I thought this one was pretty good

I was listening to a podcast recently with Francis Fukuyama and he pointed something out that is obvious but I had not seriously considered. In a real democracy, like America, Germany, etc, the failures of government can be reconciled with the citizenry with voting people out. Bush was a mess, we voted in Obama. Trump was a mess, we voted in Biden.

But what does the population do when the leaders are not able to be voted out?

You have to shift the blame somewhere. That's why Putin is so reliant on the claim that the CIA runs every protest and revolution.

Authoritarian leaders have to create a parallel environment of facts in order to maintain power. And that aligns with what Trump and his cultists have done in this country. The truth is an obstacle, so they create an alternative reality that aligns with Trump.

This post was edited by IceMage on Mar 28 2023 08:14am

Voting people out works when at least one of the candidates running represents your views on a given issue. For decades we've been presented with 'choices' for presidents that plain frankly refuse to touch issues like military spending, like the debt, like corporate welfare, and so on.

Post Iraq, vast majority of our populace has been generally against wars and interventions, and here we are 15 years later with regular interventions and wars, so to claim somehow our system of representation actually works is kind a joke, it works on some issues, but other issues that are off the table and only get decided by filtering out unwanted candidates through the electoral collage it doesn't.

Only if they make major policy mistakes and the dissonance between the lived reality of the citizenry and the official, government narrative becomes irreconcilable. And that is a description which applies just as well to mainstream and liberal politicians as it does to right-wingers or to outright authoritarians. How do you explain why people like Trump/Erdogan/Netanyahu get voted into office in the first place in free and fair elections?

This post was edited by Black XistenZ on Mar 28 2023 08:32am

Are you arguing that the electoral "collage" did not represent the anti-war viewpoint in 2016?

The voters are misinformed and/or dumb.

So the same voting public that was "smart" enough to vote in Obama and Biden was somehow suffering from a spell of "temporary dumbness" in 2016 or what? Or could it be that Obama's 2nd term was a dumpster fire, Hillary was a historically awful candidate and Biden only won in 2020 not because he was such a great candidate with such a great platform, but rather because Trump had dropped the ball too badly?

Also, how do you explain stuff like Brexit, or the recent right-wing governments in liberal democracies like Sweden and Italy? How do you explain that avowed right-wing radicals like Le Pen in France or Bolsonaro in Brazil got to over 40% of the vote? Do you think that voters across the world have collectively gone insane over the past 15 years, or could it be that voters are revolting against a political status quo which voters increasingly perceive as failing them, no matter matter how hard their political elites and the MSM try to claim that everything is fine?

And the failures of both Bush and Obama led directly to Trump. The neoliberal paradigm failed, and voters sought an alternative. The response by mainstream political, media, and bureaucratic actors has been to try and narrow the Overton window and restrict the extent to which voters can demand an alternative to the status quo. And in doing so, they've had to employ the very same tools, e.g. propaganda, scapegoating, and omission of countervailing facts, which as you say, tend to be emblematic of authoritarian regimes.

I'm arguing that it doesn't matter if majority of voters believe one thing because if neither of the parties brings up that issue or cares to talk about it then those views will never be expressed politically.

It's like every election cycle, let's say there are 5 main things people care about. If both parties only focus on 3/5 issues is the democracy truly representative? So what happens subsequently is people vote for the candidate that best represents you on those 3 things and while the 2 are also important, there's nothing I or any of the millions of the voters can do about it.

In reality, we live in an oligarchy.

This post was edited by ofthevoid on Mar 28 2023 08:53am