Democracy isn’t “the freedom to choose”. Democracy is the freedom to continue to choose.
There are systems of governance that are not democracies that include voting - for example, an elective monarchy (the Saxons had that, at least in theory). They are not “democracies” for exactly that reason: once chosen, they cannot be un-chosen without violence.
In short, it is the freedom to un-elect that is characteristic of democracy, not the freedom to elect. Many systems contain a freedom to elect; only democracy, the freedom to un-elect, to vote out a current leader. The real freedom is that of voting out the bastards, not voting in the heroes. Remove by whatever means the freedom (including a vote), and you cease to have a democracy.
What you propose as a dilemma really isn’t one. It is akin to the sometimes-advanced notion that one cannot really be tolerant, because if so, one is required to tolerate the intolerant.
Since the “you” in the question is a variable, all things are equal as far as the rule of law goes.
However, a decision to vote out the ability to continue to choose does not retrospectively make the country not a democracy. Germany under the Weimar Republic was a democracy as that term is usually defined; the vote to give up that democracy doesn’t mean it never existed.
The democracy posited in the OP may vote itself out of existence by making bad electoral choices; we don’t and can’t know whether they will. It is still a democracy for now regardless of what happens down the road.
I’m not sure I understand what you mean by this. The specific democracy at issue may or may not have any respect for the rule of law; that trait is more likely in a democracy, but it’s not part of the definition.
Let’s assume that the people living in the Wiemar Republic simply voted to end the republic’s democracy and embrace Hitler as dictator-for-life (the actual story is a little more complex than that, involving a trifle more chicanery on the part of Hitler, but for the sake of argument, let’s assume it was a wholly free and fair choice).
It is true that the Republic was a democracy right up until the moment it was not; however, the bad stuff we associate with Nazism came about almost entirely after the Wiemar democracy ended. That is, after it ceased being a democracy.
It makes no difference to this analysis whether it ceased being a democracy because of a vote in a referendum, or because of an armed coup.
Your original dilemma was - which would be worse, living in Germany in 1932 (when you had a vote), or a British Colony at the same time (lacking a vote?)
This isn’t a great choice for a dilemma, because it only arises exactly because the Wiemar democracy was ended-changed into an autocracy; and while the British colonies may have lacked votes, they were dependencies of a metropolitan that was, in fact, a democracy.
In short, the ‘threat’ posed is that a democracy could, under certain circumstances, become a dictatorship - which isn’t a god argument for dictatorship.
I mean no more than that. The fact that the OP’s question is pegged to the individual viewer means that ‘respect for rule of law’ of any particular democracy or autocracy is independent of the OP’s question - it would vary with the reader, not the question. Given we have no information concerning readers, it makes sense to assume equality in this variable - and all things being equal, respect for the rule of law is more associated with democracy.
But it does make a difference, because the PEOPLE who comprised that democracy in 1932 had a different set of political ideals than those who have lived in other democracies at other points in time. The PEOPLE who voted for the Nazis in the early 1930s willingly gave up on democracy and the rule of law in favor of the heroic leader (and Nazi chicanery aside, plenty of people really did willingly make that choice: Hitler won the referendum of 1934 with 88% of the vote, in what most historians agree was still a reasonably fair election).
The dilemma arises precisely because of the internal weaknesses of German democracy and the German political landscape of the era. I’m not saying “dictatorship” is generally preferable to “democracy”; I believe quite the opposite. However, THIS democracy (Weimar Germany) was markedly inferior to THIS authoritarian regime (a British colony without local democracy).
The OP’s question isn’t about “dictatorship” versus “democracy”; it’s about some particular dictatorship and some particular democracy.
Assume equality of what? Are you assuming that the reader cherishes respect for the rule of law, or that the democracy possesses same?
Ah. OK, MrDibble, I see you’re from South Africa. I would look at the history of South Africa since they shifted to democracy, not that they are virtually as economically unequal now as they were then, and say, this is the kind of problem an authoritarian government of the left could probably have solved.
As for Cuba, they have the second highest human development level in Latin America and are a hell of a lot higher than South Africa, so I’d say they’re doing some things right. “This sounds stupid to me” is of course not an argument, any more than “I have scars” is.
Imperial Rome in the heyday of the good Caesars, e.g., did all right by its citizens for quite awhile (although if you weren’t a citizen it wasn’t such a good place). South Korea pole-vaulted from rural backwater to one of the world’s most advanced economies in not much more than a generation. Dissenters in both were executed; ordinary people found their lives transformed. Good or bad?
If you meant to say “note that” there where I bolded, this would be an absolute bullshit statement. South Africa is not as economically or politically as unequal as it was. No way, no how.
Given that we’ve had a leftist government (partly Communist Party) with an absolute mandate, how, exactly, would an authoritarian government do anything different?
Ummm, no, you don’t get to say USA, Oz, NZ and the Nordics are ‘mediocre’ compared to Cuba, and then turn around and trumpet their HDI, a measure where most of those countries are in the top 10 and Cuba is ranked 44. Who gives a shit if they’re better than a bunch of other shitty (often just recently come out of authoritarianism if not still in it) Latin American countries? They should be better than the ‘mediocre’ countries* by the measure you choose to use*.
Wow. I’m really regretting putting South Africa on my list of non-mediocre countries now, I can tell you. Oh, wait…I didn’t. So this is a complete* non sequitur.*
At some point in debate, it’s a good idea not to make assumptions about your opponent like “they’re a flagwaving jingoist”. SA has a lot of things going for it, good governance isn’t one of them (as I indicated in my very first post in this thread - they’d be the epitome of the ‘unlikeable democracy’ of the OP, in a way US Republicans could only dream of being.)
I didn’t say it sounded stupid. I said it was stupid. Because it was. And still is.
A fact you happily affirmed by trying to brag about Cuba’s HDI , a metric where all the countries you called ‘mediocre’ absolutely cream Cuba. The worst of them, Finland, is still 20 places better than Cuba. So thanks for making my arguments for me.
Absolutely BAD, for reasons I’ve bolded above, amongst others.
Seriously, now, people are touting Imperial Rome as fucking best practice for governance? A regime where advancement by Dead Men’s Sandals was common practice is hardly a great government. A colonizing, slave-based economy is not a good system for all. Bread and Circuses (or K-Pop) don’t make good governments.
Not really, no. The issue isn’t whether “the people” wanted Nazism - it is pretty clear that “the people” did not have much of a clue exactly what the Nazis intended for them - it is that, once Nazism had occurred, there was no way to undo that choice.
The whole point is that the Nazis, having by whatever concatination of events managed to bamboozle a referendum, were then free to do - whatever they wanted.
This is never true of democracy, and goes far to explain how the Nazis could get so very extreme.
The point you are missing is that the British could never get as extreme as the Nazis (absent wartime conditions - Churchill was responsible for some horrors in India during the war), even in the ‘authoritarian’ colonies, exactly because the metropolitan was a democracy!
Your comparison is unconvincing, because you cannot ascribe the crimes of the Nazis to the Wiemar Republic - it is the death of that republic and the imposition of autocracy that led to the crimes - and you cannot ascribe the (relative) virtues of British colonial autocracy to autocracy - it is the fact that they were dependencies of a democratic metropolitan that restrained them. You could never have had British SS running around throwing Bermudians into gas chambers for long, because that would (eventually) embarass the government in London.
No, I am assuming you cannot know what the reader cherishes, so it makes sense not to make any assumptions about that.
The point is that the definition of good government varies. What definition are you using?
For example, a free and fair government with strong support for individual rights of speech, religion, etc., means diddly if the most common cause of death is starvation. An authoritarian government that can repel genocidal invaders is objectively better than a democratic government that cannot.
Government doesn’t exist in a vacuum; each state must be able to respond to challenges foreign and domestic, and those challenges will vary across time and space.
For a thought exercise, take what you regard as a model of good government, and consider how they would have responded to the Black Death, or the Wehrmacht in 1939/1940, or the Thera volcanic eruption, or the Soviets marching in as in Hungary 1956 or Czechoslovakia in 1968. Would their response have been better or worse than the responses of the nations that really confronted these crises? Would their response have been better or worse than their response to the challenges they faced themselves?
The Germans willingly gave Hitler more power. The fact that they didn’t know the full extent of what the Nazis intended doesn’t change the fact that they willingly surrendered some of the checks and balances of the old regime (in that referendum, specifically the separation between the president and the chancellor).
Moreover, under the influence of Nazi propaganda, Hitler was probably MORE popular in Germany in 1938/9 than he’d been when he first came to power.
I’m not trying to ascribe the crimes of the Nazis to the Weimar Republic; the “crime” I am charging is that German voters willingly handed over their country to the Nazis in the first place. German Jews gained no benefit from living in a democracy, because the political ideals shared by the majority within that democracy did not respect minorities (racial, religious, or political). Weimar died because of (not despite) the majority political opinion.
The Black Death- the state of science and technology was such, at the time, that the form of government is of no importance.
Wehrmacht- forms of government seem to have had less impact than whether or not military thinking was state-of-the-art and nature played along. USSR was authoritarian, but it was the sheer size of the USSR and bad judgement by the Nozzees more than Stalin that saved them.
Hungary/Czechoslovakia- really I am not seeing here how you think any form of government might have handled the situation better than another. Neither country was in a position to resist the military might of their authoritarian overlords.
If the same party always won in a ‘democracy,’ I’d put quotes around the word. (I already did. Never mind.) There’d have to be something permanently out of whack: maybe you’d have the forms of democracy, but the media were totally controlled by an oligarchy. Or maybe something else.
Not knowing anything about how the game is rigged, I see my choice as being between:
a) A game that was obviously and miraculously rigged in favor of good jobs and education for all, equal rights regardless of race, creed, color, gender/orientation, etc., medical care and a secure retirement for all, dealing with long-term problems like climate change, and so forth.
b) A game that’s rigged in undetermined ways against all these things, that has the appearance but not the results of democracy.
You ascribe the fate of the Jews to the exercise of the will of the people in Wiemar Germany. You propose this as a an example of a case where democracy exposes a weakness.
But democracy is not merely the exercise of the will of the people. It is more specific than that - it is the system under which the people can periodically be expressed, can change in accordance with changed ciricumstances - can, in effect, throw the bums out.
Now, it may well be the case that, had the Germans been given an actual choice, they would have approved of the Nazi crimes - that they would have continued to vote for Nazi leaders, even knowing what those leaders were up to. Perhaps. But that is not what happened. By the time the Nazis committed their crimes, they had engineered matters specifically to avoid any threat of being thrown out by voting.
I’m happy with Hector’s use of HDI as a measure of governmental success, actually. Maybe toss in an environmental measure as well.
People in liberal democracies don’t starve. It’s people in authoritarian states (and failed states) that do. Holodomors, Potato Famines and Great Leaps Forward happen in authoritarian states. The closest liberal democracies come is the Dustbowl - and all that wrought was the New Deal, not mass death by starvation.
You seem to be treating famine and degree of authoritarianism as independent variables. That’s bullshit.
Name one such government (that was not, itself, committing genocide internally, like say WWII Russia repelling the Nazis)
Similarly, good governments must respond and look after the welfare of all their people, not just the men, or the ones in togas, or the white ones…
Who the hell knows? likely better, given their responses to other, similar crises. But what’s the point of speculating? Much better to compare how authoritarian and democratic governments have actually performed, historically. Like, say, their HDI outcomes.
The way I imagine the OP is that I’m a member of some small third party - let’s call it the Neo-Whig Party. I get annoyed because my party never wins any elections - it’s always the Democrats or the Republicans, who I consider to be virtually identical.
So the choice the OP is offering me is whether I’d like to stay with the current system we have where there are elections but my Neo-Whigs never win. Or would I like to cancel all future elections and hand power over to the Neo-Whigs, who will then rule by decree.
Personally, I’m modest enough to acknowledge I may not be perfect. I am willing to consider the possibility that my political views are wrong. Maybe there’s a good reason why the Neo-Whig Party never wins any elections. (Is it the cannibalism? You guys need to understand it makes sense in the proper context.) If a hundred million people are telling me I’m wrong, then maybe I am wrong.
So I’ll support a democratic system that gives power to the majority, even if I’m not in that majority.
I am arguing that “democracy” in and of itself does not imply freedom, or respect for human rights, or universal suffrage, or any of the other liberal ideas we usually take for granted today.
If the choice is between generic “democracy” and generic “dictatorship,” then obviously a generic democracy is more likely to espouse the ideas I believe.
That’s not the choice the OP is presenting, however. The OP is presenting a choice between a SPECIFIC democracy where my political ideals are never in favor, versus a SPECIFIC dictatorship where they are.
Frame the choice with some specifics. South Carolina, 1820. Unquestionably a democracy, with regular elections offering the opportunity to vote the bastards out. Fully one half of the populace are legally slaves with virtually no rights. Pretend you are a free black and your political ideals include notions about life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness for all residents. Are you sure and certain that you want to continue to live in democratic South Carolina, where any political party expressing abolitionist ideas never wins (heck, never runs), versus moving to, say, authoritarian France, where slavery had already been abolished?
You are conflating “democracy” and “liberal democracy”; the two terms are not synonymous. Further, famine can happen anywhere; weather and agricultural failure don’t respect forms of government. There are no examples today or in the recent past of liberal democracies solely or even primarily dependent upon agriculture to the extent that an agricultural failure could cause widespread famine, and in the era when such nations existed (e.g., the early 19th-century U.S.), no widespread agricultural failures occurred.
However, look at the example of the Bengal famine of 1943, which was at least in part caused by elected provincial governments elsewhere in India refusing to permit grain to be exported to provinces where it was in short supply. The elected government of Bengal did not respond well, and several million people died.
Sure, I agree with this. I disagree with the conflation of “democracy” and “good government that cares about all the people.” The world has seen plenty of democracies that don’t care about everyone.
France was a democracy, but it was a divided and weak nation, with a considerable right-wing faction that really didn’t think Hitler was all that bad. (Communism was the real enemy, Hitler was anti-communist, and the enemy of my enemy is my friend.) Certainly the poor planning and general incompetence of a chunk of the French General Staff didn’t help matters, but the Third Republic lurched from crisis to crisis; at crucial points as the continent lurched towards war, France didn’t even HAVE an organized government in power, because yet another coalition had fallen.
How about how other countries besides those two might have handled what was going on?