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Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

Western countries are fundamentally confused about how democracy works, and they actively harm developing countries in their ignorance. Democracy in modern Europe was preceded by centuries of "the divine right of kings." European countries had functional states long before they had democracies.

But the west today tries to build democracy in countries that lack any state to begin with (e.g. Afghanistan) or in countries where they have destroyed the state (Iraq, Syria). They hassle or intervene in developing countries with authoritarian governments (e.g. Bangladesh, Philippines, etc.) while overlooking their own histories.

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Democracy in its current form of universal suffrage has only existed for a relatively short period of time and has a very different character to the long histories of democracies which had restricted suffrage.

I wonder if there's a cultural element to it: do people support democratic processes in their families, neighborhoods, companies, etc? If not, I imagine it might be hard to top-down enforce democracy.

Support for democratic institutions and the rule of law has gone down in USA thanks to the MAGA movement. Is that cultural?

> I wonder if there's a cultural element to it: do people support democratic processes in their families, neighborhoods, companies, etc?

I don’t think that’s right - although some on the left have advocated “industrial democracy” or “workplace democracy”, it has by and large failed to take off - many democratic countries it doesn’t really exist (beyond rare exceptions), and even those which have some semblance of it (e.g. works councils in the EU) it is in practice rather toothless, comparable to the powerless “advisory” legislatures established by some Middle Eastern monarchies

Families don’t function democratically-the parents negotiate things between themselves and the children don’t really have a choice in it until they get old enough to leave the family home and fend for themselves.

My neighbourhood isn’t a democracy - yes we have an elected local government but it covers a much larger population and territory than just our neighbourhood. Even if one’s neighbourhood has something like a “homeowners association”, that’s usually timocratic (government by property owners) not democratic (government by the people) since renters don’t get to vote, adult dependents of homeowners don’t get to vote, a couple may jointly own a home but they get only one vote not two, some wealthy person owns five homes so they get five votes, etc (and sometimes even weighted voting, so rather than one property one vote, more expensive properties may give you more votes than cheaper ones)

While I agree that many organizations, families, and communities don't have strict direct, one-person-one-vote democracies, I do think countries that have more democratic governance tend to have behaviors that are more involved and participatory and not strictly top-down command-and-control hierarchies.

For example:

> Families don’t function democratically-the parents negotiate things between themselves and the children don’t really have a choice in it until they get old enough to leave the family home and fend for themselves.

Not all families operate this way. If a family is choosing where to go eat dinner, sometimes the father (or mother) always makes a decision and no one else gets to choose. Sometimes the father and mother negotiate. Sometimes the kids are the ones who almost always make the decision. Sometimes the parents consult the kids and have a group discussion and decision. Sometimes there's actually a vote amongst all family members and majority rules.

I believe a similar pattern happens in communities. Maybe a little less so in companies, as they tend to be the most top-down structures I think in even the most democratic societies, and yet even there, I think there are culturally varying levels of involvement in the decision making process.

There's definitely a cultural element to it! Many of my family members--college educated people from Bangladesh, many of them living for decades in Canada and Australia--have been celebrating the overthrow of the democratically elected government in Bangladesh. The result of that was replacing a somewhat authoritarian, but legitimately elected and quite popular,[1] government with a military-backed government nobody elected,[2].

Democracy doesn't come from reading books, it starts with what parents say to their small children. I'm a Bangladeshi married to a founding stock American. My wife was steeped in democracy from the beginning. As a kid, she attended mainline Protestant churches run by elected members of the congregation, and her dad participated in local government and civic organizations. This is so different from the relationship Bangladeshis have with their communities.

[1] About 70% approval according to one western organization's polling from 2023: https://www.cfr.org/blog/new-bangladesh-survey-hasina-remain....

[2] https://foreignpolicy.com/2025/02/05/bangladesh-interim-gove...

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