Fuck Democracy

By Wayne Brown

Trump rallies mob beore the attack on the Capital
Jan 6, 2023




Our morning chat today wandered in the deep water when we started asking questions of why people follow Trump. This is indeed the issue. We will always have our psychopaths and narcissists. The danger is that people believe them, follow them, and, at times, are willing to violently attack our institutions in the grip of shared insanity.

As always, Perplexity was the third party in our discussion.

For one thing, Perplexity doesn't have the safety shackle of GPT-4. It answers questions from the data it has. For example, here is its answer to the question, "Is Trump Crazy?" Of course, he is, but Perplexity sends us down a few side roads to discover this gem from Scientific American, the source of the picture above. This addresses the core question of shared insanity. It also leads us to discover that the question of Trump's sanity is still censored from public discussion by professionals. But I digress ...

Trump is a blatant threat to democracy as we know it. We draw back and view the issue with a wider lens: 

How do the extreme doctrines of the American Republican Party threaten democracy?

Here, we see a definition of "democracy" that has to do with voting. It is transparently true that Republicans are opposed to elections, but the key question is, what if the MAGAs are in the majority? Can we assume that Trumpist craziness would vanish if we had fair elections? Hitler was elected. So was Putin.

I think we need another word for the just society we'd like to see.  This question gets closer to the meat of the matter:

How does DeSantes challenge democratic institutions?

I am reminded of a great book:

A Thousand Small Sanities: 

The Moral Adventure of Liberalism 

Hardcover – May 14, 2019

This reminds us that we strive for a liberal democracy, with "1,000 small sanities" such as an independent court system, freedom of speech and 998 others.

My own view is that a just society needs to be built on a foundation of human rights to avoid the all-too-common situation where the mob goes nuts and crushes the rights and lives of hated minorities. Society should be built on something like the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. This broadly defines what a "democracy," however popular, can do to its citizens or, for that matter, the citizens of other countries.

Perplexity provides this link, which is too cute to pass over.

That's pretty much the gist of our discussion on the matter. I hope it sheds some light on the issue for you.

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