Comment on Instead of everyone leaving NATO, could everyone else just kick the US out?
14th_cylon@lemmy.zip 8 hours agoNo serious political scientist claims democracy is a matter of ideology or “who feels represented.” There is broad cross-national agreement on procedural criteria: competitive elections, universal suffrage, freedom of association and expression, independent courts, civilian control of the military, and peaceful transfer of power. Chinese or Russian academics may reject these standards, but that doesn’t make them arbitrary—just inconvenient for regimes that fail to meet them. There’s no need for a supranational authority to decide this any more than there is one for physics; standards emerge from scholarly consensus and empirical comparison.
Second, pointing out abuses and contradictions inside democracies doesn’t negate their democratic character. What you describe in France, Greece, Germany, and Spain are are events happening within constitutional systems, not the absence of those systems. Courts overturn referenda because constitutions limit majority rule; executives misuse emergency powers; police and media manipulate narratives. That is democracy functioning badly, not democracy not existing.
The decisive distinction is whether these actions can be challenged, exposed, reversed, and punished. In Europe, governments lose elections, courts rule against executives, journalists investigate police misconduct, and opposition parties—leftist ones included—can recover and return. In Russia, journalists, opposition politicians, and anti‑corruption activists don’t lose court cases; they lose their freedom, their lives, or very famously, fall out of windows.
That is the difference between democracy and dictatorship, comrade.
Cowbee_Admirer@reddthat.com 4 hours ago
This simply isn’t true, ask Cuban political scientists or Chinese ones or Vietnamese ones.
Argument from the majority. By that logic, Taylor Swift objectively makes the best music in the planet, and Jazz isn’t real music.
Ridiculous comparison. Political sciences are not a hard science, and different political systems give rise to different interpretations. The fact is that this “broad cross-national agreement” is rejected by many, many scholars, particularly Marxist ones, with Marxist political scientists describing the western system as “bourgeois democracy”, meaning that despite suffrage once every four years, the outcomes are functionally the same as if only the 10% wealthiest voted. This is serious criticism based on empirical studies (such as likelihood of laws to pass based on what percentage of the population agree with them by income), and you cannot simply disregard it as “it’s not the consensus”.
Macron is president and won’t go to jail, the ECB is still operative and no bureaucrat will go to jail for destroying the Greek economy, nobody has gone to jail in Spain for tampering with democracy and fabricating false evidence from within the police, and the judges in the highest court of Germany won’t go to jail.
The fact that you aren’t aware of these things happening in Europe or the USA doesn’t mean they don’t happen. You could look up the cases of Rita Barberá or Miguel Blesa, both higher ups of the conservative party in Spain (PP) who died in mysterious circumstances shortly before going to trial, or Fabra winning the lottery 3 or 4 times. Ask the Catalonian pro-independence politicians if there is democracy and political freedom in Spain, with many of them enjailed or fleeing the country as political refugees. Ask Julian Assange or Edward Snowden about freedom in western “democracies”.