Comment by raelmiu

7 hours ago

The reason democracy works is not because a majority vote FOR a certain policy or not, but because a majority can remove shit leaders without a bloody revolution.

Democracy is a corrective system, not a prescriptive one.

Correct. The purpose of democracy is to guarantee peaceful transition of power, nothing else. Because historically this has been found to be the most critical issue killing nations.

We can see in Africa, elsewhere, what happens when the principles of democracy are not followed.

  • > Because historically this has been found to be the most critical issue killing nations.

    This sounds tautological, like "stable states are stable". There are many stable states that don't have term limits on their head of state, and there are many unstable states with 4-6 year presidential terms.

    Democracy-as-in-term-limits is a relatively meaningless historical indicator. When political stability is threatened, term limits are swiftly discarded. When the military junta is stabilized, it may introduce term limits to justify its reign (while actively filtering viable candidates).

Well, that certainly hasn't happened in my lifetime. Are you sure democracy is actually working at all? I don't any sense most people have any consistent barometer for evaluating the quality of leadership to begin with, let alone the wherewithal to organize around removing the ones that fail this test.

  • It happened to Joe Biden. He wasn't swapped out until it was clear he would lose the popular election.

    • Objectively, he was the most effective US president we’ve had in decades.

      Trump’s campaign promises were all of the form “X is so bad it will destroy the country and I will fix X”!

      Replace X with some problem that Biden had already fixed (factory investment, crime rate reduction, getting inflation under control after the previous president printed money for 4 yeara, etc, etc).

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