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Comment by notTyler | Hacker News Reader

It really feels like democracy is slowly dying all over the world.

> It really feels like democracy is slowly dying all over the world.

If it seems that way, it's because we've stopped fighting for it. Any regime without some basic level of true democratic representation and civil liberties should be the subject of official embargoes and individual boycotts. Unfortunately, many have sold out democracy to please the all-important shareholders or just to take advantage of cheap stuff.

The supremely naive "end of history"-era thinking has a lot of inertia. Now it's unclear who's left to fight for Democracy as the old champions are all dead and current generations have no concept of what that would even mean since they've just been reaping the rewards their whole lives.

Ah yes, all us youngings reaping the rewards of those that have come before us. Insane housing and real estate prices that few can afford, insane university tuition that few can afford, the pharmaceutical industry pushing dangerous drugs with impunity, the war on drugs costing trillions of dollars and leading to the militarization of police and a massive amount of incarcerated non-violent offenders, the destruction of the environment being covered up and lobbied for by massive oil and gas corporations, social security being depleted before I'll ever get to utilize it, huge downturns in the economy caused by irresponsible spending and lending, and countless other "rewards" from the older generations that we now have to fix while simultaneously getting whined at about how we're all lazy slackers that are really causing the downfall of society. I don't buy into the "end of history" thinking, but it is incredible how many people take no responsibility for things that happened during their life time and completely ignore all of the extreme negative impacts those had on younger generations and society as a whole

And what have we done about that? I'm technically Gen Y, and I'll be the first to admit that with regards to protesting my generation seems:

- Uninformed

- Undisciplined

- Lazy

- Uncoordinated

People were self-organizing large civil society organizations and marching through clouds of tear gas and worse in the 1960-90s... and yet this current generation seems to think that posting a rant on Facebook is valuable?

Incoherent, naive anger is useless.

And what did marching through tear gas give us? More interventionism in South America and... Ronald Reagan?

De facto voting rights for African Americans, desegregation, and women's rights to control their own bodies.

They have de jure voting; de facto kinda not really.

Compared to the 50s and 60s?

Most of us just don't think we CAN do anything. It seems the world is run by the rich for the rich. We vote but we don't feel that anything we can do actually will effect any change.

One could make the argument that wealth inequality is higher than it was in previous eras.

But there's always been a major disparity between capital owners and everyone else. Even in the 60s. And certainly at the turn of the century (1850-1920), when US antitrust law was actually first created.

So maybe media centralization? But the 1960s featured a limited number of media channels controlled by a few owners (albeit with some paragons of objective, journalistic integrity). And the turn of the century was the heyday of centralized newspaper control.

I'm honestly casting about for an external why and am hard-pressed to enunciate a coherent narrative.

And in lieu of one, the only thing that's left are that people simply aren't actively protesting.

Whether they're making that choice because of hopelessness or laziness, I don't really care. Because ultimately, it's a choice.

Make the other one.

(And it seems we might finally be, with regards to climate)

The end of history claimed that basically all countries will turn to liberal democracy once they see how awesome it is. You can look at China to see how well that worked out. It doesn't really have much to do with US internal policies.

I'd be willing to bet money that young people are the most represented group at these protests.

Good luck fighting for democracy in the us. Wondering how soon will you get beaten by the police if you did the same as the hk people do?

We've banned this account for using HN primarily for nationalistic arguments. That's against the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future.

The system is just being pushed to its limits. There is no perfect political system, and given enough time a political system will be gamed somehow. Simply, the means of gaming this particular system are even easier now.

I like this hypothesis as to why: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/10/losing-...

This is how processes naturally strengthen themselves. A system (democracy) becomes unstable, sick, dis-eased - which highlights the gaps and weaknesses, which is in part is a lack of attention - lack of individual health, strength, leading to lacking community. Trump for example was a wakeup call for the potential energy that has been building. Hong Kong is now a wakeup call for us - and we globally need to take an economic stand against the tyrants in China's leadership as an act to punish bad behaviour + as an act to strengthen ourselves with the stresses it can put on us.

Edit: Especially curious if downvotes in heavily political, democracy vs. tyrant topics are legitimate or suppression; another reason downvote mechanism is terrible: if you have something legitimate to counter, then spend any effort writing something qualitative.

Face masks have been banned in many places in America (for protests) some time now. I don't understand why this event makes us saddened.

In the context of China's facial recognition capabilities, social credit score, and general ability to make people it doesn't like disappear, to me it's a lot more than just a face mask ban.

Yet many U.S. courts have struck down anti-mask laws. H.K. authorities are clearly attempting to fabricate a law.

I wouldn't say that democracy is dying so much as freedom is dying. You can always vote yourself into oppression, but you can only shoot your way out (2nd amendment) if you first fail to talk (1st amendment) the masses out of voting for their own oppression.

> You can always vote yourself into oppression

True. But those in power can suppress voter turnout through a variety of means, whether thats spread of misinformation ("voting is [wrong day] at [wrong location]!"), literal voter suppression (intimidation tactics at places of voting, illegally collecting and destroying mail in ballots), to structural rigging, like gerrymandering.

We're definitely seeing a mixture of both. Democracy is certainly facing a lot of challenges. Many of them have been around for years, but are finally having a light cast on them... while others are newer, more nefarious.

The most potent way to suppress is to control money. Deny any unwanted opposition access to funding and suddenly they don't exist as they are unable to compete medially.

(Obviously this means that any party not pandering to rich is doomed to lose, unless there's a general uprising.)

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