Comments by "Luredreier" (@Luredreier) on "Hungary u0026 Turkey's Populist Takeover: Europe's Democratic Backslide - TLDR" video.

7:26 Well, the US has been slipping further and further away from a good democracy... And it didn't exactly start out as being perfect either...
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@night6724 Ever looked up the definitions of democracy and republic? Of course the US is both... And democracy was definitely the intention when the constitution was made.
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@night6724 And you think that Europeans don't have representatives? You're mixing up direct democracy and democracy. And sure a country may claim to be a democracy. And then there's countries like the US that are democracies. A flawed one admittedly, but still a democracy. There's no "perfect" democracy. But most listings place Norway and Switzerland pretty high. The exact order tends to depend on the exact metrics being used. As for your claims about "mob rule" etc. I suggest you do a bit more research yourself. If you wish to avoid confirmation bias you need to try to prove your assumptions wrong. Because if you believe something that's wrong and you try to prove it right you'll find evidence that your own mind will be biased towards thinking proves your assumptions right even if they're not actually evidence. While if you try to work out what consequences your assumptions will have and try to investigate if those assumptions can be proven false or not you're more likely to reach the correct conclusions. You may want to use that approach yourself.
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@night6724 Anyway, Norway has 19 electoral circles, corresponding to "fylker" (counties) we used to have. Each gets a number of seats in our parliament, like your states gets seats in your congress, not just based on their population, but actually favouring lower population electoral circles a bit (or in your case states). As a result the smallest political party in our parliament actually got into our parliament with 0,3% of the votes, or 4 908 votes, taking a seat from the second biggest party in one of our lowest population electoral circles, and a new party formed as a reaction to plans to close a hospital (they're all public). Since that would leave half the electoral circle in question cut of from any hospital at all when the weather is too bad to cross the mountain between that half and the closest hospital on the other side this party was formed and won a seat on their first try, costing the former second place party their seat. At the same time my own political party recieved 3 seats with 3,9% of the votes, on of the highest ratios of voters pr representative of any political parties. Our biggest party had a bit over twentysix percent of the votes and about twenty eight percent of the seats. There's no lower limit to how many votes you need to get i to our parliament, although 19 of the 169 seats are reserved to political parties with more than 4% of the total votes at a national level. I can go into more details if you're interested. But the main point is, we're a democracy. Yes, we're a constitutional monarchy, but we elect people in a way that ensures that all viewpoints are represented fairly.
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@night6724 You claim that the funding fathers never talked about democracy... "“Great confusion about the words democracy, aristocracy, monarchy...Democracy in my sense, where the whole power of the government in the people, whether exercised by themselves or by representatives, chosen by them either mediately or immediately and legally accountable to them...Consequence, the proposed government a representative democracy...Constitution revocable and alterable by the people. This representative democracy as far as is consistent with its genius has all the features of good government.” Alexander Hamilton, on the Constitution, 1788"
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@night6724 As for the definition of Democracy... The ancient Greeks didn't distinguish between direct and indirect democracy when using that word... Your idea that we somehow are not democracies is just plain wrong, because the definitions you use are wrong... Regarding the communist... It depends on the type of communism you're talking about. But if you go back to the fundamental ideological works prior to the society union quite a few of the proposed societies where democratic to varying degrees. In the case of the idea of soviets, soviets where meant to be worker councils. The idea being that in a equal society everyone is a worker of some kind and everyone would therefore be entitled to vote in a soviet, in a workers council, then that workers council would vote for representatives to send to the next step up etc... At a small scale that's actually democratic. When you start dealing with a nation on the scale of the Soviet Union and involve stalinism and his terrorising of political opponents it of course cease to be democratic in any way shape or form. And the Marxists in Russia though that the ends justified the means, and that temporarily taking away the right to vote for farmers, non-communists etc could be justified for the greater good in the long run... Not exactly a good idea...
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@night6724 Yes Hitler was elected because the Weimar Republic was a democracy. And it remained one till Hitler started using non-democratic means to influence the elections and then indeed set the democratic process aside... But yeah, honestly, if the communists had been willing to enter a coalition with labour then Hitlers party wouldn't have been given power in the first place...
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@night6724 There's no country that I'm aware of that jails people for not voting. What's normal is a fine for not voting. And a blank vote is still valid if you don't want to support any parties or candidates. But participation genuinely is a good metric, because people will vote (with or without legal enforcement of such fines) if they feel like they have agency, if their vote matters. In the US your vote genuinely doesn't in many cases. A republican or third party voter in a blue state, or a democrat or third party voter in a red state gets zero representation at a federal level if they vote, their vote is wasted. Indeed it's technically possible to win an election in the US (assuming no members of the electoral college votes against their state) with just 23% of the voters in the US voting for you, if you can just get the right people to vote for you... The remaining 77% can all vote for someone else and they'll still lose. By contrast our system here in Norway has no wasted votes.
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@night6724 As for a prime minister being elected by parliament and not directly by the people, that's actually give the people more representation and power then voting for him directly. The reason is that you essentially get a similar effect to swing states but with far more tipping points where just a few votes makes a difference. It's far easier to punish a prime minister doia bad job in a election where you vote for those that elect him then if you vote for him directly. Because our elections are not binary, you don't 100% win or 100% lose, you get degrees of power for your political party depending on how much voters you have. In the US if you get 12% of the votes there and all other parties get 11% or less of the votes you'll get 100% of the representatives from that state to the congress or electoral college etc. So as long as you aren't that one voters that's the tipping point between having more or less votes then another party you have no agency. In our system we have a tipping point for every single representative for every single political party. And winning or losing depends on the overall combination of parties that gets a majority of the seats or not. Every single one of those parties can punish a prime minister that doesn't behave. Also, prime ministers don't rule alone. They run cabinets with representatives from multiple political parties in a coalition, each one of them usually voting on what to do rather than the prime minister having power of his own. And our parliament can cast a vote of no confidence at any time removing the prime minister from power replacing him with someone else in the process. So instead of situations like in the US where the congress makes it impossible for a president to get a budget through and then punishes him and complains about him as if that's his fault (regardless of party affiliation) we just leave that to the parliament. Indeed we've had situations where our prime ministers has had to work with the budgets proposed by other parties. There's no gridlock, no blaming our prime minister. If we don't like his budget proposal and another party propose another budget with more support in the parliament then that ends up winning and is what the prime minister has to work with. Done and dusted. And it's parliaments job to balance those budgets. (A few years ago the conservatives had the prime minister, labour won their budget proposal, so we ran with a labour budget, then the conservatives and their coalition cabinet members had to work out the details of how to use that. So a liberal minister of something (say education as a example) would have x amount of money budgeted by the parliament, but would then make a education budget of their own with no interference from the parliament. That amount of money for education might be more or less then the prime minister planned in her budget. There's no we don't like your budget come up with another one. Just okay, that budget is good, but this one is better, use it, done and dusted. And like I said, our biggest political party had 28 out of 169 seats in the last election, so no one party can get a budget through that no other party likes. And even a budget proposal from a tiny party like mine (3,9% in the last election) can win if they get more votes then any other proportional. Parliament can give the prime minister instructions. Failing to carry them out can lead to being replaced. Essentially our prime minister and his or her cabinet works on behalf of our parliament to run the country. Our system leads to everything being compromises between different people with different ideas about the best solutions to a problem. With different alliances on a case by case basis. For instance take the Christian peoples party. They're socially conservative, so not all that keen on gay marriages, abortion, genetic manipulation etc... But they also believe in helping your neighbour, taking care of Gods creation etc. So while they'll vote with the conservatives on some matters they'll often vote with labour and the socialists on issues like helping the poor both at home and abroad, taking good care of refugees etc since it's in their view a god given duty to do so. And they also vote in favour of taking care of the environment, since in their view we're gods stewards of creation. Unlike labour however they want private schools. Labour wants the egalitarian equality of public schools, the conservatives believe in privatization being more effective both economically but also in terms of quality. And the Christian peoples party wants that freedom of private schools to have a separate christian curriculum on top of the enforced government ones to instill Christian values, the liberals also wants private schools. So the compromise is that private schools are allowed but making a profit on them keeps being banned then mafe legal again then banned etc depending on who's currently holding the upper hand in our parliament. And yes, the government pays for private education. All of this ensures that we have educational freedom without being exploited by anyone trying to make a profit on us, and we have equal opportunities for education of equal roughly quality. About the same amount of money is used on everyone, but private schools have the freedom to use it differently.
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@night6724 Again, a parliamentarian system is far more democratic. The reason why there's such conflict between different candidates within the US political parties is because you only have two with realistic chances of representation. By contrast under our system Hilary and Sanders would be in two completely different political parties to begin with. And people would vote for them *directly*. Any political party here can propose a prime minister candidate. It's then their job to get enough voters and coalition partners (and votes for said coalition partners) to get a majority in the parliament for their proposal for a new cabinet. You don't have to be one of the biggest parties to become prime minister, just have the most support in parliament. And that support is created by our votes. We use a party list proportional system where you can rearrange the order of representatives in the party list. Even adding people from other parties onto your list if you wish, removing people that's there etc. And seats in each electoral circle is given to each list proportionally to the number of votes they got in that electoral circle. And remember, we have 19 of them with between 3 and 21 seats. In every single one of those electoral circles a few votes can make the difference between a seat going to one list or another. And if enough people change their list then depending on those changes the representative sent in may change, and indeed like I mentioned at least in theory even be from a different political party. Or a candidate may in some cases be listed on two lists, potentially splitting the votes for them between those two lists, but also giving them two possible avenues to be elected as either list may win seats. And such alternative lists often win in local and regional elections, although that one party with 0,3% of the votes is the first time in many years that it happened at a national level (a labour party representative was also listed in another list called patient focus, all about that hospital they where about to lose, forming that list essentially created a new political party that won what had been a conservative seat in their electoral circle, the labour party kept the same number of seats as normal there, if that party had been the swing vote in our parliament between two possible cabinets she would have had the ability to fight for her hospital by trading that hospital for cabinet support for instance, being a king maker)
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@night6724 As a example of that agency we have I used to vote for the socialist left party in Norway, they never join into coalitions with the conservatives, only labour or they fight as a opposition party in the parliament. Last time they where in a cabinet with the labour party the labour party didn't make much concessions to their coalition partners, behaving like bullies. So I switched to voting for the green party. A lot of people voted for other parties then the socialist left party in the next election. The greens where willing to cooperate with the conservatives. And other voters switched to red, who campaigned on being in opposition and not selling out to the labour party. In essence we indirectly gave power to the conservatives, without voting in conservative representatives. Labour actually grew as a party with more representatives in parliament due to getting more voters. After all, they achieved their politics. But their coalition partners didn't, so they lost the election. Green political parties where strong in the parliament and the conservative relied on three other political parties, the liberals and christian peoples party both green parties that wants us to take good care of the environment, and the "process party" that's as gray as they get. so we (the environmental movement) got more work done under the conservatives then under labour despite the conservative party itself being pretty gray. They're just better at making compromises. So despite being left leaning politically I'm very much in favour of a conservative prime minister, as long as they do not enter a coalition with the progress party and enter coalitions with plenty of greener parties. The end result might not always be my preferred one, but the overall direction is likely to be better from my point of view. Other parties on other political spectrums will have similar trade offs when picking a party to vote for. But yeah, we very much vote for prime ministers, even if we don't do so directly. For you guys it would mean that you could vote for someone other than Hilary or Trump. And someone who genuinely has support in the population would win. My guess would be a moderate right leaning person back then given the political climate in the US instead of Trump. Since the person in question would have support from both the left and right, given that Hilary wasn't popular enough. Trump and John McCain would probably be in different political parties. And my guess is that McCain would have won that election with some support from the left, assuming that both Hilary and Sanders would probably fail to get enough support for their own candidacies in that election.
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@night6724 The Nazis "left wing"? How in Earth did you come to that conclusion?
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@night6724 I'm talking about the 1930 election in the Weimar republic... Not the 1932 one. If the communists had entered a coalition then the Nazies wouldn't have come to power in 1932. But the fragmentation of the electorate is part of why we have 19 seats reserved for parties bigger than 4% You still get proportional representation with fewer votes. But merging two small parties when you just have minor differences is worth doing under our system allowing smaller parties to effectively put up a opposition to bigger ones avoiding that kind of concentration of power that the Weimar republic faced. No one party here decides the outcome of a election. Almost all election results in Norway requires at least 3 parties to form a coalition in order to win.
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@night6724 Stalin just wanted power... His justification may have been psudo ideological... But he was no real communist... Marx... He was a communist. But it's kind of a problem that the Marxists started laying claim to the term communism as if no other communists existed nor other visions of what communism entails... It's a shame really... The hope of real communism in Russia died with the Kronstadt sailors... After that Lenin and then Stalin just got away with their authoritarianism unchallenged...
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@night6724 The Greeks came up with multiple forms... Athen didn't have the only democracy in Greece... I'm going to share a short article debating another paper about the topic in a follow up comment...
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@night6724 Athens where just the most well known form of democracy because they where a major power of that time, and it's the victors that write the history as they say... Anyway, they actually had a religious cult for democracy in Greece in multiple city states.
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@night6724 Damned, looks like the spam filter are my comment with the url... Hopefully it'll turn up again later when they go through the spam filter output...
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@night6724 The Greeks had *more" then one form of democracy. Athens just had one. But Ancient Greece was made up of more then just Athens and Sparta, even if they're both overrepresented in the modern consciousness.
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Hey, can you guys please check your spam filter?
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