Today's democracy functions as a 2 step process: the campaign where people hear what they want to hear (and usually they're even told what they want) and the term where they're getting something else. Or getting what they want to a degree. You vote promises, not results.

Democracy may be the best system we have but it's far from good because while the theory is stellar, the practical application is less so.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cA3XTYfzd1I

> If they gave the people what they wanted then everybody (and nobody?) would be elites, right? Or maybe the majority of people just want those 10% to be rich.

I think the majority of people are actually comfortable with the existence of even extreme (billionaire-scale) inequality. Although people want to feel that the inequality is just -- based on wealth-creation, rather than rent-seeking.

It's not about being comfortable with the difference, rather about seeing that the difference keeps increasing because that small minority keeps tipping the scales. You are not as equal as democracy makes it out to be.

50% of Americans earn ~$37000. The poorest 35% had a decrease from 2016 to 2017. Do you feel they are particularly favored in the grand scheme of things? Because they certainly have the power to change this by sheer voting power.

As I said before, democracy is the business of selling promises once every 4 years. Unless you have the power to get what you actually want you are not leading anything and you have no real power. It's like the power to choose your poison is not an actual power if you didn't want to die in the first place.

>If they gave the people what they wanted then everybody (and nobody?) would be elites, right?

You can have an elite (in wealth/earnings) and still have a voting system that reflects the majority's wishes.

In fact, unless you can balance those two you don't have a democracy -- at best you have a bastard system where elites buy influence (and not outright, that would still be up to the people "selling" their vote: they buy it though political favors, gerrymandering, mass media influence, etc).

>And since Brexit was brought up, can you think of any huge promise that was made in order to get the vote but won't be kept?

Many. EU's history is full of people voting against EU policies, even directly and overwhelmingly in referendums, (France, Ireland, Italy, etc) and then getting ignored by their representatives.

Even with Brexit the whole concern from day one after the shock that despite the whole "you're ignorant/you're doomed/this is the end/the sky will fall/TINA to the EU" campaign people still voted for it, the first concern openly expressed was how to annul it or make it so that it's followed in letter but in practice everything remains the same.

I think you completely missed the point. Which was that while democracy is the best system we have, most implementations are crap. Remember that on paper even communism sounds good. Although while hotly debating the Brexit topic with whataboutism you just made my point without realizing.

Not only are most people easily manipulated into believing they want something when they actually need something else or their votes are simply bought with "trinkets", sometimes they are also not even being offered those trinkets in the end. Their vote is worth nothing the second they cast it.

You're focusing too much on Brexit, it was just an example. Politicians fooled people into thinking they vote for (among others) more money to the NHS only to turn around right after the vote and say "that's not happening". The vote was heavily based on misdirection and manipulation. All perfectly democratic but without actually giving any power to the people. What happens after a promise is broken? Nothing.

Somewhere else in the world people might be told that "I'm sure education is important but the war against terror...". So they vote for the war without even realizing that they're losing twice: they have to fight a war and miss out on education. Again, perfectly democratic.

Democracy as it stands now is actually the business of selling promises. If you vote for a promise that's never fulfilled what exactly is your power other than to try again?

>Remember that on paper even communism sounds good. Although while hotly debating the Brexit topic with whataboutism you just made my point without realizing.

Sorry, but I consider accusations of whataboutism an easy cop-out from the duty to put things in perspective. It's predominantly one-sided too, those accusing people of bringing up Y in a critique of X seldom or never critique Y. But even if they did, both critiques would be bogus without whataboutism anyway. Things can only make sense and can be understood in comparison, not in some abstract pure critique that ignores what happens in parallel and what the alternatives were.

But I digress. Let's get back to the comment.

>You're focusing too much on Brexit, it was just an example. Politicians fooled people into thinking they vote for (among others) more money to the NHS only to turn around right after the vote and say "that's not happening". The vote was heavily based on misdirection and manipulation. All perfectly democratic but without actually giving any power to the people. What happens after a promise is broken? Nothing.

Sure. But that's neither here not there -- that's a common with politics.

I'm focusing on Brexit because it's the perfect example of this contempt for democracy (and the "unwashed masses") when it involves a choice the 10% doesn't like.

As if one choice or the other was objectively good and the other objectively bad -- which misunderstands and diminishes the role of democracy to always choosing the objectively good. Instead, democracy is about balancing opposing interests, as individuals see them.

Saying that those that voted opposite to what one would want are "voting against their interests" etc, is putting one's position above politics, and into the realm of inherently good. That's not democracy, that's TINA.

>Democracy as it stands now is actually the business of selling promises. If you vote for a promise that's never fulfilled what exactly is your power other than to try again?

Mass protests? Mass participation to party meetings and conferences? Grassroots emergence of new candidates? All of those have been tried with various degrees of success (including toppling governments). Not all of them are guaranteed to work all the time of course, but that's life. It's all up to the vigilance of the citizenry (or lack thereof).

> Sorry, but I consider accusations of whataboutism an easy cop-out from the duty to put things in perspective

Well, that may be your duty, to be "the defender" regardless of the topic. But from my perspective not only is it one of the most useless techniques if you want to contradict someone, it's also irrelevant to the discussion. Which was about democracy in general, with a particular example of Brexit. Telling me others (FR, IT, DE) do the same presumably to make the UK (or the people) look... less bad is a pathetic way to provide an excuse for Brexit. An excuse that nobody asked for. I don't care whether it'll turn out well as long as I could prove "democracy" meant people getting tricked with false promises. A point you don't really want to address I see.

You also just manage to strengthen my point with it: democracy may be the best thing we have but it's still so fragile and screaming to be manipulated that in real life most implementations only give the impression that you as "the people" have any power.

Trump and BREXIT: the blame is put entirely on the electorate, but in both cases it was the elites who gave the electorate the opportunity to make a choice and it was the elites who provided the selection of possible choices.

Think of the many contemporary political issues on which the elites refuse to provide such a choice and insist on governing as they please.

This is the same as when the media (the voice of the same elites) blame lack of political progress (on for example climate change) on certain demographics of poor people. As if the elites care about what these poor people think. Since when did the elites lend an ear to these people to consult on policy?

They blame it on democracy when it is anything but.

You're correct, and it's unfortunate that we're both being downvoted for pointing out the flaws in this kind of thinking.

Brexit was a false choice foisted upon the people by wealthy special interest groups that used falsehoods[0][1] and illegal tactics[2] to mislead the people [3][4] into voting for something they didn't fully understand [5]

[0] https://www.independent.co.uk/infact/brexit-second-referendu...

[1] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/final-say-bre...

[2] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/vote-leave-ca...

[3] https://www.npr.org/2018/05/30/615388562/fishermen-say-they-...

[4] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/brexit-voter...

[5] https://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2016/06/24/48...

It's also worth noting that Trump actually lost by the (small-d) democratic measure: the popular vote. What gave him the election was the Electoral College, an institution designed precisely to "protect" against "tyranny of the majority."

So if anything, Trump's election is a point in favor of more democracy, not less.

> Trump and BREXIT: the blame is put entirely on the electorate, but in both cases it was the elites who gave the electorate the opportunity to make a choice and it was the elites who provided the selection of possible choices.

To the extent that the elites made President Trump's run possible, I believe it was because they believed him to be the most defeatable Republican competition for Mrs. Clinton. The media loved reporting on him, because it was fun. Meanwhile, the Republican Party relied too much on primaries and not enough on caucuses, and awarded delegates based on plurality rather than having runoffs. As it turned out, while he was the most-defeatable opposition for Mrs. Clinton she wasn't able to actually defeat him.

As for Brexit, the whole reason it was on the ballot was that Mr. Cameron believed that he could get a clear vote of confidence on the U.K.'s E.U. membership. This is a pretty historic instance of hubris: had he simply asked for a two-thirds vote, he'd have won. But he went with a simple majority, and that defeated him.

If Trump, Brexit and Duterte are what the people want, perhaps we live in societies that are incapable of self-governance. I'm no fan of centrist neoliberal politics, but regimes and decisions which destabilize economies, marginalize minorities and villainize immigrants are clearly not a better alternative.

>If Trump, Brexit and Duterte are what the people want, perhaps we live in societies that are incapable of self-governance

Only if we take the preferences of the 10% of well cushioned (who see themselves as Elois and the masses as Morlocks) as some universal law, or _the good_ itself, as opposed to what they are: preferences based on their private interests.

You are advocating for the marginalization of minorities if popular opinion is that minorities should be marginalized.

This is the very definition of "tyranny of the majority", and is also self-defeating in terms of democracy: marginalized groups are no longer fully represented in democracies once they have been marginalized.

>You are advocating for the marginalization of minorities if popular opinion is that minorities should be marginalized.

That's part of democracy. Whether they should be marginalized or not is up to the culture, not to the political system.

I would love to hear what in the world you think "centrist neoliberal politics" means.

I'm not sure what you mean. Neoliberalism is a centrist philosophy on the U.S. political spectrum, and has been the dominant political ideology in the US and the UK for the past three decades. [0][1][2]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoliberalism

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17436985

[2] https://theconversation.com/what-exactly-is-neoliberalism-84...

> clearly not a better alternative.

To what, though? What's the choice here? Give a few people even more power without having to be voted in? Who decides which people get all the power? What if they're worse? How do we get rid of them? Is a bloody revolution or decades of dictatorship really the same as having elections where the votes don't always make the best choices?

Thank you. Democracy is not about guaranteeing competent government, or government that agrees with you. Democracy is about avoiding civil wars. I think people forget this, and forget how hideous civil wars can be, because it's been so successful.

I don't know. I didn't offer an alternative, and I'm not sure that there is one. I only pointed out that from the GP's viewpoint, these examples of democracy reflecting the will of the people (Trump, Duterte, Brexit) are not having positive impacts on society. I don't believe they should be held up as examples of democracy at work, but rather as unfortunate failures of democratic systems.

Failure only because you disagree with the outcomes. Many of us supported Brexit and Trump. Democracy does not guarantee the outcome you want, and to believe that democracy has failed when it does not go your way means that you have a wrong idea of what democracy is and perhaps are anti-democratic.

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