Comment by immibis
1 year ago
If half the registered voters want to elect Adolf Hitler, is it acceptable for a democratic government to agree to ignore them? The Nazi party is banned in Germany. Is that good or bad?
I agree such a government is not acting democratically. However, it's better than the alternative. Don't we do democracy because it's usually good, and not for its own sake? Then if doing something nondemocratic is even better than doing something democratic, we should do the former.
If you set the precedent that the government can ignore the result of an election because the electee is bad, that's the very tool that a tyrannical government will use.
The first thing every dictator and tyrannical government does is stop or subvert the elections. There's still elections in Russia and China and North Korea.
Dictators and tyrannical governments are perfectly able to make their own tools. Hitler didn't need to edit an existing law allowing the government to kill Nazis, to target Jews and gypsies. He didn't need an existing law giving chancellors unlimited powers. He simply wrote those laws he needed, then used them. If the government prior to his one had a law giving Nazis the death penalty, it could have saved a lot of lives.
No but he did need a population ready to accept the idea that a non democratic government is necessary.
> If half the registered voters want to elect Adolf Hitler, is it acceptable for a democratic government to agree to ignore them?
The candidate people voted for would enter office, but elected officials should not have the power to do the things Hitler did.
> The Nazi party is banned in Germany. Is that good or bad?
It's basically meaningless. If you ban the "Nazi party" and then someone comes and says they're a member of the Social Nationalists party which is totally different even though it shares a lot of the same policies, now you have to decide which policies are banned. And we're back to politicians are never allowed to censor their opponents etc.
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