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Comment by midoridensha | Hacker News Reader

>It would likely be used by MAGA and similar organizations to justify a lot of what I see as coming down the road from that particular political faction to justify policies aimed towards minorities and women.

Given that SO many women and minorities actively support and vote for these groups and candidates, and this is a democratic system, is this really such a bad thing in this case?

In short, if groups of people actively and happily vote against their own best interests, and to keep themselves oppressed, is it wrong for them to be oppressed? Or, in this case, is democracy even a system we should be upholding? And if not, what is the alternative? A system where a group of unelected, unaccountable elites run society because they know what's best? I honestly don't have the answer here.

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>Given that SO many women and minorities actively support and vote for these groups and candidates

What do you mean by this?

I don't believe the meaning is unclear. The OP asserts that a large number of minority voters and women voted republican in the last two trump elections. Do you take issue with the premise? Do you consider the finding not to be meaningful?

FWIW as far as I can tell, the OP is correct in that 55% of white women, 36% of hispanic men, and 30% of hispanic women voted for trump. It was also telling that in the 2020 election support for the republican party from all minority groups increased by a few percentage points. I think that counts as "SO many". It's not a majority, but I don't think the OP claimed that.

[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-54972389

Only counting white women is misleading but I can see the point there. But 36% is definitely not "SO many": it doesn't win an election of two parties, and that was the whole premise of GP.

>Do you take issue with the premise? Do you consider the finding not to be meaningful?

Just wanted some elaboration. It's a bold claim given with no data.

I never claimed that "SO many" equaled a majority. 36% is more than one-third, which seems like a lot of people to me, and not really that far from a majority; it doesn't take that much to get (1/2 - 1/3) (one-sixth) to change their minds.

>and this is a democratic system

"SO many," if defined as less than 50%, is irrelivant given a democratic sysyem with only two parties. Therefore "SO many" must refer to more than 50%.

I feel like I always have this argument with American liberals: in your mind, a minority of voters can simply be ignored, even if they're 49.9% of the vote, because "there's only 2 parties so those voters don't matter". And then when things change slightly, you get a fascist elected into power and you're shocked because you preferred to ignore those voters.

36% knowingly voting for a known fascist and attempted insurrectionist is pretty scary, no matter how you slice or pendanticize it. What else do they support, fascists tend to turn to violence when they can't win elections.

Yep, this is exactly my point. But any time I talk to American liberals, they just hand-wave it away because that group of people is less than 50%. "They're not a majority of the population, so they're nothing to worry about!!" Talk about the 2016 and 2020 elections and American liberals will claim that Trump voters were a tiny, tiny minority (rather than less than 2% difference as it was in reality).

Hitler was elected by a minority of the population, but American liberals seem to have forgotten that. It's becoming easy to see how leaders like Hitler come into power. If Trump had been much more competent and destructive than he really was, the US would be really screwed right now, while American liberals would still be sitting around whining about how "gerrymandering" got him elected by a tiny, tiny, tiny minority. (Yes, I know gerrymandering only affects elections for the House members. American liberals don't: they routinely blame gerrymandering for governor's elections and Senatorial elections.)

30% of a large population group is a very large number! It's just US first-past-the-post politics that somehow convinces people that anything less that 49.9% is somehow insignificant, and 50.1% is somehow a vast majority (I exaggerate, but you get my point).

Aren't these proportions of the voting population, not the actual population?

Seems like a bit of a jump to assume they're distributed the same way and start making conclusions based on that.

"if we elect fascism, is it really that bad?"

The answer is yes. And in fact that's how fascism typically rises to power.

Right, so what's the alternative? If you support democracy, then you must therefore support the right of people to vote for fascism. If you don't support the rise of fascism, or don't think people should be allowed to vote for fascism, then you're rejecting democracy, and therefore supporting authoritarianism (which is what fascism turns into).

I feel like this is a paradox.

The disconnect is that you can limit the range of what democracy permits without being anti democracy.

If we're voting on dinner, and I say I'm not going to eat at any restaurant with an F health inspector rating, we can still vote.

Democracy always has to accept that we must set limits on choice. I can't vote for a foreign national to be our president. But honestly, I'm not that broken up about that limit. Just like I wouldn't be that broken up about limiting the ability to elect fascists.

Yes, limiting the available options is part of the political elite’s job. But there are practical constraints on what’s possible. Skewing the political options too far from what the voting public wants leads to the rise of populist demagogues in the short term and revolution in the long term. Elites cannot just impose their narrow ideological commitments on a populace that largely rejects them.

>Democracy always has to accept that we must set limits on choice.

Ok, and who sets those limits? If an unelected group sets the limits, then what you have is not a democratic system at all; it's more like a 1-party state where you can vote who whomever you want, as long as The Party has approved them.

> If we're voting on dinner [...]

That doesn't replicate the conditions of national elections which are monopolistic and repeated. You can't opt to participate in a different group and you have to play all your games with the same rules - if you refuse to eat at F-grade restaurants you may end up starving.

In "real" elections you end up without the ability to set those convenient limits consistently or usefully.

And "politics" is the conflict over groups fighting for power to set these limits. There's no escape from the friend/enemy distinction. At some point there will be irreconcilable disagreements and opposing factions. Who has power to set the terms of political discourse is what all politics is.

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