Hacker News Reader

Comment by Spooky23 | Hacker News Reader

In a democratic society, the power of the executive is defined by law. The President is a powerful individual, but he is not a King.

By law, appointments of certain positions require explicit consent of congress.

The ability of regressive partisan elements to break government is a part of the design of the government. I personally find it repugnant and stupid. I also think that the short sighted nature of wielding this power in such a trivial and hamfisted way will ultimately backfire and result in constitutional changes down the road.

View on HN

> The ability of regressive partisan elements to break government is a part of the design of the government. I personally find it repugnant and stupid.

It's amazing the way you guys (small-d democrats) are always dressing up what is nakedly the statement that "everything I like and want is good and proceeds in a way I'll call democracy (because I say it's good for the people), but whatever I dislike is authoritarian (even if the people want it.)"

It may surprise you to learn that, historically, this is exactly how authoritarianism views itself. Even Saddam Hussein conducted polls of his popularity so he could pretend his sovereignty arose from the people. The Vichy government was legal, popular, and internationally recognized. What the law says on paper is a different thing than what is practiced, and conveniently appealing to what the paper says is a time-honored tactic of eliding inconvenient realities.

Democracy, c. 2020s: "The people must be allowed to choose, but only if what they choose is good for them, as decided by me."

I think you're stretching it to say the only definition of democracy is one where the people have selected some specific situation. This is problematic on two fronts. One is scale. The other is definitional and presupposes that democracy's only definition stems from the fact that people choose.

Democracy doesn't scale. You need representation. Which makes the question of "what do the people want" very challenging because you go through layers of representation. Definitionally it's a problem which surfaces obviously at the extreme - "if the people want an authoritarian government and they get it, does that mean that that's democracy?". You may think that's absurd yet humanity tends to favor authoritarianism in groups, particularly in moments of crisis and/or being swayed via propaganda (see Julias Ceaser).

I think the nuance that's missing is that you can have objective definitions and measures of democracy which you have dismissed as ""everything I like and want is good and proceeds in a way I'll call democracy" when it's more nuanced.

I would like to understand what these objective definitions of democracy are. If you look at ratings and papers created by the people who (like you) suppose the very real science of democracy measuring exists, e.g. Freedom House, what am I to make of the fact that various societal and legislative attitudes towards LGBT peoples (for example) are now a key component of democracy? No country can get a full democracy score without legalizing maximally permissive attitudes towards this population.

Taking your assertion at face value, that means no full and true democracy has ever existed prior to ~2010. Is that what you believe? Because even the then-believed-to-be freest countries of the 80s were probably quite regressive on gay rights.

You would have to believe that, because otherwise "democracy" seems to mean "all the things that good people support today," which is my point. And if that is what you believe, that only in the last 1-2 decades has a real democracy existed, then you must also believe that it's possible that the science of democracy measuring will discover in the future that the True Democracy is even more democratic than what we have today. It's not clear to me how this is any different from "everything I like is democracy," where "what I like" is increasingly progressive policies.

Why are gay rights apparently part of the canonical definition of democracy and not firearms ownership, which directly empowers people to resist tyranny? How can you explain this by appealing to universal principles, instead of simply reiterating liberal orthodoxy? I don't see a way.

Gay rights may not have explicitly persued by democracies of old. But modern democratic values implies at the very least: freedom of expression equality under law and other values which may imply a different attitude regarding what gays can and can't do. Gays have been opressed for a long time. There's some momentum for this type of a sociatal attitudes and norms. So granted democracies have changed and evolved but the idea of gay rights is not an antithesis for democracy.

So in a society that sees gays as people, it's not a large leap to consider gay rights as part of a evolving definition of democracy. Same as all western "democracies" took time to let women rights be a thing. Will you argue that a contemporary democracy which doesn't give women a right to vote is a democracy? If not, then how is gay rights different?

What will stop pedophiles (as an example, not associating them with gays) from gaining the same rights and recognition? Or do you suppose that, if that happens, it must be that society has "discovered" that these rights are also part of democracy?

In other words, is there a limiting principle that you're appealing to?

And why do you suppose that the right of people directly to be armed, and therefore resist tyranny and remain governed only democratically, never figures into these democracy scores?

I think you put words in my mouth and strawmanned it to an extreme degree and then argued with the strawman. A black and white view isn't helpful nor is it one I ascribe to. I think there are objective qualitative criteria of democratic values (which themselves aren't unidemensional and may be in opposition of each other at times). Can you actually numerically ascribe a single democratic value that can be used to objectively compare countries? I think that part is mostly silly. Not sure why you're grouping my views with Freedom House as it's not a thing I brought up. I might agree with them on some things and disagree on others. I don't have that much knowledge about them.

I think statistics can be certainly be used to be illustrative. For example, having a 7x higher incarceration rate than Canada might imply that on some level USA has a larger problem than Canada on this democracy level. Specifically, the US disenfranchises people while in prison and frequently keeps them disenfranchised afterward. I'd say it's pretty non-controversial to say that metrics around the percentage of the population living within the country that is enfranchised is a measure of one aspect of democracy (which means that most countries fail on this metric of letting non-citizens vote). Another might be whether citizens believe that an election result was free and fair (in addition to actually trying to find any evidence that it wasn't). A more democratic country would probably engender more good will and faith from its constituents vs one where the population believe that it only paid lip service to the idea.

Anyway, that's all I'll say on this as I'm done talking with someone engaging in bad faith tactics.

I think history illustrates vividly that when democratic power is watered down by other means of power, the end result is bad for the people as a whole.

Democracy in 2020 in the United States looked more like 1890 than 1980. That’s not good for anyone.

And the regressive elements I reference exist by peddling fear and anger without addressing the source of the grievance or the problem faced. Someday, the people in places like Kansas will figure it out. In the meantime, folks will feast on the bread and circus of “LGBTQ”, or whatever is being served up by the outrage of the month club.

Ok, I am not looking for an argument but based on this response, I don't think you understand the critique at all. You keep using these words like democratic power, and it's not clear to me that you mean anything other than "things I like."

Reply on news.ycombinator.com