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Comment by hellofunk | Hacker News Reader

One thing about a democracy, if poor choices are made and poor leaders are selected, it’s only temporary until the next wave of elections. But in a dictatorship, or even something that masquerades as a democracy but is not, those choices may go unchecked for decades.

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> One thing about a democracy, if poor choices are made and poor leaders are selected, it’s only temporary until the next wave of elections.

With sufficiently bad choices in a democracy it ceases to be a democracy before the error is corrected. Also, even when that doesn't happen, its possible for a choice to be bad but repeated in a democracy.

> With sufficiently bad choices in a democracy it ceases to be a democracy before the error is corrected.

I’d like to see a real world example of what you mean. Because while lots of countries have elections, when leaders are allowed to arbitrarily extend their reign past with their laws allow, then I would agree with you. But those are the countries that I consider falling under the category of “masquerading as a democracy“.

> I’d like to see a real world example of what you mean.

The German Enabling Act of 1933.

> when leaders are allowed to arbitrarily extend their reign past with their laws allow

What if they just use the provisions in the fundamental law that allow changing the structure or terms of government?

A state can either have a thanatocracy in which the dead dictate the details of government to the living, or it can have process by which even the fundamental law can be changed. If it has the latter, that process can, within the preexisting democratic system, be used to terminate democracy without anyone exceeding the power allowed in law.

That seems a bit tautological to include the outcome in the definition. By that logic there are democracies today that will sometime in the future become “masquerading” that we can’t know yet.

You can't predict the future of any country of course, but you can certainly use its past to inform such a distinction. The moves by China and Russia, for example, to lengthen the reign of their leaders, while in the U.S., no matter what has happened to its leadership for the entirety of its history, no one has ever exceeded the time they were allowed before another election risked that tenure.

It's good that it hasn't happened in the US yet, the US luckily has pretty strong institutions it turns out.

But just looking at number of times a democratically elected senate has been dissolved throughout history (Rome, Japan (rise of imperial japan), Germany (third reich), Iran (iranian revolution), etc), there has indeed been a lot of "masquerading as a democracy" going on.

Separation of powers makes it harder to raise a dictator but in some cases it's just another piece of legislation away. Hence, I think Americans ought not to take our democracy for granted.

Some views suggest that the political structure of the United States is in many respects an oligarchy, where a small economic elite overwhelmingly determines policy and law. Some academic researchers suggest a drift toward oligarchy has been occurring by way of the influence of corporations, wealthy, and other special interest groups, leaving individual citizens with less impact than economic elites and organized interest groups in the political process.

A study by political scientists Martin Gilens (Princeton University) and Benjamin Page (Northwestern University) released in April 2014 suggested that when the preferences of a majority of citizens conflicts with elites, elites tend to prevail. While not characterizing the United States as an "oligarchy" or "plutocracy" outright, Gilens and Page do give weight to the idea of a "civil oligarchy" as used by Jeffrey A. Winters, saying, "Winters has posited a comparative theory of 'Oligarchy,' in which the wealthiest citizens – even in a 'civil oligarchy' like the United States – dominate policy concerning crucial issues of wealth- and income-protection."

In their study, Gilens and Page reached these conclusions:

   When a majority of citizens disagrees with economic elites and/or with organized interests, they generally lose. Moreover, because of the strong status quo bias built into the US political system, even when fairly large majorities of Americans favor policy change, they generally do not get it. ... The preferences of the average American appear to have only a minuscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy.
   — Martin Gilens and Benjamin I. Page, 2014

E.J. Dionne Jr. described what he considers the effects of ideological and oligarchical interests on the judiciary. The journalist, columnist, and scholar interprets recent Supreme Court decisions as ones that allow wealthy elites to use economic power to influence political outcomes in their favor. "Thus," Dionne wrote, in speaking about the Supreme Court's McCutcheon et al. v. FEC and Citizens United v. FEC decisions, "has this court conferred on wealthy people the right to give vast sums of money to politicians while undercutting the rights of millions of citizens to cast a ballot."

Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman wrote:

   The stark reality is that we have a society in which money is increasingly concentrated in the hands of a few people. This threatens to make us a democracy in name only.
   — Paul Krugman, 2012

I would say, again, that the answer is complex and multifaceted. It is not exactly clear whether authoritarianism or democracy is better. One thing is clear though... both are far from perfect.

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