Comment by capr
1 year ago
There are no core tenants of democracy other than majority rule. The actions you listed (with the exception of canceling elections) do not actually destroy the ability for the majority to rule. In fact, one common tactic of democratic states is to employ referendums for laws that infringe on the rights of a minority, thus shifting the moral blame onto the population when convenient.
No. If the majority wants to murder or deport all immigrants and seize their assets because “fuck ‘em”, there’s no way a Democracy can just shrug and call it “vox populi, vox dei”.
It might lose but it will have to put up a fight, legal or physical.
What is this “it” that might “lose”? A country is a homeland for a people. Democracy is an abstraction. “It” cannot fight or “lose” against the people of the nation. The people exist. Democracy is simply rule by a majority of those people.
To play by the rules is an implicit rule in any political/power system. There are consequences when a ruler practices tyranny.
> There are no core tenants of democracy other than majority rule.
Let's suppose you're right. We have a "democracy" that holds elections and whichever candidate gets the most votes wins, but there is no freedom of speech. Whoever is in office controls all the media, all private communications are monitored and lèse-majesté is a crime. Everything is a crime, in fact, and the law relies entirely on selective enforcement. By election day, opposition candidates with any chance of winning are always blood relatives of the incumbent. Deranged candidates with no chance of winning are ignored but independent candidates who start to gain any support are immediately executed for treason. Every year there is an election in which the people can choose between the incumbent, the incumbent's favored offspring (if any) and a selection of paste-eating loons who think Hitler is still alive, campaign on raising energy costs to help Hitler accelerate human extinction and never get any votes.
That isn't a democracy, it's the fig leaf dictatorships wear when they want to lie about being a democracy.