In my book a democracy doesn't deny people health care for religious reasons. You wouldn't let muslims deny non-muslims (or other muslims) blood transfusions. (Yes, it's a thing...)
Like, I don't think abortion is murder, but if I did, I'd vote for restrictions even if I could get pregnant. Just like I would vote for restrictions on "normal" murder if it were up for debate.
You have a bizarre definition of "democracy." In my Muslim home country, abortion and homosexuality are both illegal. That's democratic. Having some member of the elite, such as a judge, decide that the people cannot have the laws they want, because of their personal ideology, is not democratic.
You might have a valid point about Democratic norms allowing people in Alabama to have different abortion policies than people in Connecticut, but you can't make it with an argument that "proves" as much as your "my home country bans homosexuality" argument does.
Can you try harder? For instance, it's hard to tell whether you're trying to make a case against democracy and for a panel of philosopher kings, or whether you're making a case about what abortion policy means vis a vis women's rights and interests.
I'm not advocating for or against democracy versus philosopher kings. I'm pointing out that OP's assertion is backward--he wants less democracy, not more. If you want to protect racial or religious minorities, etc., you need to take power away from the public and put it in the hands of philosopher kings. Maybe that's a good thing, maybe it's not. But in all events, you're making the system less "democratic." Conversely, Bangladesh or Egypt aren't less "democratic" because the people are free to vote to impose Islamic values upon themselves.
Imposing Islamic values upon themselves is not the issue — or the problem.
Take voting rights. Switzerland was last of all the "civilized" democracies to establish full voting rights for women. Why? Well, the current voters had to vote for that constitutional amendment, and them being all male they had no big problem with denying women a vote. In the US plenty of states suffer from a similar dynamic where politicians actually keep a majority beyond what the population actually wants by making it harder for minorities to vote. All those things are not democratic despite getting voted on in supposedly democratic systems.
Tell that (for example) to Iranian- or Afghan- or Saudi women who must cover themselves in public, can't drive, and possibly can't leave the house without a male relative.
Or tell it to women in Texas, Idaho, etc., who are compelled to carry unwanted pregnancies to term — and then are largely left to fend for themselves after their forced births — because power-seeking radicals have democratically imposed "Christian" values about when an abortion is supposedly "murder."
To be sure, living in a society involves duties, not just rights. But some purported "duties" go too far.
And as to Idaho and Texas—who decides where “murder” begins? Me? You? Someone has to, right? What is the rule of decision? Why should post-Christian secular humanism provide the rule of decision instead of regular Christianity, or Islam?
To a first approximation, Roe got it right.
> Why should post-Christian secular humanism provide the rule of decision instead of regular Christianity, or Islam?
I'm certain you recognize that, if enough people feel strongly enough about an issue, the rule of decision will arise not from logic but from raw power, manifested in various forms:
- elections;
- mass demonstrations (Iran 1978-79; Israel of late, outcome uncertain);
- strikes (France of late, outcome uncertain);
- armed rebellion (Ireland 1916; East Pakistan 1971);
- military intervention (the U.S. 1861; East Pakistan 1971).
The "elites" in Iran are the Shi'a hierarchy. The "elites" in the US are, in your formulation, people who went to college and who live in major US metros. These are not comparable sets. Elite control over US policy is implicit (one might even say supposed); elite control over Iranian policy is explicit and rigidly formalized. These are not comparable notions of "turned over to".
Protection of minorities, however, isn’t a necessary precondition to being a democracy. And in fact it requires restricting democracy. Democracy is distinct and separable from the (little “l”) liberal principles that are often packaged together with democracy in western countries: https://www.persuasion.community/p/hamid
The situation that was remedied in Brown v. Board reduced the ability of black Americans to get educated, earn a decent living and participate fully in the democracy.
For me, the protection of rights is the actual goal of democracy, and voting just a necessary means to this end. To protect those rights (especially the rights to life and freedom from harm parts) you need certain services like fire fighters or police. To govern those you need laws, shaped ultimately by elections. It's just that there are some principles that are sacrosanct and should be decided by experts on a very narrow basis. Constitutional judges, in most countries, are not "philosopher kings". The situation in the US supreme court has gotten way out of hand in that regard....
By some definitions, a system is "democratic" if it reflects the will of the majority of the population. If the majority wish to deny certain groups the right to vote – maybe that's wrong, maybe it isn't, but so long as those groups are numerically a minority, it doesn't stop the system from reflecting the will of the majority of the population, and hence by those definitions isn't "non-democratic".
Even today, various groups are denied the right to vote – those beneath voting age, non-citizens, prisoners. Maybe those limitations on voting are right, maybe they are wrong – but since those groups are (collectively and individually) a numerical minority, denying them voting rights does not infringe on the principles of majoritarian democracy, if that denial is what the majority of the population wants. It may infringe on other values, but not majoritarian democratic ones.
> The situation that was remedied in Brown v. Board reduced the ability of black Americans to get educated, earn a decent living and participate fully in the democracy.
"Racism is wrong" is a different value from democracy. I agree it is wrong to discriminate against a group on the basis of their race, including by denying them voting rights – but, if the majority wants to do that, while that's a violation of anti-racist values, I don't see how that's a violation of democratic values. Anti-racist values and democratic values will contradict each other, whenever there is a pro-racist majority, and then you have to decide which of those values gets priority.
> For me, the protection of rights is the actual goal of democracy, and voting just a necessary means to this end.
For me, democracy is a good thing, but it is not the highest good. In some cases, it can be legitimate to put limits on democracy in order to protect other goods. If the majority of the population wants to commit a genocide, then it would be right to deny them their wish – it would be anti-democratic, but that's a case in which being anti-democratic is the right thing to do. If the military decided to launch a coup to prevent the genocide, I'd support that military coup, even though it would be anti-democratic, because an anti-genocide dictatorship is morally superior to a pro-genocide democracy.
> It's just that there are some principles that are sacrosanct and should be decided by experts on a very narrow basis.
Many other countries don't have entrenched constitutional rights like the US does. For example, I'm in Australia, and while abortion is legal nationwide, nobody in Australia has ever had a constitutional right to an abortion – we have legal abortion nationwide, because the people's elected representatives in each state voted to legalise it. In fact, the Constitution of Australia has no Bill of Rights, and while there are a handful of explicit provisions protecting various rights within its text, and a few more rights our High Court has "read into" it (e.g. the "implied right of political communication"), it contains far less extensive individual rights protections than the US Constitution does.
In the Commonwealth, there is a traditional legal doctrine, inherited from England, known as parliamentary sovereignty – Parliament has the power to make any laws whatsoever, even heinously wicked ones, and their wickedness does not make them legally invalid. The late 19th / early 20th century British jurist A. V. Dicey, in his influential textbook on English constitutional law, Introduction to the Study of the Law of the Constitution (1st ed 1885, 8th ed 1915) cited this example due to the moral philosopher Leslie Stephen: if Parliament wanted to order the murder of all blue-eyed babies, as morally heinous as that would be, it would be entirely legal and constitutional. Genocide is undoubtedly morally abhorrent, but in the English constitutional tradition, it is constitutional, and as far as that tradition goes, if a democratically elected Parliament votes for genocide, it would be democratic to carry the genocide out. Of course, the American traditions of constitutional law went in rather different directions – as far as I am aware, the English doctrine of parliamentary sovereignty was never received in the United States – but, maybe that's an example of how American and British understandings of "democracy" traditionally differ.
Who decides what those “rights” are?
There are just a few things a majority can't vote for and still call it democratic. Easy examples: Killing off a minority. Not letting a minority vote (quite common actually). Somehow less easy examples: Stop women from getting health care they need to sometimes save their life and sometimes "just" keep their life on track.
What are “democratic values” though? A lot of people seem to use the phrase to mean whatever values they personally endorse - but what makes those values “democratic”? How do we decide what values count as “democratic”?
> Easy examples: Killing off a minority.
I think “genocide is wrong” is a value which the vast majority of people share. But what makes that a democratic value?
Same point about all your other examples - whether the values you support are the right ones or the wrong ones, what makes them “democratic”?
In a pure majoritarian democracy, whatever the majority wants, they get - even if they want something bad like genocide. Of course, I don’t think genocide is right, even if the majority wants it - but that’s not a “democratic value”, that’s a case where some values (such as the wrongness of genocide) are more important than democratic values, and ought to win out when they conflict with the value of democracy.
This is much more well defined than you try to argue. Your main argument is basically your ignorance of much of political theory for the past two centuries at least...
What about 17 year olds? They don't get to vote, so by your definition, you don't have a democracy.
Drop the voting age to 16, as some propose? Then 15 year olds still don't get to vote, so you still don't have a democracy.
More serious: foreign nationals who live in the same country aren't allowed to vote despite paying taxes and being subject to the laws. More serious still: Minorities and in general "Democratic" voters are kept from turning out by discriminative voter suppresion. That's a deficit on democracy. Or when you incarcerate a ton of people, especially with racial preference. Or when you take away bodily autonomy from women with a ban on abortion, when men cant get pregnant and have more ways to extricate themselves of those consequences. Black and white thinking is not the way