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I see people saying this, but I don't see it. I don't get why this really makes much of a difference; many of the scenarios I see circulated and speculated about in many of the other places I frequent are of the sort that won't be affected by this.
Except, as I've noted before, many on that side tend to define "Democracy" rather differently than what you imply. The people voting for whatever representative they want — whether approved by elites or not — is "populism," which is the greatest threat to Our Democracy; "Democracy" meaning rule by an intellectual vanguard party of elite technocrats who are the only people with the smarts to enact the Rousseauan "general will," which is what the masses would vote for were they all properly educated and enlightened enough to know what's truly good for them, instead of being loaded down with ignorant bigots and bitter clingers, vulnerable to exploitation by the next Hitlerian populist demagogue.
Do you have a citation for this, because I've only seen the reverse — people on the left arguing that "being forced to vote for an unnamed, unelected cabal of unaccountable lobbyists, bureaucrats, and special interests" is the very definition of Democracy.
Yes, which, via redefinitions of "Democracy" along the lines of places ranging from Germany to Ukraine to China, will work just fine — because "if we don't run the country
anti-democraticallyinsulated from people who vote wrong, it will be the end ofDemocracyrule by those who know best."(I can't find it via a quick search, but I remember back in 2016 over at the subreddit linking to a professor who argued for stripping the franchise from Trump voters, on the grounds that it's legitimate — the right thing for democracy, even — to remove the vote from those who've demonstrated that they will misuse it by supporting an unacceptable candidate.)
Again, we saw once and for allwhat happens when you let the people vote for whoever they want — instead of from a carefully-curated menu of elite-acceptable figureheads for the "unnamed, unelected cabal of unaccountable lobbyists, bureaucrats, and special interests" — and let said representatives have actual power… in 1930s Germany. "Never again" means never again.
There are things like that:
https://www.jurist.org/commentary/2024/01/states-are-well-within-their-rights-to-take-trump-off-ballots/
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