[Silhouette]

The problem is that in many Western systems the people who gain power aren't democratically elected.

In a real democracy the big challenge should be how to protect minorities from the tyranny of the majority. However most of us aren't even getting that far because the people who gain power often don't even have the support or even acceptance of the majority.

[gernb]

You said

> In a real democracy the big challenge should be how to protect minorities from the tyranny of the majority

But isn't that exactly what's happening? The minority (red) won against the majority (blue).

[kibwen]

The grandparent is simplifying. The goal of a democracy is to respect the will of the majority while respecting the fundamental rights of the minority. If you're not doing the first step, respecting the will of the majority, then your democracy has already failed. A tyranny of the minority is strictly worse than a tyranny of the majority.

[mathnmusic]

> A tyranny of the minority is strictly worse than a tyranny of the majority.

Not if the minority opinion is right. The ground truth matters.

[rayiner]

The whole point of democracy is that we don’t agree on what’s “the truth” and who is “right” and need a process for deciding what to do notwithstanding those disagreements.

[kibwen]

Okay, how do you decide which opinion is right? Perhaps we'll... vote on it? You do see the problem here, yes?

[Silhouette]

We're talking about politics and democracy here. People will always have a diverse range of opinions on political issues where none of those opinions is objectively "right".

Hopefully one opinion that most would agree on is that in matters of fact any competent representative should pay attention to the knowledge and advice of experts.

[rayiner]

> In a real democracy the big challenge should be how to protect minorities from the tyranny of the majority.

Protection of minorities has nothing to do with democracy, and is often anti-Democratic. In the west, minorities are increasingly being invoked by elites as pretexts for strengthening anti-Democratic institutions and overruling majorities.

[wizofaus]

Can you give an example? I'd suggest protections against "tyranny of the majority"/"mob rule" are a cornerstone feature of any successful democracy. The point is to ensure that it's not possible simply by force of numbers alone to elect governments who then enforce laws and implement policies that could significantly disadvantage any minority group.

[rayiner]

The US Supreme Court is a good example. It sits as an elite Guardian Council that over the last century has overruled the public on numerous issues, ranging from contraception to abortion to same sex marriage to the death penalty. These rulings are not based on law but rather moral philosophy—specifically the libertarian moral philosophy of elites.

Protection of minorities is not a necessary feature of democracy. It’s a feature of a specific type of democracy. In the American system, it’s a feature that initially arose because elites sought to protect their property rights from the masses through constitutional checks on democracy.

Shadi Hamid at the Brookings Institute has done excellent work distinguishing “democracy” from “liberal democracy.” https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/10/us-democra...

[wizofaus]

Are you claiming overturning abortion laws was done on the pretext of protecting foetuses (who are a minority)?

[rayiner]

Roe overturned abortion laws ostensibly to protect the minority of women who choose to have an abortion. In doing so, the justices replaced the moral philosophy of the public with their own moral philosophy.

[wizofaus]

Well if you really believe that then I assume you think they did the right thing by overturning Roe, so it seems like (in your eyes) it has a self-correcting mechanism in place. Except I gather that it's now the case that right-to-a-legal-abortion does actually have quite firm majority support from the polls that have been done? At any rate, I don't see either case as an example of the Supreme Court protecting minority factions against tyranny of the majority.

[Silhouette]

Protection of minorities has nothing to do with democracy, and is often anti-Democratic.

Exactly. And that means protecting minorities from abuse - particularly abuse caused by short-term or ill-informed policy making by politicians - is the big challenge facing any political system based on representative democracy. But before you can get that far you first need to have your representatives democratically elected in the first place and most of us don't right now.

In the west, minorities are increasingly being invoked by elites as pretexts for strengthening anti-Democratic institutions and overruling majorities.

Careful. Relatively few policies implemented by Western governments actually have a clear, verifiable majority of the public in support of them. For that you essentially need either a referendum or a clear result electing representatives on an explicit platform of implementing that policy and where that policy is known to be the deciding factor in voters' choice of representative.

For everything else in a representative democracy we elect our representatives usually based on some very narrow set of priorities and yet those representatives are entrusted with deciding on any government policy that requires a decision throughout their term of office. There is a very long tail of minor issues that can still profoundly affect the lives of many people yet where the representatives making the decisions certainly were not elected based on their position on those particular issues. Even on major issues situations will inevitably change during the term of office of elected representatives and their response to any emergency was almost certainly not something voters had an opportunity to consider before making their choice at the last election.

Representative democracy has obvious practical advantages over requiring direct democracy for every little decision any government ever makes but it also implies limitations on the democratic mandate granted to representatives and by extension on the legitimacy of any actions those representatives take on behalf of their electorate. Strong checks and balances are essential to keep representative democracy democratic. One common safeguard is to have constitutional rules about the most important policies where the powers of any current representatives to act in those areas are limited without going back to their electorate for a specific decision to change the foundational rules. Another is having a power of recall so that if the voters who elected a representative are unhappy with their actions then they can require a fresh election that might choose a different representative instead. Crucially both of those safeguards ultimately depend on an explicit decision by the entire electorate, which can and should be more powerful in a democracy than any decision by elected representatives.