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Comment by robk | Hacker News Reader

When a democracy transitions to a dictatorship in a decade how do you not hood the electorate responsible? They made the choices continually to allow this.

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How long did it take Germany to transition into a dictatorship? How long will it take the US to transition into one? For us, the laws are already in place. We're just watching and waiting for the right guy, or the wrong guy, depending on your perspective.

What does it even mean to "hold an electorate responsible"?

Something like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_collective_guilt? (obviously what is happening in Venezuela is substantially less tragic and not directly comparable)

Probably the difference between something like Brexit, which no one doubts was a free and fair election, and, say, Assad, who is not really the 'fault' of the Syrian people.

I get that. I just don't understand how that informs our response to the situation. Both Brexit and Syria are terrible situations.

I don't see anyone offering Theresa May amnesty if she'll retire quietly to Saudi Arabia or Iran or something in order to aid in the forming of a lasting peace in the British Isles.

I suppose outsiders feel more or less justified in meddling depending on how much "it's their own damned fault" ?

Brexit is inconvenient; Syria is a humanitarian catastrophe. There are several orders of magnitude of difference.

Plus Brexit was achieved by the most democratic of processes, Syria's government was overthrown from a foreign country, because someone else had all good contracts - how are the two comparable eludes me.

Are you actually refering to referundum as the "most democratic process" when they are (mostly) always accompanied by massive propaganda ? The Brexit one being no exception (on both sides).

Thats a frequent opinion that sounds sensible. But when you put some thought into it, you realize that a lot of the electorate are poor uneducated people who did not know better.

and in the regions most people vote for whichever party drove them to the polling booth in a bus then gave them a sack of food and a gas canister afterwards.

Venezuelan elections have never been fair - there is a lot of vote rigging from all sides

Maybe so, it's often said that democracy requires an educated populace. So maybe if you don't have that, you don't have a democracy.

Also an unbiased and free news media, which is another thing that might need to be on your list.

If by unbiased you mean in terms of the bias variance trade-off, and not in terms of "tends to align with beliefs of neither side of the political spectrum," then I'm inclined to agree.

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