@davenicolette @marick Lots to say about this. After skimming some of your stuff I admire your seriousness at trying to grapple with where we are, but come down pretty strongly in different places. 1/

@davenicolette @marick First I'd ask you to think carefully about what "democracy" might mean. To some people it means government by the popular. Then according to polling, China and Russia are great democracies. 2/

@davenicolette @marick To others it means "democratic elections". But democratic elections are fragile. Substantive outcomes vary with institutional choices, lots of which are defensible, none of which is obviously right. There is never any such thing as a "will of the people" independent of you how constitute the people. 3/

@davenicolette @marick As you suggest, if your definition of democracy is just democratic elections, democracy can never be sustainable. Eventually a tyrant will win an election and that's that. So elections neither offer coherent or consistent guidance on how to rule, nor a sustainable social system. So democracy sucks, right? 4/

@davenicolette @marick No. Democracy is everything. People often, as I'm afraid I think you do, place "freedom" in opposition to democracy, but freedom is even less coherent, and far less stable except in very lopsided forms, than even electoral democracy. 5/

@davenicolette @marick democracy first and foremost is an ethos. it derives from a set of axioms. we hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal. that's an axiom. we are all fundamentally of equal value, and our social arrangements should reflect that. 6/

@davenicolette @marick Further, each of us and only each of us know our own values, experiences, and ends. This is the flaw in every form of "epistocracy", and I'm afraid I see some similar reasoning in your musings. Governance shouldn't be democratic because the people are smart, wise, engaged, whatever. Governance must be democratic because government lacks information accessible only within and through each of us. 7/

@davenicolette @marick We must participate, all of us, to inform collective action of what is otherwise unknowable. The form of the participation is always subject to debate. Are US-style first past the post elections good, or proportional representative? Maybe Singapore's mix of weak, superficial formal democracy but intensive consultation with the city-state's public is better. That, termed "whole of society democracy" is China's stated aspiration, and you can make a case. 8/

@davenicolette @marick But prior to those arguments is the ethos. You are my equal, and vice versa. When you speak I listen, because however educated or uneducated you are, good at math or bad at math, articulate or inarticulate a speaker, you have information that I need to account for that I can only know through you. And vice versa. 9/

@davenicolette @marick That is democracy at its essence, and it is prior to elections or any sort of institutional arrangement, and it is the most precious and important, too often abandoned or ignored, prerequisite to decency in human affairs. Democracy is an ever present duty and aspiration that no election can undo, though a bad election can certainly bring on a great deal of misery. 10/

@davenicolette @marick What about freedom? Do freedom and democracy conflict? No, because we cannot even meaningfully define freedom (at least not in any universalistic sense) without democracy. 11/

@davenicolette @marick You point a great deal to "rights". But the dual of any meaningful right is someone else's obligation. My right to swing my fist stops at my neighbor's nose. Alright. That seems almost "natural". But then why doesn't my right to free speech stop at her ocular canal? Meaningful free speech imposes an obligation on others to hear and tolerate what they would not like to hear. 12/

Where and how do we draw the boundaries of these obligations? We define a lot of "rights". Every property "right" imposes an obligation that others tolerate their exclusion from the use of a good. If I have a right to my own body and I stand in a doorway so you can't get by, does your "right" to enter the builder trump my "right" not to be physically manhandled? Who gets to do what, who has to tolerate what? Every right is also a burden. We have to collectively make these tradeoffs. 13/

Without some form of universally enfranchising democracy — yes, always imperfect, always contestable — these choices will always be made in ways that benefit the more enfranchised and burden the disenfranchised. The "sausage factory" of actual ostensibly democratic political institutions is horrible, and my god the most urgent thing we can possibly do right now is to improve them. 14/

But even as broken as they are, you see the power of the franchise, broadly construed. It all seems such a sham, yet people with an edge in "our democracy" are constantly trying to entrench that temporary edge by disenfrachising people who would make those choices differently than they would. Before you get to cynical about even existing, imperfect "democracy", watch how assiduously cynical actors strive to strategically withdraw it. 15/

There was a great Isaac Chotiner interview with a leader of Israeli settlers. Listen to what she says, "I think the Arabs in Judea and Samaria have no right to ask for rights or take part in elections for the Knesset. They lost their right to vote for the Knesset. They will never get this right. They will have their own Palestinian Authority where they can run their civilian affairs in a logical way, but not as members of the Knesset. No, no, no... " 16/

"If they accept our sovereignty, they can live here. So they should accept the sovereign power, but that doesn’t necessarily mean having rights. It just means accepting the sovereign power.
Right. No, I’m saying specifically that they are not going to have the right to vote for the Knesset."

https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/the-extreme-ambitions-of-west-bank-settlers

17/

In theory there is some form or degree of law and due process even for West Bank Palestinians in Israel. But when the political institutions are not just imperfect, but garishly impervious to binding participation of groups of people, the result nearly always is predation and conflict. Not because the state "owes it" to those people, although it does that too. But because the purpose of a state is to balance the invisible, inaccessible, inchoate interests of all who reside on a territory. 18/

Only in that *balance* can any meaningful freedom subsist.

And states are simply incapable of finding that balance to the degree the interests and experiences of portions of its public are not rendered active within those tradeoffs by some form of weighty, binding enfranchisement. 19/

To summarize a bit. 1) democracy is prepolitical, an ethos, an essential underpinning of human interaction for anything that will become anything like a decent society. that ethos can be gained and lost, it *should* be always and everywhere but descriptively is not. but it is also not so fragile merely losing an election to a tyrant undoes it. and whenever it is lost, in formal institutions, more broadly as an ethos, i say it is always our work to recover and reinstate it. 20/

Absent that ethos, and institutions that always imperfectly but meaningful aspire to uphold it, "freedom" is an ill-defined concept. lots of definitions are mooted (cf US libertarians), but they always turn out to be rigged towards the values and interests of the mooters, and yield predation and misery to those whose values and interests were omitted from the definitions now enforced. /fin