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Comment by MrBuddyCasino | Hacker News Reader

Quite the opposite, the problem is democracy:

"In democracy, one side always wins and makes its opponents illegal."

“The claim to legality renders every rebellion and counter-measure an injustice and a legal violation or ‘illegality.’ If legality and illegality can be arbitrarily at the disposal of the majority, then the majority can, above all, declare their domestic competitors illegal, that is, hors-la-loi… Whoever controls 51 percent would be able legally to render the remaining 49 percent illegal… and to treat partisan opponents like common criminals, who are then perhaps reduced to kicking their boots against the locked door.”

Carl Schmitt, Legality and Legitimacy

https://x.com/Tool_Being/status/2102495046260150596

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this is not limited to democracy - every form of government does this to varying degree, and in fact democracy tends to be (perhaps marginally) better than say autocracy.

as is often said with a sigh, "democracy is the worst form of government, except for every other."

to me, democracy is really about giving the masses enough feeling of agency, because the alternatives are either revolution and/or disengagement / low productivity / low creativity, and both are "bad for business" i.e. cannot compete with democracies.

China will be an interesting test of this theory. Notably, in China they have a terrific education system and the government is able to attract/retain smart ambitious people.

Another test will be the power of governments to thwart revolutions using digital and kinetic assymmetry. The masses have individual hackers and pea shooters and the government has digital armies and autonomous drone swarms. In turn, since revolution is off the table, governments don't need the overhead of democracy. In the US, we see this with the rise of Executive Orders for example.

> to me, democracy is really about giving the masses enough feeling of agency, because the alternatives are either revolution and/or disengagement / low productivity / low creativity, and both are "bad for business" i.e. cannot compete with democracies.

I'll pick this one because it is the easiest to refute (but the others are wrong, too). What form of government was predominant during the most creative and productive periods in recent history, namely the industrial revolution and the Italian Rennaissance?

You even mention China yourself, but do not update your priors.

You cannot compare these eras, where one offers a zeitgeist of scientific progress and opportunity and the other of global scale problems met with ignorance and stagnation.

The tides will turn in china, once that positive notion gets suffocated by misaligned elites.

The magic of democracy isn't that it promises good governance, the magic of it is that it provides a clear avenue for a peaceful transfer of power that is exercised every few years.

Most functioning democracies require more than 51% of a senate and six justices and a criminal head of state to completely unravel.

> The magic of democracy isn't that it promises good governance, the magic of it is that it provides a clear avenue for a peaceful transfer of power that is exercised every few years.

We are currently witnessing the dismantling of this illusion. The reason western governments increasingly engage in lawfare against the opposition is that for the first time since the post-WWII order, they are threatened by a real regime change.

> for the first time since the post-WWII order, they are threatened by a real regime change.

It's only new if you are blind to post-WWII history.

In the western world alone, there was no shortage of incredibly vicious fights with communist/socialist groups in in post-war Europe (Most prominently in Italy and Greece), to say nothing of the various domestic decolonisation movements (The British and French governments were scared shitless of them), secessionist movements in Quebec, Spain, that entire thing in North Ireland (the understatement of the century), the Civil Rights and universal suffrage movement in the US, collapse of prominent dictatorships in Portugal and Spain...

State-threatening social upheaval is nothing new, we just have a particularly shitty flavour of it right now, as fascism and fascist-adjacent movements are currently waxing.

You are mixing every western conflict you've heard of in one big bucket, stir vigorously and call it an argument. What do wars of religion (which happen under most forms of government, except perhaps communism) have to do with democracy?

What is "the Civil Rights and universal suffrage movement in the US" if not a continuation of the leftist politics that Roosevelt started? What has the authoritarian Franco regime got to do with "democracy"?

None of this makes any sense.

Most of the events I've listed cannot be described as 'one side wins and makes the other illegal'. Many of them ended with compromises, or partial success, or complete success, but the losers were not banished from public life. (They just held on to coalitions of waning influence. Some of them are resurging.)

> What is "the Civil Rights and universal suffrage movement in the US" if not a continuation of the leftist politics that Roosevelt started

The CRM was bottom-up, with personalities like Malcolm X and MLK both scaring the shit out of the government, due to their ability to mobilize millions of people.

Did they win and make the other side illegal? No.

Did the dipshits they fought win and make them illegal? I'd say no to that, as well.

> Did they win and make the other side illegal? No.

That is exactly what they did. The Civil Rights Act usurped the constitution.

That is a ridiculous definition of 'made the other side illegal'. There's no shortage of vermin actively working to undermine and dismantle it, and none of them are going to prison.

Fascism is, and always has been, how capitalism defends itself from socialism. When the population starts getting the idea that the people who rules us (billionaires) are bad people or have too much power, the rulers defend themselves by redirecting it at one or more scapegoat groups instead (like Skaia in Homestuck, to make a particularly silly analogy). Often, this works. This is what happened in Germany.

The word "fasces" as in "bundle of sticks" refers to to the elites putting aside their individual differences and banding together to protect their class. They have no problem doing class consciousness.

The problem is not democracy, it's corruption fueled by sociopaths who insist on controlling everything and buy politicians. The problem with everything in society is that many people are fundamentally broken. Plenty of people aren't broken and can get along without committing crimes or plotting to take over the world.

So man‘s fallen nature rules out any form of good governance then? What a weird argument.

In the US, at least, good governance has been subverted, the political machine is bought, the free press is like a caged animal, and so on. The pillars of democracy have crumbled under the weight of kleptocracy.

There's no government that can solve for the problem of people who are at their core antisocial and want to conquer those around them. The rest need to be vigilant, and there's no utopia where people have to be so vigilant and suspicious of each others motives. Then when vigilence against evil wanes among the well-off happy types, when people start building bunkers instead of trying to fix anything, we get this impending collapse.

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