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Well, what you described is not quite “Democracy” but “Majority Rule”. Those are two different things

It's not clear what kind of distinction you're trying to draw or why it would be relevant. Some kind of representative democracy where policy is chosen by something more involved than a majority popular vote would still have to be just as forbidden from engaging in tyrannical activities that influence the public discourse or the mechanisms the populace uses to express their preferences.

Sure it is, no one is arguing against that. The process includes a constant check against the Constitution and its core values and whenever a conflict is found the law or act is just nullified.

See the Italian constitutional court as an example

The heart of the argument for the person advocating democracy here is centered on the idea that democracy, by its nature, must protect certain fundamental principles, even if those principles are threatened by a majority or by actions claimed to be in defense of democracy itself.

They emphasize (in good faith I might add) that certain actions, such as censoring the opposition, canceling elections, or jailing people without due process, are inherently undemocratic and would destroy democracy if allowed, regardless of the intentions behind them. The argument is that democracy must adhere to its own rules and principles, even in the face of threats, because violating those principles in the name of protecting democracy ultimately leads to its destruction.

You can’t “protect Democracy” by violating its core tenants.

I feel like your arguments are more whataboutism than substantive.

There are no core tenants of democracy other than majority rule. The actions you listed (with the exception of canceling elections) do not actually destroy the ability for the majority to rule. In fact, one common tactic of democratic states is to employ referendums for laws that infringe on the rights of a minority, thus shifting the moral blame onto the population when convenient.

To play by the rules is an implicit rule in any political/power system. There are consequences when a ruler practices tyranny.

No. If the majority wants to murder or deport all immigrants and seize their assets because “fuck ‘em”, there’s no way a Democracy can just shrug and call it “vox populi, vox dei”.

It might lose but it will have to put up a fight, legal or physical.

What is this “it” that might “lose”? A country is a homeland for a people. Democracy is an abstraction. “It” cannot fight or “lose” against the people of the nation. The people exist. Democracy is simply rule by a majority of those people.

> There are no core tenants of democracy other than majority rule.

Let's suppose you're right. We have a "democracy" that holds elections and whichever candidate gets the most votes wins, but there is no freedom of speech. Whoever is in office controls all the media, all private communications are monitored and lèse-majesté is a crime. Everything is a crime, in fact, and the law relies entirely on selective enforcement. By election day, opposition candidates with any chance of winning are always blood relatives of the incumbent. Deranged candidates with no chance of winning are ignored but independent candidates who start to gain any support are immediately executed for treason. Every year there is an election in which the people can choose between the incumbent, the incumbent's favored offspring (if any) and a selection of paste-eating loons who think Hitler is still alive, campaign on raising energy costs to help Hitler accelerate human extinction and never get any votes.

That isn't a democracy, it's the fig leaf dictatorships wear when they want to lie about being a democracy.

If half the registered voters want to elect Adolf Hitler, is it acceptable for a democratic government to agree to ignore them? The Nazi party is banned in Germany. Is that good or bad?

I agree such a government is not acting democratically. However, it's better than the alternative. Don't we do democracy because it's usually good, and not for its own sake? Then if doing something nondemocratic is even better than doing something democratic, we should do the former.

If you set the precedent that the government can ignore the result of an election because the electee is bad, that's the very tool that a tyrannical government will use.

The first thing every dictator and tyrannical government does is stop or subvert the elections. There's still elections in Russia and China and North Korea.

Dictators and tyrannical governments are perfectly able to make their own tools. Hitler didn't need to edit an existing law allowing the government to kill Nazis, to target Jews and gypsies. He didn't need an existing law giving chancellors unlimited powers. He simply wrote those laws he needed, then used them. If the government prior to his one had a law giving Nazis the death penalty, it could have saved a lot of lives.

No but he did need a population ready to accept the idea that a non democratic government is necessary.

> If half the registered voters want to elect Adolf Hitler, is it acceptable for a democratic government to agree to ignore them?

The candidate people voted for would enter office, but elected officials should not have the power to do the things Hitler did.

> The Nazi party is banned in Germany. Is that good or bad?

It's basically meaningless. If you ban the "Nazi party" and then someone comes and says they're a member of the Social Nationalists party which is totally different even though it shares a lot of the same policies, now you have to decide which policies are banned. And we're back to politicians are never allowed to censor their opponents etc.

That's not remotely similar to any of the established definitions.

Those tends to be based on variants of democracy being "institutions that enable a peaceful transfer of power". This usually includes the so called democratic freedoms, overseeing journalists, and a non-politicized judicial system.

Every practicing democracy however includes some exceptions for law and intelligence services, as that is required to uphold the system in times of uprisings and uncertainty. Advocating genocide or revolting against the democratic institutions is not considered within the bounds of democracy anywhere.

What do mean "not remotely similar"?

You don't offer an established definition, but you do list some things the government must not do, e.g. overseeing journalists, politicizing the judicial system. Those things could easily fall within GP's definition.

There is no established definition of democracy that defines it as a public discussion with a vote.

> Those tends to be based on variants of democracy being "institutions that enable a peaceful transfer of power". This usually includes the so called democratic freedoms, overseeing journalists, and a non-politicized judicial system.

You can pretty clearly have a democracy without a peaceful transfer of power. Suppose the state of California had entered open revolt after the 2016 election and the rebellion had to be put down by the military. You could hardly have called that a peaceful transfer of power even if the end result was that people voted and the winner took office. And the reverse can also be true; some aging dictator undemocratically chooses a successor who comes into power without bloodshed.

Also, it is not the role of governments to oversee journalists, it is the role of journalists to oversee governments.

> Every practicing democracy however includes some exceptions for law and intelligence services, as that is required to uphold the system in times of uprisings and uncertainty.

These things are not inherent requirements, they are the implements of tyranny. Notice that the US constitution doesn't have these exceptions written into it, they were read into it by authoritarians and cowards in times of weakness.

The day you find out if you have principles or just empty words is the day when following them is hard.

> Advocating genocide or revolting against the democratic institutions is not considered within the bounds of democracy anywhere.

You can advocate whatever you want, you're just never allowed to actually do it.

Think about it. A system of checks and balances that can stop them from doing it even after they're already in power is the only thing that matters. If you have that, they can say whatever they want. If you don't have that, censorship doesn't help, because they can gain power under false pretenses (politicians lie) and your system isn't configured to stop them once they do. Indeed, a censorship apparatus would even make it worse, because now they're the ones deciding what gets censored.

Censorship is always the tool of the villain because lies and bad ideas can be openly refuted but the only solution to a ban on the truth is to defeat the ban.