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Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

No, democracy is supposed to be two wolves and a sheep voting on who to eat for dinner. What you’re talking about are the anti-democratic measures the founders put in place because they didn’t trust democracy.

Look, it’s hardly settled that “democracy” is a good thing. The founders didn’t think it was—they restricted the franchise to property owners, and provided for indirect election of the president and appointment of senators by stage legislatures. Just be candid about what you’re arguing, because these distinctions matter. Jacksonian Democracy has a theory of how decisions are legitimized—by the support of the masses. If you believe that the government should sometimes do something different than what the masses want, then you need to articulate a theory for who should make those decisions and what confers legitimacy on those decisions.

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Sometimes democracy is the sheep area violently and unconstitutionally seceding from the wolf area and then ethnically cleansing the region of wolves, to make absolutely sure that no wolf will be around who can vote about what to eat (see e.g. the post-1991 history of Yugoslavia). A major reason why people living in immigrant-attracting democratic political entities care about immigration policy is because immigrants eventually change the composition of the voting electorate.

Please explain the senate

> No, democracy is supposed to be two wolves and a sheep voting on who to eat for dinner.

The senate is exactly the sheep. That the senate is now controlled by the sheep is also wild. The senate is what gives a person in Wyoming has 4x the voting power of someone in California. The senate was designed so that the less populous states (the sheep) don't get rolled. That the senate is majority minority is wild.

> Please explain the senate

The Senate is orthogonal to our discussion. It implements the federalist structure of our government, representing the states themselves. That’s why the state legislatures originally appointed Senators. We have muddled up the system through direct election of senators and should probably repeal the 17th amendment.

The senate was a compromise to give small rural states unequal voting power compared to the more populist states.

The senate is explicitly created to give more power to minorities.

It is not orthogonal. The senate is EXACTLY the mechanism to ensure majoritarian rule is not at the expense of the minority.

The direct election vs not is not consequential. The consequential part is that states get two senators regardless of population.

You seem to be under the mistaken belief that democracy means deciding policy based on opinion polls. This is not how democracies work in practice, and opinion polls often show that most people don't want policy dictated solely by opinion polls.

Democracy is a governmental system where political power is vested in the people. It is characterized by competitive elections and the safeguarding of human rights[1].

It is by definition undemocratic for two wolves and a sheep to vote for who to eat for dinner. It is undemocratic to have gerrymandering. It is undemocratic to have uncompetitive primary elections. It is undemocratic for the police to quell protests. It is undemocratic to have state-backed propaganda, censorship, and misinformation.

Maintaining a democracy necessitates maintaining its institutions. An authoritarian one-party state does not magically become democratic just because it has an election or manufactures support for its project. Elections are an insufficient condition for democracy.

[1]: https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/jod.2024.a930423

Elections are not a necessary part of democracy as you can have a democracy through sortition as well, like they did in some parts of ancient Greece.

Other than that, yeah.

Which is also why it is a Republic and not a democracy. I wonder why people continue to call it a democracy even when they know that it isn’t. I guess it is just a sticky name

its a union rather than a monarchy.

canada is a monarchy and a democracy.

usa is a union of republics and a democracy

they are different dimensions

This is a naive take. It’s much more complicated than that. You’re missing the federal and state's. It’s a republic union of republics, so calling it a “Republic” is the most accurate definition

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