Yeah, I’ve heard that there is some very axiomatic math to being anti-democratic for some reason. Unlike the mathematically sound benevolent and also omniscient philosopher kings.
makes it clear you need expert decision making and democratic participation and without them no system is sustainable. Yet these can't really be reconciled: the public often doesn't know enough to have a worthwhile opinion.
The last defense of democracy is Winston Churchill's "democracy is the worst form of government – except for all the others that have been tried." What it promises is that you can depose bad leaders in an orderly way, not have good leadership. But today it fails to do even that and people are craving good leadership. In the US today it is not "make the trains run on time" but it is having trains at all -- so Xi's China can look a little appealing to some people, even myself on a bad day although I know better.
The argument that Trump represents a threat to democracy doesn't motivate most people in the US because our democracy lacks output legitimacy, whether it is really bad as people think it is an open question in my mind (I'm lucky enough to be a homeowner) but you just can't sell people on it -- the Schoolhouse Rock song and dance about How a bill becomes a law looks like tangled-up proceduralism and the last scene in the The Parallax View where a murdered politician careens on a golf cart through tables on the floor of a conference center is more how it feels
It's easy to say that the path to Eudaimonia today would involve ignoring politics but Nader and Pericles would agree that "If you're not turned on to politics, then politics will turn on you"
> makes it clear you need expert decision making and democratic participation and without them no system is sustainable. Yet these can't really be reconciled: the public often doesn't know enough to have a worthwhile opinion.
The last I read in passing about Habermas (I could never in a hundred years read Habermas) was that he was one of the ringleaders of deliberative democratic theory or whatever it was called. A very elitist theory according to that author.
And from reading some of that piece it made sense. The world is run by sadistic child molesters (for posteriety: Epstein Class). That positions of power actively attracts sociopaths seems to be scientifically backed and not just hearsay coming from relatively normal people. So what are the democratic theorists doing?
What are they doing?
They’re doing schoolroom hazing rituals; testing whether the public has big enough brains for the responsibility of governing their own communities and lives (c.f. pedophilic sociopaths).
The reason why the public “often doesn’t know enough to have a worthwhile opinion” is pretty fucking obvious! Their opinion doesn’t matter! It is irrelevant! See R. Dahl, democratic elitism.
Someone else from the Frankfurt School wrote about the post-WWII irrational mindset. Yeah, well, not that I can recall any of that right now, but my own synthesis is that people rationally took to their own devices and pursued whatever their alienated selves fancied and had good use of; liberal democratic society is not a classroom writ large where Habermas and people like him rule intellectually and the commoners follow along with their curriculum. That would have been authoritarian in a very nerdy way. But even that would have been an improvement over actually existing liberal democracy. A society where people are irrational because it doesn’t matter. We are by and large not part of the body politic, like 98% of the time.
... so why don’t people know things. Very strange (says Habermas).
The idea seems to be that the commoners need to first prove themselves worthy to Habermas and his ilk. They do that by, of course, going back to school (extra-curricular). Then they rack up however many hours in subjects that matter to politics and whatever. Not because it will help them politically. They are still politically impotent. But! Once they have worked up the hours, maybe the theoreticians will find them worthy. Relief!
Then their studying will be for naught since these theorists just acted as gatekeepers anyway. Because the next obstacle is, I dunno, think tank merchants who will discredit the theoreticians who are holding up the impotent and knowledgable commoners.
> The last defense of democracy is Winston Churchill's "democracy is the worst form of government – except for all the others that have been tried."
Okay.
> The argument that Trump represents a threat to democracy doesn't motivate most people in the US because our democracy lacks output legitimacy, whether it is really bad as people think it is an open question in my mind (I'm lucky enough to be a homeowner) but you just can't sell people on it
