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naraburns  nihil supernum  3yr ago (text post)   33085 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 9, 2023

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What country are you in?

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Finally there is the idea that the majority of fellow citizens and members of government would be persuaded to adopt the protestors’ views but somehow they have not had the chance to hear them explained properly. In a non-democracy like China or Russia this claim has a lot of plausibility. In those countries not only is factual knowledge about key political issues deliberately suppressed (as a state secret), but also even knowledge about the extent to which other people support the rulers and believe their lies. The only way to find out what one’s fellow citizens really believe may be to take the bold action of walking along the street with a piece of white paper. Thus, in a non-democracy, protest can indeed be a democratic act – an attempt to return politics to the people.

However, actual democracies aren’t like this. [...]

And this is the weak point of the argument. Where does the border between democracies and non-democracies lie? Who defined it? Governments of both groups of countries claim to be democratic and representing the will of the populace. All of them have groups the government or the people at large would prefer to pointedly ignore, be they racists, gays, nationalist separatists, people asking where the money went or smokers. The government has a lot of tools at its disposal to manufacture consent, not all of them democratic even in the most demic and cratic of democracies. A public protest is a way to bypass these tools and force the public to discuss your issue again, a relatively safe, quasi-anonymous way.

Even peaceful protests harm democracy by making the reach of ones voice dependant and granting undue weight upon characteristics not necessarily parallel with, and sometimes directly opposed to, what makes someone worth hearing.

I would actually agree to this.

To which I would also add: If technology makes protests easier, any politician who does respond to the protests should discount their response by the ease of protest. The size of the protest indicates how much support there is for the cause. If you use the newest technology to coordinate huge protests, transport people to protests to make it easier, etc., you are Goodharting protest size by increasing it in ways unrelated to the size of the underlying support.

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