tillingborn wrote: ↑Tue Apr 06, 2021 1:58 pm
Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Tue Apr 06, 2021 1:50 pm
tillingborn wrote: ↑Tue Apr 06, 2021 9:23 am...and the attempted insurrection was a legitimate exercise of democracy.
No part of this was anything I ever said.
It follows from this:
Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Tue Apr 06, 2021 1:20 amAll he's obligated to do is not violently overthrow the mandate -- provided that that mandate is truly reflective of the public will, and not of the number of dead people and straw "votes" that could be assembled by manipulators of the process.
Oh, I can clear that up.
I was simply speaking of what
democracy requires, not what
I advocate.
Democracy, in theory, does not reject rebellion or refusal when tyranny is being imposed or the democratic process itself is being subverted. It insists that the only legitimate mandate is a democratic mandate, that is, one decided by the
authentic vote of the people. There is no democratic duty to ratify a false narrative about that; there is only a democratic duty to ratify a genuine mandate. That's the American pattern: it began with a rebellion under the banner, "No taxation without representation," as I trust you know. The government has to be genuinely representative: if it's not, it's not democratically legitimate, even if it succeeds in seizing power.
And if Biden's win was authentic, then you would be right to say that rebellion would be "undemocratic." On the other hand, if
Time magazine and others are right, then the actual "undemocratic" decision would be to capitulate and say nothing. Democratic people ought to object to any "fixing" of the ballot box. And if the election were actually the product of a conspiracy between business, media and the Democrats, then there would be no real distinction in terms of legitimacy between that and the tyranny in the 18th Century colonies. It would still be governance without democratic legitimacy.
As for the fiasco at the Capitol, personally, I don't suppose it served any purpose, save to provide an additional thing for the incumbents to use to claim that all opposition is irrational. In the end, it seems to have failed to serve any democratic objective at all.