I don’t buy that explanation. Democracy turned out to be easily manipulatable with large sums of money and media control.
At this point, an average person can’t have much of an affect on how government is acting. Very few people can take a day off to protest, and even if they do, protests tend to be meaningless too.
I’m not saying that average person is blameless but most of the fault lies with the ruling classes.
> At this point, an average person can’t have much of an affect on how government is acting. Very few people can take a day off to protest, and even if they do, protests tend to be meaningless too.
The older I get, the more I believe the only real voting someone can do is with their wallet.
And even that is mostly bullshit, if you don't happen to be flush with money so you can actually afford to throw the weight of your wallet's contents around.
>Democracy turned out to be easily manipulatable with large sums of money and media control.
People being easy to manipulate is feature of humanity, not evidence that democracy does not work.
People are in charge for allowing that to happens, allowing to continue etc. If things go shit under heavy influencing and manipulation it's the failure of the people. "ruling classes" in democracy works is the fault of the non ruling majority.
> People being easy to manipulate is feature of humanity, not evidence that democracy does not work.
Maybe it's both. Much like communism assumes altrustic spherical humans in a vacuum, so does democracy assume that each voter will both bother to vote, and that they are rational enough to vote close to what they actually want without being swayed.
This could be evidence that democracy, much like communism, does not work very well.
I don't think so. Communism has an idea of what should happen next, democracy does not. Democracy is open to change, for whatever people choose, even quitting democracy.
Democracy is always changing, always on move and dangerous. That's why I like democracy. Functioning democracy can even end democracy and choose tyranny.
The founding fathers were heavily against democracy and did everything they could to limit the power of the government without being completely ineffective.
Idea being that individuals create wealth. Government will always become tyrannical.
> The founding fathers were heavily against democracy
Well yes, but this is the UK so the founding fathers would be one of William the Conqueror, James VI and I (that's one person), or George III and his regent, depending on which argument you want to have.
Nahh... when people say "the vote was manipulated" what they mean is "the vote made no sense to me personally, and clearly the voters can't be blamed, so it must have been manipulated".
There are plenty of examples of billions being thrown at campaigns and barely even moving the needle (e.g. Bloomberg's $1B fight for the Presidential race where he didn't even get 1% of the vote).
What I'm saying is that what people see as manipulation of voters (nobody could ever believe that!) is actually just another valid opinion that you so happen to disagree with.
Nobody was deceived. Nobody was manipulated. The voters just don't agree with you on this issue.
This is silly: all kinds of promises were made for Brexit, and if they weren't delivered then those expecting them are at least disappointed, and if there was no reasonable way they could have been delivered and no real effort to deliver them, then they absolutely were deceived.
How did the "£350m for the NHS" bus work out?
> actually just another valid opinion
Some opinions - sky is green, earth is flat - aren't valid.
People who argued about the nature of democratic accountability of the EU, even though I disagreed what them, are not a group I would argue were deceived.
People who believed the UK gave the EU £350 million per week, which is the example the other poster gave, were unambiguously deceived.
If any vote results in voters regretting their vote, I think that counts as voters being deceived.
I don't know (or care, given I left the UK as a direct result of the vote) if there was any significant regret in this case.
(I caveat "significant" because 5-10% of the population will agree with almost any proposition in any opinion poll, no matter how nonsensical the question).
Or maybe a water main breaks during vote counting and everyone is sent home. Except one party that keeps working. But of course nothing suspicious about that.
> Democracy turned out to be easily manipulatable with large sums of money and media control.
Is it, though? Establishment interests spend huge sums of money and often lose. The Republican party was an elite country club party, but when evangelicals emerged as a political force, the party had to jump on that wave, no matter how distasteful the old party elites found it. Then Trump came along, giving blatantly shallow lip service to religion, and now the party is beholden to him. That wasn't in anybody's plan except Trump's, and his personal wealth was paltry next to the Republican Party's resources.
But maybe the elites who do the manipulation are happy to pander on a few issues if they get what they want on the issues that are really important to them. Let's think about that. If there was one core tenet of the GHWB-era Republican Party that its elites would have wanted to protect above all else, what would it be? If there was one core tenet that united all American economic elites, one thing above all others that they would want to instill in voters' heads, wouldn't it be economical liberalism? More specifically, free trade? Well, they've failed at that. NAFTA was a banner achievement for the Republicans. Now Trump calls NAFTA a Clinton disaster and promotes trade war with China, and he runs the Republican Party, because it does matter what the voters want, and you can't outright buy their belief in anything.
We blame voters for being bought and manipulated when someone speaks to them in a way they find compelling but "shouldn't" according to our worldview. We assume that the superiority of our worldview gives us a natural advantage, and we look for special reasons why our views don't prevail. "What's the matter with Kansas?" in other words. What's the matter is that Trump's voters really do care more about Trump licking their wounded egos more than they care about anything else.
Do you think it doesn't apply to the UK? I drew on a US example because it was something I could explain in enough detail. Maybe UK economic elites have mastered control of their voters in a way that US elites have not. Although, you'll have to explain which economic elites in the UK decided that Brexit would be to their advantage and how they stole a march on the UK finance industry.
> Although, you'll have to explain which economic elites in the UK decided that Brexit would be to their advantage
The press.
For a time, Johnson himself was both a minister and a "journalist" for the Times. He was paid more for writing one article a week than for being a minister. Eventually he was forced to give this up. But Brexit is to a great extent a media project, backed by sensational but misleading claims, and supported by the media/politics revolving door.
The Sarah Vine/Michael Gove couple had quite an effect too.
If that's the best answer, I think it tends to show that money didn't buy Brexit. The media doesn't care what circus they're covering, as long as there are plenty of clowns and dancing bears. The people who had the money and motivation to buy public opinion on the issue lost out, and it all happened because some politicians found a message that resonated with voters and kept on it as long as it kept working.
Sounds like an explanation Adam Curtis would approve of. I wonder if he's made a film that's explored this in full yet? I know he's certainly mentioned Brexit.
The UK "establishment" is approximately Oxbridge, the Conservative party, the Queen, and the Church of England. These groups are not quite the same thing as economic elites.
The UK also has much stronger spending (and content) limits on electoral campaigns compared to the US.
Yep it's the people's own fault that they died while waiting in the emergency room. The politicians are sacrosanct and must not be criticized under any circumstances. So, you see, all these excess deaths are really suicides.
More people voted against the conservatives than voted for them, but due to the first past the post system they got a massive majority in Parliament and can do whatever they want.
Watching from next door (we've had STV PR in Ireland since independence), I never got this. PR _wasn't on offer_. Unless you actually preferred first past the post to AV (PR > FPTP > AV seems like a weird preference ranking, but I suppose it might be _someone's_), why on earth didn't you vote for AV?
