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What does this even mean? Elections are that consultation, and the electorate gets to decide what the 'major decisions' are by the salience of any particular issue come election time. Any more specific consultation than that is hardly necessary for a meaningful democracy, hence why every successful democracy ever has been a representative one.
Yeah, China has elections too. So does North Korea. Any more specific consultation than that is hardly necessary!
Oh come on that's hardly analogous. Those elections, as you well know, only allow government-approved candidates; there is no choice or consultation. It's ironic you should say that given that, as Skibboleth notes, it is often nominally Marxist regimes and their defenders that deploy the argument that liberal democracy is a farce that thwarts the real Will of the People, which can only truly be fulfilled by an authoritarian leadership.
Right, in America, you can have non-government-approved candidates... but if you try to run one, we'll investigate him and his associates to the ends of the earth and charge whatever ticky tack crimes we can concoct while claiming that he's "mentally incapable" of discharging the duties of the office, so we can also remove him that way, too.
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I find it reminiscent of many pro-Chavismo arguments from Western leftists I read some 15 years ago: authoritarian populism is more authentically democratic than liberal democracy because the former (supposedly) draws upon mass popular support while the latter uses sterile proceduralism to deprive The People of their voice while pretending otherwise.
This was mostly due to the fact that they liked Chavez' economic policies and needed a way to rationalize supporting an increasingly dictatorial government while claiming to still believe in freedom, human rights, etc...
For the contemporary American populist, it is much the same dilemma, except from the right. Your electoral fortunes have been tenuous at best and you're clearly losing the popularity contest with the younger generation. You can try to retool your message to be more appealing, or you can argue that corrupt institutions are creating a false consciousness and need to be swept away.
It's not a question of authoritarianism or false consciousness, it's a question of whether a different election result will actually mean a different policy. With strategies like "you get to vote in a referendum until you give the right answer", unelected bureaucracies pushing through policies that were never voted on, and half-assing the policies that people did vote for, you make elections more or less irrelevant. Add to that the demonization and censorship of dissent, and I'd say it's on you to prove these "public consultations" are in any way meaningful.
Different election results do yield different policies. The structure of the US government, however, means that there is heavy status quo bias - 50% + 1 is not adequate to radically alter policy.
Further, "winning" doesn't guarantee you get what you want because it's easy to talk a big game until you actually have to wield power and worry about fucking up (either by making a bad decision or alienating voters with incoherent demands - witness the GOP stumbling at the 1 yard line on ACA repeal or past prevaricating over the debt ceiling).
I'm going to need you to elaborate, because this looks like a complaint about being unpopular and a wheeled goalpost.
Weird... the word on the street in Europe is that the Anglo "first past the post" system makes things a lot more amenable to change, in contrast to coalition in-fighting of continental parliaments.
The "demonization" complaint might look that way, but censorship? If something was unpopular you wouldn't need to shadowban it, or ban it outright.
This may or may not be true, but the US doesn't have an Anglo political system. It has its own thing, which has a lot more veto points, asymmetric representation, and parliamentary rules which allow a minority to veto new legislation. Plus an electorate that seems to like divided government (in contrast to many parliamentary systems where divided government isn't even possible). In order to enact major legislative changes in the US you either need to convince diametrically opposed factions to cooperate or win an absolutely overwhelming victory (or bite the bullet and abolish the filibuster).
Absent that, you're pretty much stuck with executive discretion or lobbying the Supreme Court to declare that not doing what you want is unconstitutional.
Here I think we're going to hit an impasse, because I don't think right-wing populists in the US are being censored. I think they are (especially their more extremist representatives) attempting to frame losing soft power conflicts (or even just getting hit with the banhammer for TOS violations) as censorship.
Let's just say I will believe you don't think it's censorship only when you get hit by it to the same extent, and maintain that position. But either way losing soft power conflicts does not imply lack of popularity, it implies losing influence at centers of soft power, and what I said above still stands - you wouldn't need to pull strings at the centers of soft power if what you were trying to silence was truly unpopular.
Like I said, I don't think there's any chance of us coming to an agreement on this. What far-right American populists are experiencing is novel only in that it is falling on them for the first time in a very long time.
Multiple issues here.
First: People don't act on their beliefs out of need, they act on them out of sincerity (or at least a desire to signal sincerity). Religious conservatives don't persecute trans and gay people out of need; they do it because they genuinely believe these things to be immoral.
Second: you can be winning a contest and still correctly feel threatened by your opponent. To resort to sports metaphor, the second lowest form of argument: being ahead doesn't preclude the other team from staging a come back. Or cheating. Or doing something really weird, like pulling a gun. Especially when the game never actually ends and the only way you can really 'win' is to crush your opponent so badly they're forced to fire half the players (and half the fans) and try and poach some of your guys.
I'm not asking you to agree with me, I'm asking you to prove you actually believe what you say. For example, setting aside the fact that the people this is happening to mostly aren't right-wing (let alone far-right), American, or populist, since you're saying it isn't novel, can you give a few examples of it happening to a group you favor, and then elaborate on how you think this is not censorship at all, and it's a perfectly good way for a society to function.
To me it looks like you went of on a tangent. Nothing you said here addresses my argument that the people losing the soft power conflicts aren't unpopular, and that if they were unpopular, you wouldn't need to exercise soft power to silence them.
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This is bullshit propaganda for the ruling class of liberal democracy.
The people are never intentionally consulted about important issues, and when they are and vote against the wishes of the elite, their will is ignored in practice or slow walked to oblivion.
When were the European people's consulted on immigration? And those few times they were consulted about higher EU integration they said no and were summarily ignored.
Americans keep desperately voting to end their foreign wars and the elite will literally have generals disobey the people they elect to conserve foreign entanglements.
The idea of popular sovereignty is a fiction as self evidently self serving by now as the divine right of kings.
Perhaps not intentionally, but elections are a de facto consultation on the biggest issues anyway. The latter part of the statement just isn't so universally, or even generally, true as you suggest. Take immigration. Every election in a European nation was a consultation around the time of the refugee crisis; Germans could have voted for AfD if they felt that strongly, but they mostly didn't so more Merkel it was.
Concerning EU integration I assume you are referring to the Denmark Maastricht referendum, but I don't think it proves your point. As a result of the referendum they negotiated several crucial opt-outs including on defence and currency, then they put that changed agreement to another referendum and won fairly comfortably. So score one for liberal democracy, if anything.
Also; Obama did end the Iraq war? So not sure what the 'foreign entanglements' bit is about. If it's referring to Trump, them that isn't evidence of deep state interference, just of the fact that Trump is a moron who had no idea how to work the levers of power.
I guess it's one of these irregular verbs.
I am powerless, you are being railroaded, he is a moron who has no idea how to work the levers of power.
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This is not a fair representation of what happened. While the vast majority Syrians who made it to Europe were accepted (under their current international obligations European nations didn't have a great deal of choice, they could hardly start refouling them to Syria), most applicants from nations like Nigeria and Pakistan were rejected, as well as about half from Sudan and others. Overall I think about half of all asylum applications were rejected in the peak of the crisis, which considering that somewhere in the region of half of all asylum seekers were Syrians, Afghans or Iraqis is hardly a scandalous figure.
I also think public opinion was not so decidedly anti-migrant as some imply. Over the 2015-2017 period ESS, Ipsos Mori and BES all have opposition to migration decreasing, (all slightly different wording) the former two with figures of under 50% for every year since 2014.
In the technical sense that nearly 100,000 soldiers left 2009-11, with remaining forces mostly there for embassy/consulate protection?
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What do you call it when generals lie about the number of troops stationed in Syria to their president?
Anyway, this makes the whole idea unfalsifiable. Anyone that the deep state successfully hinders is automatically a moron who doesn't know how to work the levels of power by this logic.
Having read about that now it seems fairly small fry. Leaving under 8-900 troops where they led Trump to believe it was below 4-500. They still probably shouldn't have done it but hardly a grave subversion of democracy.
I don't think so. Successful apparent 'deep state hindrance' of an otherwise competent politician would be genuine cause for concern, whereas there is plenty of other evidence to indicate that Trump was just an idiot.
The dude that posted a bunch of classified documents on Discord doesn't seem like big deal to me either, in the grand scheme of things, but somehow the whole system came down on him like a tonne of bricks.
If someone's hindered at every step, won't he look like an idiot no matter what? How do you tell whether or not he's actually competent?
Well in all of his other affairs/experience as a politician/legislator/governor (as in someone who governs, not literally a 'governor'). In fairness though on some skim re-reading it doesn't seem that on Afghanistan there was that much thwarting. After all he got it done in the end.
I thought that was a joint Trump-Biden thing? Trump started the retreat, but Biden saw it through to the end, and going purely on memory, he surprised everyone with that move. It does show the establishment isn't omnipotent, but also that a lot of stars have to align for the common people to get their way.
Yeah I suppose there was the possibility of extension of presence/disregarding of the agreement but seems unlikely. As to the stars needing to align for the 'common people' to get their way; I'm not sure this is a useful statement generally because very rarely are the 'common' people so united as to say reasonably that they speak with one voice. On Afghanistan, I suspect your average American did not see it as a particularly important issue either way by the Trump era.
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