The impetus is more to ensure people don't get pollution in the big cities (which indirectly helps with climate change, but that was never the real goal).
We've been conditioned to think democracy is the perfect form of government but why did people vote for Trump? Why in my country does less than 50% of the voters show up for elections?
Either you live in a very different bubble, or you are building a strawman to demolish.
I never even heard anybody claiming that democracy is perfect form of government. People in democratic countries usually accept that democracy is messy.
The real killer app of democracy is the ability to change leaders without death or bloodshed. Of course it results in fewer big projects being built (though the US was very good in building things like Apollo or the Interstate System, once - it is mostly environmental regulations that get in the way now, and not pure democracy).
But the stereotypical danger of autocracy is that its big projects will be a useless money sink (like this [0]), or even destructive.
sure, but half of the country believes that's achieved with some measures and the other half believe those measures are the cause of the problems. A dictatorship doesn't change that, you'll only have half of the country incapable of voting for a change.
The US is rated as an "flawed democracy" and not a "full democracy" for the last decade by the Economist Intelligence Unit (an offshoot of the Magazine that published this article).
First past the post systems generally have lower turnout than proportional systems. Even record turnout for the US isn't very high in international terms.
And if that record turnout is to support and/or oppose a candidate that seeks to burn the whole system down and gets votes due to the system not reflecting voters priorities for a while then it further supports my theory.
Switzerland has usually a less than 50% turnout, for a comparison - and still gets brownie points for democracy. Yes, I'm sad myself, but I'll still take it over any other systems.
While I personally think of democracy as "the worst except for everything else we've tried", there's plenty who speak as if it's tautologically the best.
In the historical context I would see "Vox Populi, Vox Dei" as intentionally juxtaposed against the "Divine Right of Kings" (the leading political philosophy in Europe for the last few thousand years).
I think there is a TON of interesting discussion to be had on the best ways to _implement_ democracy, but locating the source of political power directly in the people who are governed seems like a pretty solid idea to me... I have not been able to come up with anything better.
Indeed. Democracy is "least bad" because it at least allows people to choose, but don't be surprised if they make the wrong choice. Evidently one problem outweighs the other, and for advocates for democracy it's that the latter issue is outweighed (the former is that the people have no choice, this is people making the wrong choice). If men were angels, a nominally totalitarian government could be absolutely ideal.
A few decades ago, a French minister was being interviewed on US TV about the French nuclear power program. He was asked how France had managed to get all their nuclear plants approved and built. He said, "We had a vote in the Chamber of Deputies. I understand you do things differently in America."