No it wouldn't. There is no definition of democracy where 51% of the people enslaving the 49% would constitute a democracy. Except the one you just imagined for the purposes of "winning" an argument on the internet.
This is why people who give a shit about Democracy talk about minority rights, and free media, and non-discrimination. These are the core tenets of democracy.
replace “enslave” with gradually weaker words until you find the statement you, personally, agree with.
51% decide that 49% shouldn’t be allowed to drink alcohol. that’s a comparatively minor example of “tyranny of the majority” (which happened within living memory). now explore all battles you’ve been on the losing side of. abortion access? funding of overseas wars? legality of drugs?
i find it incomprehensible that if you look at things honestly you won’t find at least some instance when you’ve felt repressed by the democratic rule of the majority. “enslavement” is simply that repression exaggerated for the purpose of making you see it.
> This is why people who give a shit about Democracy talk about minority rights, and free media, and non-discrimination. These are the core tenets of democracy.
no, these are the core tenets of egalitarianism. democracy is merely one process by which we may approximate egalitarian ends. if you care about egalitarian ideals (or above, “liberation of the people”), you should be open to other processes which achieve them — not just the one you were raised to know.
As long as I'm still free to try to persuade the 51% that I was right in the last election I lost and I have a chance to win next time, then it sounds like a perfectly good system to me.
Just because sometimes you lose in a democracy doesn't make it tyranny. Quite the reverse. If you can't accept a political system that doesn't always let you get your way, then you're the tyrant.
WWII Japanese-American internment camps: though done by executive order, polls show 59-93% support, so it would have passed even through ordinary processes. is it good that this extremely non-egalitarian outcome is legitimate within a democratic political system?
if “yes”, we have radically different views that probably can’t be reconciled on a HN thread (could talk about them on a different platform — check my bio).
if “no”, then i’m not sure i understand your argument.
That argument essentially boils down to "democracy is illegitimate because sometimes majorities vote for awful things." There are many formulations of that argument. It gets repeated over and over.
But I've never seen a satisfactory answer to the followup question which is what political system do you envision can prevent such bad outcomes? Surely non-democratic societies produce similar bad outcomes more often.
That's why these arguments frequently reduce to one person saying "democracy is illegitimate because sometimes majorities vote for awful things" and the other person replying "democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others."
In a democratic system I believe the majority of people would vote for a constitution that says no group can enslave another group and that such a "constitution" then can not be changed by 51% majority. In other words protect the rights of minorities.
That's how all democracies work, 51% can't just make any enslavement-law they want. It is still democracy because the constitution that says so was approved democratically.
Democracy is not a single "thing". It is an adjective describing societies. Some have more of it, some less. Not so long ago women couldn't vote, nor blacks. A clear dividing line in current-day politics is that some people seem to think we should have less of it.
i think we're on the same page then. thanks for summarizing the conflict so clearly.
earlier in the thread we touched on (literal) slavery, and it was pointed out that it's basically irrelevant to modern, established states.
but how much of this is political, v.s. social and economic/technological? to state the obvious, slaves didn't gain legal rights by voting or participating in the political system. but moreover: if you took a democracy today, picked one race within it, excluded them from the political process and let everyone else vote on whether to enslave that race or not, would they do it?
i can't really imagine it. social norms have shifted so much that the politics just play a substantially more minor role here.
now take the WWII internment camps. if this replayed today, how would it be different? we didn't have RVs in the 40's, but today anyone with one could reasonably escape to the hills and live in only mild discomfort for at least a few months. information flows are generally faster, so anyone at risk of being interned would probably have more time to react. on the downside, surveillance means your bank account might be frozen, and your employment -- even if remote -- jeopardized. who really knows exactly what would happen -- more importantly technology plays a huge role in shaping what at first looks to be a strictly political outcome.
to get to the point: social norms and technology are inextricably linked to the same outcomes which political processes seek to control. to ask "what political system ... can prevent such bad outcomes" is incomplete: because that's only one of three large systems which drive these outcomes.
an extremely simplified view of these systems is something like this:
- social norms: the informal ways we relate to and interact with each other.
- political systems: formal process for legitimizing large-scale power relations between individuals and groups. underpinned -- especially in democracies -- by social norms or myths (widespread belief in a founding body of law like a constitution).
- technology: tools which change the specific dependencies between individuals. often they supplement the ways people relate to each other: in the past if i wanted to read a book i had to purchase it through a bookstore; now i have the choice to print it myself at home.
while political systems are about taking powers which are presumed to be necessary and deciding exactly how they should be distributed across the citizenry, technology uniquely offers a path toward diminishing if not altogether escaping those power relations.
> what political system do you envision can prevent such bad outcomes?
none. in both senses of the word. democracy gets us further along than any other political system we've explored by distributing power, and choice.
to bring choice where there was none before, at this point, technology is the remaining lever.
a generation from today, that person with the RV in the hills can manufacture their supplies on some 3d printer. they can purchase food through Bitcoin over some P2P internet link, maybe pick it up without exposing themselves with a drone. a generation from then, they can just grow food lab-style. utopian, dystopian, it's not a panacea, but it's better than being locked in a camp. it's better to have the choice.
if "liberation" means choice, and increasing choice means decreasing order, then infinite choice would imply anarchy in the political sense. not as a goal but as a side effect of pursuing desirable social outcomes. that's not to say people wouldn't self-organize into groups within this environment, some of which might have hierarchy and even formal decision making systems (even the most unconstrained successful non-profits leverage such systems) -- just that these would always be escapable: the risks would be minimal whenever those structures turn against you.
now that's a very distant, hypothetical future. we need a state to ensure the negative rights that protect choice in the first place: i don't see that changing in my lifetime. my point is just that we're at the point where the fruitful thing to do is gradually decrease the powers we hold over each other via political systems.
so what kind of political system allows itself to shrink over time? over the last century, the borders between democracies have been largely stable, most of the growth has been inward. in the US, i don't think we'd see any internal warring if we got rid of our central federal government. i think the path forward in my lifetime is just toward smaller democracies, connected by trade and treaties. during covid, here on the west coast CA, OR and WA were already coordinating outside of federal processes. distribute the powers held by the federal government back to the states, and from there on to the metro regions. in the political sphere, that seems the easy/low-risk direction to proliferating choice.
i'm arguing politics in a cryptocurrency thread. so to bring it back: now is our opportunity to remove one of the political levers we wield over each other. OP is right that Ethereum isn't democratic. head-to-head it might not be better than a democratic state's currency. but the coexistence of the two insulates against some possibility of "the majority voting for something awful". if the tyrannical majority vote me out of my home during WWIII, at least it's that much harder for them to vote away my ability to buy an RV and retreat to the hills.
That is because it is a business, not a government elected by people. And I'm fine with that. It's not too different from credit card companies. Problem of course is if it becomes a monopoly.
Nope, you are using a definition of democracy that is "all the things I like". Democracy is widely understood as voting-based mechanism for conflict resolution, it's just the implications that are not widely appreciated - if you take out "doing all the things I support", what remains under "democracy" is "doing all the things I don't support but the majority does". For every person, democracy IS just the ugly parts - the rest is "what I'd do anyway in my personal dictatorship utopia".
On a completely separate track, what is described above is just an extreme example of what is actually happening. Some proxy of majority voting forced me to finance, in addition to the things I would gladly finance out of necessity like police and roads; or even unnecessary things I'd gladly donate to like NASA or National Parks; such things as e.g. the continuation of the war in Afghanistan, student loan forgiveness, healthcare subsidies, TSA security theater, etc. They did it by taking some part of my earnings, i.e. forcing me to work extra instead of having more free time for the same salary. Then they used the money to bomb a foreign wedding or give some deadbeat a chance at grievance studies. I guess it's good it is only a part-time enslavement.
You should look up the definition of “democracy” in a dictionary before accusing others of making up a definition.
Im not just trying to “win an argument”, like you accuse me of, I’m pointing out an inaccuracy of your statement. Through your childish outburst I can see that you’re defining democracy to include other aspects of what you deem to be “good governance” — fine, but that’s confusing given the well known definition which doesn’t necessarily include those things.
The government is no longer democratic if it is attempting to enslave it's own people. Your example is just one of a democracy voting to no longer be a democracy. This does not mean that the people of the democracy were never free or empowered.
This is why people who give a shit about Democracy talk about minority rights, and free media, and non-discrimination. These are the core tenets of democracy.