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PaperclipPerfector  10d ago (text post)   29604 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 21, 2024

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Democracy only serves its purpose if you can convince the other half of the country that they lost fair and square. If they remain convinced you cheated, it's broken and will eventually spin out into civil war given enough time.

How rational, easy to prove or the character of the people who hold the doubt are all completely immaterial. All that matters is that they are in large enough numbers and capable of violence.

Democracy has to convince the losers, or it is defunct. That is how it is. And all complaints that this is unfair or insane are to lay at the feet of democracy as a concept, not at the those of the electorate. Since its entire claim to legitimacy rests on representation.

If half the people think the election is rigged, it is rigged in any practical sense. The ritual isn't powerful because the incantation was said in the exact right tone. It's powerful because people believe in it. And if they don't, it isn't; and you have to fix it or the magic won't work and peaceful transfers of power will stop.

I'm not sure it's a knock on democracy to say that it can break down and fail at times. We know that. Maybe this is one of those times. I don't know who is to blame? You can't blame someone who's convinced of something despite evidence -- they're idiots. You can't blame someone who's failed to convince an idiot. How could they? At a certain point it's all just atoms and very sad.

You can't blame someone who's failed to convince an idiot. How could they? At a certain point it's all just atoms and very sad.

Of course I can.

Why did that person see fit to extend the franchise to idiots?

At some point refusing to question the assumptions that lead to the end of the republic is dogmatism. Popular suffrage is not a suicide pact. And if this solution doesn't prevent civil wars, there are other ones available.

Hmm, I think the belief that democracy is the least worst system can survive the probability that there are a lot of idiots and it will sometimes fail. But that's a big discussion.

Democracy in America is already dead and dying then, because it seems to me there’s simply no practical way to convince one side of losers because they’ll nitpick any evidence to the contrary to death. Maybe this is to be expected, as a symptom of the larger decline of democracy across the world in recent years.

A couple of weeks ago in the weekly attempt to enforce consensus on the election issue there were plenty of practical ways. Thing is, they all involved actually taking things seriously, not having a prior of 0 on cheating, and not trying to paper over the problem to maintain the appearance of the integrity of the system. As long as your solution set is limited to "keep doing insecure elections, refuse to disallow obviously fishy things like ballot harvesting, and have no remedy when election laws are violated e.g. by ejecting observers or having the observers not be able to object", yes, you can't convince one side that things are on the up and up.

To that side, what you're asking is "how can we cheat outrageously and have the result be accepted by you?" and obviously the answer to that is "you can't".

Or, to quote @naraburns in that earlier thread, 'Because my answer to your question is "Well, it could stop rigging elections."'

Ok, if you truly need better election security to be convinced to accept the results, then make that a core part of your platform. Don’t focus on a whole bunch of other things with election integrity only a marginal footnote, and then afterwards come out with “Heads I win, tails the election was rigged because you can’t prove it wasn’t!”

If that’s truly your biggest concern with democracy, then make it an issue front and center and make the Democrats pay when they try to avoid it, just like how the Democrats have done that this election by focusing on Trump’s disregard for the electoral process. Instead, the revealed preferences of the MAGA constituency don’t appear to be anywhere close to emphasizing election security as one of their foremost issues.

That is also my appraisal of the situation.

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