That's not "democracy," that's constitutionalism, which is inherently anti-majoritarian
That was a nice sleight of hand, but democracy and majoritariansm are not synonims. IMO majoritarianism is the failure mode of democracy - mob rule. We saw this happen in Hungary, where Orban used his majority to cement sixteen years of one-party dictatorship and only by a miracle got deposed this year.
Pluralism is how democratic institutions can actually be upheld and protections like free speech can be protected from the tyranny of the majority.
That was a nice sleight of hand, but democracy and majoritariansm are not synonims
They are synonyms. That’s why the Founders called America a “constitutional republic” rather than a “democracy.” “Democracy” is like a color: blue, green, or red. You never find it by itself in the real world. It’s always got something else mixed in: constitutionalism, liberalism, even constitutional monarchy.
And there is a good reason to be precise about using orthogonal terms in orthogonal ways. As Georgetown’s Shadi Hamid explains, conflating “democracy” with “liberalism” and Anglo/European cultural and political norms makes it very hard to understand how democracy actually operates globally: https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/05/de....
More to the point here, we don’t have a democracy in the U.S. We have a constitutional republic with myriad checks on majoritarian rule: the Supreme Court, the Senate, the Electoral College, etc. Thus it’s important to be precise about when you’re saying a particular decision should be turned over to the majority and when you think majoritarian impulses must be checked by anti-majoritarian institutions.
Here, I’m trying to be precise: I think the majority should get its way when deciding who to affirmatively support with taxpayer dollars. I think public spending priorities are at the core of where the people are preeminent. That’s why the House of Representatives in the U.S. and the House of Commons in the U.K. have the Power of the Purse. But the majority should be checked by courts when it comes to shutting down independent speech from private individuals.
I'm not American, so I'm less interested in debating your (or even any Anglo!) political traditions and norms. I'm more interested in systems design and the implications of structures. It's easy to get stuck in the particular when the questions are universal, let's not fall for that.
I don't think a democratic system has to be inherently majoritarian in design and I don't believe they are synonyms - how the demos is determined and weighed is not a given based on the etymology itself. Think of Ancient Athenian democracy, where the demos was considered wealthy male land owners, or even pre-emancipation America!
More importantly, I'm less interested in abstract labeling than I am in designing a democratic system that is robust and can survive authoritarian impulses of a ruling class (that might be democratically elected, as it has been in all the examples I've named).
I saw the result of what you propose - ruling party control of government funded media - happen right in my backyard. Hungary was functionally a one-party dictatorship with total media control through a combination of government controlling the purse strings of public media and government-aligned oligarchs capturing the private market.
It functionally stopped being a democracy precisely because party with majority support at one point in time used said majority to completely take over control of the fourth estate, thereby effectively kneecapping democratic control mechanisms going forward.
As an extreme example, this mechanism was also core to the process the Nazis used to take Weimar Germany from democracy to dictatorship - they even had a fancy term for it, Gleichschaltung.: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gleichschaltung
There's lots of precedent for why letting the ruling party control the budgetary survival of the mechanism that is supposed to keep it in check is dangerous to democratic survival. That's my point. The labels are a distraction, an inaccurate one at that.
Comments
That was a nice sleight of hand, but democracy and majoritariansm are not synonims. IMO majoritarianism is the failure mode of democracy - mob rule. We saw this happen in Hungary, where Orban used his majority to cement sixteen years of one-party dictatorship and only by a miracle got deposed this year.
Pluralism is how democratic institutions can actually be upheld and protections like free speech can be protected from the tyranny of the majority.
They are synonyms. That’s why the Founders called America a “constitutional republic” rather than a “democracy.” “Democracy” is like a color: blue, green, or red. You never find it by itself in the real world. It’s always got something else mixed in: constitutionalism, liberalism, even constitutional monarchy.
And there is a good reason to be precise about using orthogonal terms in orthogonal ways. As Georgetown’s Shadi Hamid explains, conflating “democracy” with “liberalism” and Anglo/European cultural and political norms makes it very hard to understand how democracy actually operates globally: https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/05/de....
More to the point here, we don’t have a democracy in the U.S. We have a constitutional republic with myriad checks on majoritarian rule: the Supreme Court, the Senate, the Electoral College, etc. Thus it’s important to be precise about when you’re saying a particular decision should be turned over to the majority and when you think majoritarian impulses must be checked by anti-majoritarian institutions.
Here, I’m trying to be precise: I think the majority should get its way when deciding who to affirmatively support with taxpayer dollars. I think public spending priorities are at the core of where the people are preeminent. That’s why the House of Representatives in the U.S. and the House of Commons in the U.K. have the Power of the Purse. But the majority should be checked by courts when it comes to shutting down independent speech from private individuals.
I'm not American, so I'm less interested in debating your (or even any Anglo!) political traditions and norms. I'm more interested in systems design and the implications of structures. It's easy to get stuck in the particular when the questions are universal, let's not fall for that.
I don't think a democratic system has to be inherently majoritarian in design and I don't believe they are synonyms - how the demos is determined and weighed is not a given based on the etymology itself. Think of Ancient Athenian democracy, where the demos was considered wealthy male land owners, or even pre-emancipation America!
More importantly, I'm less interested in abstract labeling than I am in designing a democratic system that is robust and can survive authoritarian impulses of a ruling class (that might be democratically elected, as it has been in all the examples I've named).
I saw the result of what you propose - ruling party control of government funded media - happen right in my backyard. Hungary was functionally a one-party dictatorship with total media control through a combination of government controlling the purse strings of public media and government-aligned oligarchs capturing the private market.
It functionally stopped being a democracy precisely because party with majority support at one point in time used said majority to completely take over control of the fourth estate, thereby effectively kneecapping democratic control mechanisms going forward.
As an extreme example, this mechanism was also core to the process the Nazis used to take Weimar Germany from democracy to dictatorship - they even had a fancy term for it, Gleichschaltung.: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gleichschaltung
There's lots of precedent for why letting the ruling party control the budgetary survival of the mechanism that is supposed to keep it in check is dangerous to democratic survival. That's my point. The labels are a distraction, an inaccurate one at that.