General Politics Thread

Reactionaries are exactly that inflexible. That’s kind of their whole thing.

Then what should be done with them if you want to live in a democracy? Especially if they made large parts of the population?

Edited by KazuyaProta on Aug 4th 2019 at 11:22:51 AM

Give them a taste of their own medicine?

Edited by Voltron64 on Aug 4th 2019 at 9:31:55 AM

Make sure the rest of the population votes? I mean, that’s like the very most basic idea behind democracy. I’m not sure what you’re getting at.

Edited by archonspeaks on Aug 4th 2019 at 9:29:03 AM

What if the reactionaries are over 60% and are guaranteed to win the elections?

Then you live in a reactionary state. Those do exist.

What are you asking?

Is morally permissible to ignore Democratic votes in.order to prevent reactionaries from reaching power?

I used to believe it wasn't but those later years have soured my opinion

Edited by KazuyaProta on Aug 4th 2019 at 2:31:06 PM

What do you mean by "ignore"? If you mean overthrow the government by force, no I would say it isnt. Because if one minority can overthrow the democratic regime by force, that's an invitation for anyone to try. You're asking for endless civil war.

An endless civil war at worst and an endless Full-Circle Revolution at best.

"Is morally permissible to ignore Democratic votes in.order to prevent reactionaries from reaching power?

I used to believe it wasn't but those later years have soured my opinion"

I'm of the opinion that, with democracy, letting them burn their hand to teach them never to touch the fire is the only recourse when they feel compelled to elect a regressive. Imposing your will on the populace to guarantee an outcome isn't sustainable. That said, your situation is deeply hypothetical — political reaction ends in failure because there was already a reason why society changed and isn't as the reactionaries want. Unless they're conservatives maintaining a particularly repressive status quo, I doubt there's any reactionary faction that could actually command 60% of the vote. Trump, for example, only scratches the surface of what is potentially reactionary and he only became president because of electoral college skulduggery, not a decisive acclamation by the people. In that, I can feel comfortable in proclaiming that what we really need to be guarding against isn't a massive reactionary wave from below — which basically never happens — but of a vanguardist right-wing element using structural flaws to capture power disproportionate to their actual political support. Think about it this way: he managed to eke out a victory by capturing a very well-placed 40,000 votes in an election where some 120 million voters didn't show up. Reactionaries win when the rest of us do nothing.

Edited by CrimsonZephyr on Aug 5th 2019 at 10:01:33 AM

To be fair, it should be noted that majority rule doesn't have to be the final word in a democracy. In the US, constitutional law still applies even if they're unpopular.

Having said that, I would say that democracy shouldn't be opposed strongly. To use a metaphor: if we think of politics as a sport, a big problem it has is that the "fans" often prioritize their "team" winning over the actual integrity of the sport. People will be perfectly fine with any dirty trick that works in their own interests, and then will wonder why politics are so underhanded.

History has a wonderful tendency to believe that the populace is too stupid to rule itself.

Colonialism, Irish repression, and so on.

My opinion is that democracy means that you have to respect the will of the people operating under a Constitution.

Your last sentence is precisely why the electoral college doesn't make sense to me even though God knows I've tried to read up on it and people tried explaining to me. How is it possible to lose the popular vote but win the presidency?

"The will of the people" is also thrown about in the Brexit discussion too, which as I've noted maybe they should have set up a referendum this important saying "ok side with the most votes wins but we leave a 5% threshhold - if the difference is less than that let's call it undecided and vote again".

>How is it possible to lose the popular vote but win the presidency?

The TLDR is the balance between making sure all of the areas of the United States agree and all of the people agree. Which isn't crazy in a federal system.

In the US, you typically take the number of senators (a fixed number per state) plus the number of representatives (variable roughly based on population). Those are awarded to the winner of that state. The impact of this is that winning a low population state counts more towards winning per capita then a high population state does per capita.

"Your last sentence is precisely why the electoral college doesn't make sense to me even though God knows I've tried to read up on it and people tried explaining to me. How is it possible to lose the popular vote but win the presidency?"

1) Because after a certain point, highly populous states are undervalued and after a certain point, underpopulated states are overvalued, meaning it's possible to not just win without winning the popular vote, but to do so with an extraordinarily small vote — the absolute minimum you need is something like 24% of all voters.

2) Most states aren't competitive. The Democrats routinely win in the Northeast and West Coast, the Republicans routinely capture the Deep South and the Midwest. The few states that are competitive together have just enough electoral votes to decide elections, but that conversely means that a president is elected by virtue of such and such district in Ohio having a very localized surge in support.

3) Almost all statewide presidential elections are winner-take-all and first-past-the-post. You don't need a majority, just the most votes within that state, and you take everything, even if you only won by five hundred votes, were up against numerous competitive candidates, or both.

The central conceit of the EV system is that by mandating that presidential candidates venture to earn the support of areas that are not financial, technological, or population hubs, you ensure the president is conscious of the needs of all people. In my opinion, and in full disclosure, I despise the system, what it ensures is a great deal of political myopia, pandering to swing states whose local biases may not be representative of popularly supported policy.

As he mentioned, the Senate is another institution that can, and does run contrary to population. Because there are two per state and all states are not equal in population, one party can control the Senate, and therefore which bills are allowed to be debated on the floor, while representing a minority of the population, which is a trend that will steepen in the years to come with the GOP.

Edited by CrimsonZephyr on Aug 5th 2019 at 10:36:44 AM

While technically true, the real underlying reason is because way back when the Constitution was being signed, the states were considered the sovereign governing entities, not the central government. The President didn't represent the people directly, he represented a majority of the states (and at that time, electors were selected by the state's legislatures). It's technically the states who directly elect the President, not the people. We have since simply watered the system down to the point that electing a president is more representative of popular opinion than it isnt, but vestiges of the old paradigm remain, over-ruling the popular vote in close elections.

So, basically... trying to make sure big states don't overwhelm the small ones and don't bully them into agreeing and smaller/more rural states aren't forgotten Gone Horribly Right?

Essentially. That and the priorities the States and the Federal government had back then are not completely the same priorities they have now. There have been an extra 250 years to cement the states together in an Union and form a mostly cohesive nation with a common identity - rather than the rag-tag group of independently run colonies that they were back in those times. The field the game is played on has changed, but the rules haven't.

It's almost as if the EU became essentially one country some day in the far future with European identity overriding national identity for the vast majority of people, but all the countries still have the same veto powers, which would allow Luxemborg or Cyprus to veto certain changes to the entire union.

Edited by GoldenKaos on Aug 6th 2019 at 10:24:12 AM

I see. Makes a little more sense than I first though I do agree given the different circumstances an amendment of the rules may be in order.

(BTW it's a funny world we live in. When I read "Europe becoming essentially one country with European identity overriding national one" I almost laughed but then I remembered 100 years ago people would have laughed at being told of the current level of cooperation and coexistence in Europe.)

Edited by akanesarumara on Aug 6th 2019 at 11:59:12 AM

History moves faster than we think sometimes. And sometimes things take far longer than we expect. I deliberately did not pin a number on that eventuality.

The electoral college made some sense when we were a loose confederation of states. But the moment we moved away from that state of being it outlived its usefulness.

Better we reform it so our system becomes more responsive to the needs of the people instead of unfairly giving a few unearned privileges.

Edited by Fourthspartan56 on Aug 6th 2019 at 9:42:48 AM

The electoral college made more sense in the 19th Century where the presidency was poorly regarded, institutionally weak, and occupied by forgettable people. The House of Representatives was at the absolute peak of its power, in contrast. Even after the Civil War, the presidency just wasn't that important. The thing is, the de facto powers are decided by judicial interpretations of constitutionality, the maturation of bureaucracy, and development of mass media, which naturally gravitates towards the Cult of Personality over the balance of power or the collegiality of government, while the methods for changing the Constitution are a functional impossibility and are deliberately designed to be as hard as possible, without outright saying that it's not supposed to change. The actual power of the Presidency so outstrips the written power of the Presidency that the Constitution may as well be lying to the reader, so the Electoral College makes sense within the context of the Constitution, frozen in time from that era, but not as an element of an extant government.

Edited by CrimsonZephyr on Aug 6th 2019 at 6:20:56 AM

I've lately been thinking about countries like China, Russia, Iran and so on, and how their leaders/governments like to go on about how internal pro-democracy, pro-human rights etc. elements are always part of nefarious Western plots to force their cultural values on them.

I suspect this is because those countries have never really had anything resembling a functioning democracy in their entire histories, and they were only really introduced to the whole idea after all the meddling Western great empires turned around and started promoting peace & love, and so they interpret this as a thinly-veiled attempt to subvert their own development into rich, industrial countries via means that those same Western hypocrites did - they're just being honest about it.

With this in mind, does this mean it's impossible at this stage for any sort of genuine homegrown democratic movement to pick up steam in those countries without it being dismissed as 'Western meddling'? I mean, I'm fairly certain something like that happened in Japan during the Bakumatsu era, which lead to the Meiji Restoration - granted, that eventually transformed into the Japanese Empire, but IIRC Ryoma Sakamoto was a big fan of American democratic principles, and yet he was associated with very nationalistic, Occupiers Out of Our Country elements in the anti-Shogunate movements.

Iran had a functioning democracy for a brief while. It was very much western meddling that brought an end to it.

Oh yeah, I forgot about Operation Ajax. I still could have sworn Iran's gov't made some 'democracy/human rights is a Western conspiracy' comments in the recent past, which if so is a little ironic given those circumstances.