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ZorbaTHut  1yr ago (text post)   35245 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 19, 2022

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Another examples is when the supreme court overturned Roe vs Wade. People were saying it was undemocratic even though all it did was return the power to regulate abortion from the unelected court to elected officials.

I don't like Roe and am glad it was overturned, but it seems legitimate to call its reversal undemocratic because overturning Roe was unpopular according to polls.

(It is also fine to call Roe itself undemocratic for the reason you give. This is no more contradictory, in theory, than when Congress wants to defer its authority to Executive Department bureaucrats.)

In my experience, undemocratic is only used for its literal meaning, but it's also only used to show negative valence and primarily used by the left, so undemocratic right wing moves get called "undemocratic" but undemocratic left wing moves don't get that descriptor applied.

This is a roundabout way of saying that the grandparent to this comment doesn't match my experience. The media would portray the Slovenian Court decision positively, but it wouldn't call the decision "democratic".

It would be cool if the Supreme Court had the ability to initiate national referendums on court cases or to convene citizens' assemblies via sortition.

That one was just farcical. I can only guess that people just call SC decisions they don't like "undemocratic" on a knee jerk reflex, and didn't bother to actually think this one through. I'm not sure how else you can call that decision "undemocratic" without deliberately misusing the word for propaganda purposes.

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