As they say, “everything is political”. And yes, “only the information I say is political is allowed” is quite the overreach.
Believing that you’re the only person who deserves to exist and that everyone else should be killed is still a political view, and one that must be allowed to exist in a democracy as long as you don’t actually start killing people. Odious and hateful ideas are still political ideas (see: American Democrats and Republicans arguing that the others’ ideas are odious and hateful, for example), and if we believe in democracy we have to believe that the people can be trusted with unrestricted political information.
A manipulable minority that acts on these calls to violence is enough to deeply damage a democracy.
That’s why acting on those calls to violence is illegal, while speech is not.
The majority did vote for democratic parties but that isn’t enough, it has to be an overhelming majority that votes for democratic parties.
Yes, that’s a huge flaw of coalition system governments, but it doesn’t change the overall point - you either trust the people with the choice of electing their government, or you don’t. If you only trust some of the people with electing their government, you don’t have a democracy - you just have a slightly-larger-than-normal autocracy.
Also, unless I’m misunderstanding something (which I very well may be), it seems to me that 70% of the people voted for democracy in Germany - your elected representatives not being able to agree with each other is what appears to be the problem.
Also: I’d argue that representative democracies are a lot more susceptible to this kind of flaw where parties have to resort to manipulation to get the votes of people.
I was going to argue in my previous comment that representative democracies are dangerously close to autocracies already, but thought it too far afield from my main point. So, I think I agree with you here.
A system where more political decisions are voted on through direct democracy and representatives are only chosen to enact the policies already selected by the people would be less susceptible to these problems (but, again, would rely much more heavily on the people, which, again, is the entire question).
(Also, I’ve enjoyed this conversation so far - thanks!)
As they say, “everything is political”. And yes, “only the information I say is political is allowed” is quite the overreach.
Believing that you’re the only person who deserves to exist and that everyone else should be killed is still a political view, and one that must be allowed to exist in a democracy as long as you don’t actually start killing people. Odious and hateful ideas are still political ideas (see: American Democrats and Republicans arguing that the others’ ideas are odious and hateful, for example), and if we believe in democracy we have to believe that the people can be trusted with unrestricted political information.
That’s why acting on those calls to violence is illegal, while speech is not.
Yes, that’s a huge flaw of coalition system governments, but it doesn’t change the overall point - you either trust the people with the choice of electing their government, or you don’t. If you only trust some of the people with electing their government, you don’t have a democracy - you just have a slightly-larger-than-normal autocracy.
Also, unless I’m misunderstanding something (which I very well may be), it seems to me that 70% of the people voted for democracy in Germany - your elected representatives not being able to agree with each other is what appears to be the problem.
I was going to argue in my previous comment that representative democracies are dangerously close to autocracies already, but thought it too far afield from my main point. So, I think I agree with you here.
A system where more political decisions are voted on through direct democracy and representatives are only chosen to enact the policies already selected by the people would be less susceptible to these problems (but, again, would rely much more heavily on the people, which, again, is the entire question).
(Also, I’ve enjoyed this conversation so far - thanks!)