this post was submitted on 09 Feb 2025
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The issue is the people in charge have a different definition of "behave properly" to the rest of us.
Então porque não tomar o poder? why not take the power from them?
Yeah, democracy doesn't tend to optimize for honesty or other virtues.
I see how suffrage within a constrained context like in the USA leads to awful results.
However, if democracy is stuffed into the small box of suffrage, its potential is limited. If, instead, it's spread so that it grows everyone's capabilities, then you see something very different. You see hundreds of thousands or millions of people in the street, demanding change against authoritarianism, against unnecessary cruelty, against egotism ("me me me my nation my family my religion my clan my precious me me me").
So democracy tends to optimize for capacity building, democratic value orientations, and institutional capacity construction. In other words, it makes people more capable, it makes people care more about freedom for themselves and others, and it makes institutions guarantee that people can build their capacities to be free.
In fact, you can quote me on this, but the USA right now is way more anti-democratic than its people are and therefore there will be massive protests. Those protests will not be against democracy; they are democracy in action.
You can check out Christian Welzel and the World Value Survey literature to see why I say what I say.
Are you sure América USA ever were a democracy? Camon...
It sounds as if you think the USA is not a democracy, and I can agree with that sentiment to an extent. For example, I see how neo-conservatism and neoliberalism are whacking their axes at the forest of democracy in the USA. I also see how elites everywhere try to avoid investing in humanity, avoid paying back to the societies that made them rich in the first place, including in the USA. In fact, I'd argue that the elites in the USA are shackling people's hands and covering their mouths so that they work for their corporate overlords without questioning anything.
If I agree with that then how could I possibly believe anything else? Do I not believe the narrow narrative that America is anything but a democracy? Well, do you believe that the millions of Americans who have striked or protested for their rights are shackled and mouth-covered? Do you believe that democracy is defined narrowly as suffrage? Or do you believe that democracy is defined as making people more capable so that they value freedom and therefore strike or protest to transform their institutions to build the capacities of everyone?