Tactical_Spam wrote:
Yes, but last time I checked, wasn't Hitler a Right winger? Or was he Left because he was technically part of a "socialist" party?

 Manchu wrote:
I know many conservatives who balk at expanded government oversight but at the same time revere the military, the most terrifying of all government institutions.

 Breotan wrote:
https://www.yahoo.com/news/hawaii-becomes-first-u-state-place-gun-owners-210248882.html?ref=gs

 Kilkrazy wrote:
It's perfectly obvious that authoritarianism has been on the rise for 10 years or more. You only need to see people like Le Pen (France), Geert Wilders (Holland) and similar people in Austria and Sweden growing in popularity.

As far as the UK goes, the points made in the article about 'sovereignty' and 'immigration' being a kind of shorthand for isolationism and racism do have some truth in them. The sea change in the Brexit campaign came about when they let rip with anti-immigration stories two or three weeks ago. That's when the polls began to move in favour of Leave.

However, it's also important to note that almost half the UK electorate voted to stay in the EU.

The other point that the article makes, which has been made in many other editorials from respected sources including The Economist and the Evening Standard, is that people are suffering economically from globalisation and the 8-year recession. The rewards of the past 30 years of economic liberalisation have disproprortionately gone to the already rich. Meanwhile, social and job security has been cut for the rest of us.

The Evening Standard made the very good point that it's no use telling people that a vote to Leave is a vote to tank the economy if for them the economy has already tanked.

From this viewpoint, the Brexit vote is an emotional protest vote against power elites who have ignored the genuine concerns of the "lower orders'.

Unfortunately history teaches us that economic bad times bring popularism and authoritarianism in their wake.

 Manchu wrote:
My feeling is, these children and many of their parents have no commitment to democracy itself.

 Frozocrone wrote:
Probably not going to happen, since the future generations voted had a super majority to remain (close to 75% for Remain in ages 18-25).

Not to call out Leave voters as xenophobic, but there is a greater sense of multiculturalism found within Remain voters.

 NuggzTheNinja wrote:

 Frozocrone wrote:
Probably not going to happen, since the future generations voted had a super majority to remain (close to 75% for Remain in ages 18-25).

Not to call out Leave voters as xenophobic, but there is a greater sense of multiculturalism found within Remain voters.

We might expect that, as they gain the wisdom and experience with the world that comes with age, their opinions are likely to change.

 NuggzTheNinja wrote:

 Frozocrone wrote:
Probably not going to happen, since the future generations voted had a super majority to remain (close to 75% for Remain in ages 18-25).

Not to call out Leave voters as xenophobic, but there is a greater sense of multiculturalism found within Remain voters.

We might expect that, as they gain the wisdom and experience with the world that comes with age, their opinions are likely to change.

 Easy E wrote:
Here is a hyperbolic story about how Brexit is a sign that Liberal Democratic values are beginning to fail with regular citizens in the "West".

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2016/06/britons_radical_rejection_of_the_status_quo_should_terrify_all_liberal_democracies.html

However, this little factoid struck me as deeply concerning....

Across most countries in North America and Western Europe, voters have grown deeply dissatisfied with the political class. For a rapidly growing number, this dissatisfaction with particular leaders has started to transform into an actual rejection of democratic institutions. Across North America and Western Europe, the number of citizens who say that it is important to live in a democracy is shrinking. At the same time, the number of citizens who are open to making their countries more authoritarian is rising.

This trend is especially striking in the United States. Two decades ago, 1 in 16 Americans believed that Army rule would be a good way to run the country. Today, it is 1 in 6. The picture is even bleaker among the young and affluent: Support for military rule in this group has increased nearly sixfold, from 6 percent to 35 percent.

Well, is it truly the beginning of the end for Liberal Democracy as its own citizens begin to turn away from it as an effective form of government?

 MrMoustaffa wrote:
We could of course write in a third party or something, but people have been so thoroughly doctrinated that voting anything aside from the main 2 is throwing away our vote, so it'll never happen.

 MrMoustaffa wrote:
This is the product of a huge amount of things, but it seems the main source is modern "news" outlets, social networks, and the anonimity and connectiveness of the internet allowing people to find an echochamber condusive to their beliefs.

Because if we had been voting in the primaries and all that we wouldn't be in this mess. Instead, the nutjobs went out to vote because theyre far more passionate and now we're here.

 Peregrine wrote:
It isn't indoctrination, it's a consequence of how the US election system works. It pretty inevitably encourages a system where there are two major parties and any minor parties that attempt to emerge are absorbed by the major parties. And it's certainly the case in 2016, even if theoretically the US system could have more than two parties. No third-party candidate has any hope of winning, so either you vote for the least-bad candidate from one of the two major parties or you vote for the worst candidate (including by staying home on election day or voting for a third-party candidate). If you want to change this situation then you need to change the structure US elections and implement a system like other countries have, where you rank your choices and can safely vote third-party while still supporting the least-terrible major party candidate if/when the third-party candidate fails to win.

 sebster wrote:
Maybe, we have preferential voting in our system, so you are never 'wasting' your vote by selecting a minor party or independent first. And yet, our last election just produced the most minor party and independent wins in our history, and there's a whopping 5 of them out of 150. All the other seats went to one of the two major parties.

Having proportional representation is the bigger issue. Any system with electorates will tend towards two parties, while awarding representation based on the overall share of the vote will produce a diverse range of parties.

 Peregrine wrote:
Well, I certainly wasn't arguing that having a preferential voting system inevitably produces more parties, just that it's necessary to have more than two parties.

It doesn't negate all of the advantages that an established major party has, but it at least makes it possible to have that chance of winning as a minor party. And, while Australia is mostly limited to two major parties, other countries with preferential voting have more successful minor parties.

You're right. Proportional voting does also help, though it forces you to have more than one seat per district (and obviously does nothing for things like presidential elections in the US where there's only one winner). Unfortunately making it possible in the US would require major changes to how our legislative districts are drawn, while preferential voting is a very straightforward thing to implement.

 sebster wrote:

 Peregrine wrote:
Well, I certainly wasn't arguing that having a preferential voting system inevitably produces more parties, just that it's necessary to have more than two parties.

It isn't necessary, the Lib Dems do quite well in the UK, and that's a first past the post electorate system. There's more going on than just the formal electorate system, basically.

 NinthMusketeer wrote:
You know, if the voters are so upset with the politicians they elected maybe they should consider electing better ones. But it's easier to just run with whatever political bias one has rather than, you know, actually researching the people one is voting for.

 Easy E wrote:
Here is a hyperbolic story about how Brexit is a sign that Liberal Democratic values are beginning to fail with regular citizens in the "West".

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2016/06/britons_radical_rejection_of_the_status_quo_should_terrify_all_liberal_democracies.html

However, this little factoid struck me as deeply concerning....

Across most countries in North America and Western Europe, voters have grown deeply dissatisfied with the political class. For a rapidly growing number, this dissatisfaction with particular leaders has started to transform into an actual rejection of democratic institutions. Across North America and Western Europe, the number of citizens who say that it is important to live in a democracy is shrinking. At the same time, the number of citizens who are open to making their countries more authoritarian is rising.

This trend is especially striking in the United States. Two decades ago, 1 in 16 Americans believed that Army rule would be a good way to run the country. Today, it is 1 in 6. The picture is even bleaker among the young and affluent: Support for military rule in this group has increased nearly sixfold, from 6 percent to 35 percent.

Well, is it truly the beginning of the end for Liberal Democracy as its own citizens begin to turn away from it as an effective form of government?

 A Town Called Malus wrote:
Errrrm, about that

They did get totally destroyed in the last election to the point where the SNP, who can only be voted for in Scotland, overtook them as the third largest party in parliament.

Now locally I'm sure they still do reasonably well (as in they actually get elected in more than single figures) but nationally the Lib Dems were basically wiped off the map.

 sebster wrote:

All this hints that possibly the reason minor parties don't really have that much presence in US politics is less to do with the system, and more to do with the minor parties themselves. Maybe the libertarian and green parties in the US don't get much of the vote because people actually just don't care for their party platform.

 sebster wrote:

 A Town Called Malus wrote:
Errrrm, about that

They did get totally destroyed in the last election to the point where the SNP, who can only be voted for in Scotland, overtook them as the third largest party in parliament.

Now locally I'm sure they still do reasonably well (as in they actually get elected in more than single figures) but nationally the Lib Dems were basically wiped off the map.

All this hints that possibly the reason minor parties don't really have that much presence in US politics is less to do with the system, and more to do with the minor parties themselves. Maybe the libertarian and green parties in the US don't get much of the vote because people actually just don't care for their party platform.

In 1934, at the dawn of the Stalinist Terror, the great Russian writer Isaac Babel offered a daring quip at the International Writers Conference in Moscow:

"Everything is given to us by the party and the government. Only one right is taken away: the right to write badly."

A onetime Soviet loyalist who was eventually shot as an enemy of the state, Babel was likely trying to say something profound: that the freedom to make mistakes is itself an essential component of freedom.

As a rule, people resent being saved from themselves. And if you think depriving people of their right to make mistakes makes sense, you probably never had respect for their right to make decisions at all.

This is all relevant in the wake of the Brexit referendum, in which British citizens narrowly voted to exit the European Union.

Because the vote was viewed as having been driven by the same racist passions that are fueling the campaign of Donald Trump, a wide swath of commentators suggested that democracy erred, and the vote should perhaps be canceled, for the Britons' own good.

Social media was filled with such calls. "Is it just me, or does #Brexit seem like a moment when the government should overrule a popular referendum?" wrote one typical commenter.

On op-ed pages, there was a lot of the same. Harvard economics professor and chess grandmaster Kenneth Rogoff wrote a piece for the Boston Globe called "Britain's democratic failure" in which he argued:

"This isn't democracy; it is Russian roulette for republics. A decision of enormous consequence… has been made without any appropriate checks and balances."

Rogoff then went on to do something that's become popular in pundit circles these days: He pointed to the lessons of antiquity. Going back thousands of years, he said, Very Smart People have warned us about the dangers of allowing the rabble to make decisions.

"Since ancient times," he wrote, "philosophers have tried to devise systems to try to balance the strengths of majority rule against the need to ensure that informed parties get a larger say in critical decisions."

Presumably playing the role of one of the "informed parties" in this exercise, Rogoff went on:

"By some accounts... Athens had implemented the purest historical example of democracy," he wrote. "Ultimately, though, after some catastrophic war decisions, Athenians saw a need to give more power to independent bodies."

This is exactly the argument that British blogging supernova Andrew Sullivan unleashed a few months ago in his 8,000-word diatribe against Donald Trump, "Democracies end when they are too democratic."

Like Rogoff, Sullivan argued that over-democratic societies drift into passionate excesses, and need that vanguard of Very Smart People to make sure they don't get themselves into trouble.

"Elites matter in a democracy," Sullivan argued, because they are the "critical ingredient to save democracy from itself."

I would argue that voters are the critical ingredient to save elites from themselves, but Sullivan sees it the other way, and has Plato on his side. Though some of his analysis seems based on a misread of ancient history (see here for an amusing exploration of the topic), he's right about Plato, the source of a lot of these "the ancients warned us about democracy" memes. He just left out the part where Plato, at least when it came to politics, was kind of a jerk.

The great philosopher despised democracy, believing it to be a system that blurred necessary social distinctions, prompting children, slaves and even animals to forget their places. He believed it a system that leads to over-permissiveness, wherein the people "drink too deeply of the strong wine of freedom."

Too much license, Plato wrote (and Sullivan echoed), leads to a spoiled populace that will turn to a strongman for revenge if anyone gets in the way of the party. These "men of naught" will inevitably denounce as oligarchs any wise group of rulers who try to set basic/sensible rules for society.

You have to be a snob of the first order, completely high on your own gas, to try to apply these arguments to present-day politics, imagining yourself as an analog to Plato's philosopher-kings.

And you have to have a cast-iron head to not grasp that saying stuff like this out loud is part of what inspires populations to movements like Brexit or the Trump campaign in the first place.

Were I British, I'd probably have voted to Remain. But it's not hard to understand being pissed off at being subject to unaccountable bureaucrats in Brussels. Nor is it hard to imagine the post-Brexit backlash confirming every suspicion you might have about the people who run the EU.

Imagine having pundits and professors suggest you should have your voting rights curtailed because you voted Leave. Now imagine these same people are calling voters like you "children," and castigating you for being insufficiently appreciative of, say, the joys of submitting to a European Supreme Court that claims primacy over the Magna Carta and the Bill of Rights.

The overall message in every case is the same: Let us handle things.

But whatever, let's assume that the Brexit voters, like Trump voters, are wrong, ignorant, dangerous and unjustified.

Even stipulating to that, the reaction to both Brexit and Trump reveals a problem potentially more serious than either Brexit or the Trump campaign. It's become perilously fashionable all over the Western world to reach for non-democratic solutions whenever society drifts in a direction people don't like. Here in America the problem is snowballing on both the right and the left.

Whether it's Andrew Sullivan calling for Republican insiders to rig the nomination process to derail Trump's candidacy, or Democratic Party lifers like Peter Orszag arguing that Republican intransigence in Congress means we should turn more power over to "depoliticized commissions," the instinct to act by diktat surfaces quite a lot these days.

"Too much democracy" used to be an argument we reserved for foreign peoples who tried to do things like vote to demand control over their own oil supplies.

I first heard the term in Russia in the mid-Nineties. As a young reporter based in Moscow in the years after communism fell, I spent years listening to American advisors and their cronies in the Kremlin gush over the new democratic experiment.

Then, in 1995, polls came out showing communist Gennady Zyguanov leading in the upcoming presidential race against Boris Yeltsin. In an instant, all of those onetime democratic evangelists began saying Russia was "not ready" for democracy.

Now it's not just carpetbagging visitors to the Third World pushing this line of thought. Just as frequently, the argument is aimed at "low-information" voters at home.

Maybe the slide started with 9/11, after which huge pluralities of people were suddenly OK with summary executions, torture, warrantless surveillance and the blithe disposal of concepts like habeas corpus.

A decade and a half later, we're gripped by a broader mania for banning and censoring things that would have been unthinkable a generation ago.

It seems equally to have taken over campus speech controversies (expanding the "fighting words" exception to the First Amendment is suddenly a popular idea) and the immigration debate (where Trump swept to the nomination riding a bluntly unconstitutional call for a religious test for immigrants).

Democracy appears to have become so denuded and corrupted in America that a generation of people has grown up without any faith in its principles.

What's particularly concerning about the reaction both to Brexit and to the rise of Trump is the way these episodes are framed as requiring exceptions to the usual democratic rule. They're called threats so monstrous that we must abrogate the democratic process to combat them.

Forget Plato, Athens, Sparta and Rome. More recent history tells us that the descent into despotism always starts in this exact same way. There is always an emergency that requires a temporary suspension of democracy.

After 9/11 we had the "ticking time bomb" metaphor to justify torture. NYU professor and self-described "prolific thought leader" Ian Bremmer just called Brexit the "most significant political risk the world has experienced since the Cuban Missile Crisis," likening it to a literal end-of-humanity scenario. Sullivan justified his call for undemocratic electoral maneuvers on the grounds that the election of Trump would be an "extinction-level event."

I don't buy it. My admittedly primitive understanding of democracy is that we're supposed to move toward it, not away from it, in a moment of crisis.

It doesn't mean much to be against torture until the moment when you're most tempted to resort to it, or to have faith in voting until the result of a particular vote really bothers you. If you think there's ever such a thing as "too much democracy," you probably never believed in it in the first place. And even low-Information voters can sense it.