Discussion Main / DemocracyIsBad

Why isn't this full-on In-Universe Examples Only?

Hide / Show Replies

An awful lot of critiques of democracy boil down to this: evil people get to vote too. An evil policy may be a popular policy. The critics may feel that certain policies may be so important and beneficial that only governments that have such policies can possibly be democratic (a socialist economy is a common such policy in 20th-21st century critiques); when voting does not lead to such policies for whatever reason, then voting is actually undemocratic. Or less sarcastically stated, the critics hold that some policies are so beneficial that having such policies is more important than letting people decide for themselves; people are likely to decide wrongly for themselves.

A variant of this is the idea that a better form of democracy would be one where the good smart people are allowed to vote, and the bad stupid people aren't. Then the people will make only good smart decisions. (And hey, even the most inclusively democratic countries don't give toddlers the vote.)

Yes, the first is a call for enlightened dictatorship. The second for enlightened oligarchy; or at least, stepping back from the universal right to vote.

The usual counterargument is that dictatorships and oligarchies are even more likely to make bad decisions. It appears to be even harder to make sure the dictator, or the oligarchs, will always be the good smart people and not the bad stupid people than to make sure the voting masses are; and a committee of one, or even a committee of a few dozen, is much more prone to whims than a committee of hundreds of millions.

This is the anarchist critique—and even anarchists have been known to flounder when confronted by the realization that the sheeple might want to do things the anarchist thinks shouldn't be done.

(Plus, as of our current tech level, the logistics of having millions of people vote on everything remain unreasonable. Yes, even with social media and the Internet. It's difficult enough to get a Parliament or Congress to vote on everything that needs to be decided, and you're only talking about a few hundred people, with personal support staffs to aid them.)

Hide / Show Replies

Was the Terran confederacy a democracy? The Starcraft wiki suggests it was some form of oligarchy. It had democratic elements in the form of a senate (admittedly a corrupt one), sure, but that was only part of its ruling body.

It says that a Republic is "any form of government that is not a monarchy or theocracy". This is false. If no one objects, I shall remove it.

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/republic

Edited by Kotatroper

I removed the Dragon's Age and Mass Effect examples from the Video game section. As pointed out by another commentor in that section, the dragon's Age example doesn't really count since the political bpdy in question wasn't actually a democracy while the Mass Effect example was more alone the lines of Democracy Is Flawed rather than this trope.

Hide / Show Replies

A major problem is people not realizing the difference between a Democracy and a Republic. America's Founding Fathers hated Democracy.

Regardless of whether Real Life examples should be allowed I would like to note that the US is not an exception to the "new democracies don't work well" rule. The British Empire was already a constitutional monarchy by the time of the Revolution, the issue was that the colonial assemblies had no say in how much the Crown taxed them.

1. Most of the American Founding Fathers were opponents of democracy to some degree, favoring a constitutional republic with strong restrictions on government power.

• To say that the American Founding Fathers were "opposed to democracy" is only technically true. Yes, they were opposed to what we call democracy today. But they were less opposed to it than just about anyone else living at the time. By the standards of their time, they were very much the most pro-democratic side.

o It depends on who counts as a "Founding Father," honestly. The majority of the people who wrote the Constitution were quite anti-democratic relative to the revolutionary radicals who did not attend the Constitutional Convention. These absentees included, among others, Thomas Jefferson (probably the least radical of the group), Patrick Henry, Samuel Adams, and Thomas Paine—many of the original movers of the revolution. o It also depends on what you refer to as "democracy." The literal definition of Democracy, aka pure democracy, is "one citizen, one vote," with all decisions and all LAWS made by simple majority. However, even in the abstract of game theory this rapidly breaks down when a given group within the population realizes that they can vote themselves absolutely any set of rules they want simply by having one more vote than anyone else. Three wolves and a sheep voting on what is for dinner, in other words.

—The original quote is from Ben Franklin, "Democracy is two wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for dinner. Liberty is a well armed sheep contesting the vote."

For a mental exercise: would you have liked to put up the issue of Slavery to popular vote in the antebellum South? Or the issue of Jewish rights, in 1935 Germany? THIS is what the authors of the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the Federalist papers were opposed to. They preferred a system of Constitutionalism—- where the sheep all have guns, and a list of what's expressly NOT on the menu. The purpose of the Constitution was to make it clear that certain precepts were NOT to be up for a popularity contest. o Infodump! Look up Anti-Federalism as opposed to Federalism! Take That!

1. The Constitution of the United States of America was carefully written to prevent democracy from breaking out. There's a reason so few U.S. citizens bother to vote.

• There's also the fact that it tries to prevent a tyranny of the majority. The electoral college was made to prevent Virginia from dominating the government, and today prevents the same thing from happening between New York, California and Texas (the three most populous states)

Hide / Show Replies

Although the 300 movie didn't make it clear, the major bad guy in it was in fact the other king of Sparta. (Yes, Sparta had two.)