@oralloy,
oralloy wrote:
Then they get the government that they vote for.
So you call it 'democracy' when the media and vote-buyers steer the voters into submitting to their authority/manipulation instead of basing their democratic participation on independent reasoning?
So can members of congress be impeached as well then?
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Perhaps it wouldn't. But House elections every two years will prevent the government from becoming too intolerable to the people.
Look, let's say global investment groups are trying to get Trump out of the way because he is bad for business. They can buy minions in congress, who then use their terms for nothing but attacking and gaining power over the president and/or ousting him to try to get someone in who's more docile to falling in line with the cues and pressures they expect them to obey.
Look at all this nonsense where every political candidate makes their finances public. They may as well be saying, "look, world, here are my puppet strings and pain points you can pull and push to influence me." That may help them get support to get elected, but it's because they are giving away their power before they even get it. There should be a law against anyone being elected to office if they have made their financial information public, like the emoluments rule. The problem would be that people would still transmit such information in secret and receive support in exchange for doing so.
livinglava wrote:Popularity isn't ultimately sufficient to produce good representatives. The people/voters have to be unbiased and the party system that controls the choices can't structurally prevent good government, as it currently does.
It's a limit against really terrible representatives however. People will not vote for someone who is truly unacceptable to them.[/quote]
So how was Hitler elected then?
Quote:Elections may not guarantee the very best people, but they do reliably prevent the very worst.
and where exactly does Hitler fall on that spectrum then?
livinglava wrote:You are promoting popular sovereignty as the key to good government, but it's not a magic bullet. In fact, popular sovereignty is the cause of and facilitator of fascism. Hilter was elected by referendum, for example.
"Democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time."
-- Winston Churchill
http://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/commons/1947/nov/11/parliament-bill#column_207[/quote]
Democracy is used by some people to mean mob rule but it isn't or there wouldn't need to be separation of powers and checks and balances. It is about the prevention of any subgroup from dominating others against their consent, whether minority or majority. It is about governance with consent, not in spite of the dissent of a minority.
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The way to prevent that is to try to be an informed voter. Join in political discussions to try to inform other voters. Do your part to strengthen democracy's protections against bad government.
That has nothing to do with congress abusing their power to expose presidential power to external coercion by revealing Trump's financial information.
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Yes, but that perpetually backfires on the Democrats to the GOP's benefit.
The only good it does is to make the public aware of how backroom-planned tactical collectivism works, to the extent that the public in fact perceives it instead of just getting caught up in the play as it is scripted.
They are supposed to reason with the public and with others, not strategically communicate with them in tactical pursuit of planned objectives.
Quote:livinglava wrote:In order to have democracy, different parties have to work together.
Not necessarily. Although bipartisanship is preferable.
You shouldn't rule against dissent unless there is some reason that is too compelling to allow dissent to impede it.
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Yes, but people tend to ignore this sort of silly rhetoric from the Democrats. It doesn't get them anywhere.
It is just an example of how they avoid actually engaging in civil discourse being strategic and tactical. E.g. if they want to pursue/protect legal abortion, they will focus on late term abortion or men interfering in women's rights instead of making an actual case for consideration and discussing. This latest statement about some children being unwanted and executing them before birth or on death row was an exceptional instance where a Democrat actually put out an idea for discussion without it being a tactical statement designed to pursue a policy strategy that avoids discussion in order to just railroad it through with as many votes as possible.
They are even talking now about how they need a supermajority to avoid Trump contesting the election results. They are always skirting the actual discussion to make their case in favor of tactical pursuit of victory against an enemy that needs to be removed from obstructing whatever it is they have decided on in their backrooms.
Quote:livinglava wrote:In short, the DEMs sort of pretend to listen to those outside their party program in order to coach them into accepting it, but they never really listen to and try to understand people who don't submit to their elaborately-constructed party program. They just don't believe in an open critical public discourse of ideas. All their ideologies are decided in academic discussions and by the time it is served to the public, it has been packaged for acceptance as propaganda, not food for public discussion.
That's why people vote for Republicans.
Well, most Republicans aren't strong enough on what to do when liberty fails to suffice as a platform for good self-governance of the people by the people. They don't want to offend away voters by telling them doing whatever they want at the expense of others is an abuse of liberty. They pander to self-interested egotism instead of honoring liberty as a decentralized system for taking social/environmental responsibility without the government structuring for people. They just tend to whitewash whatever the people choose as being good, instead of acknowledging that many people don't put sufficient effort into self-regulating for the greater good.
The problem with criticizing Republicans, however, is that the Democratic party profits from that both politically and literally, because the moment they get power they go to work spending money instead of looking for ways to address social problems on the cheap.