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Originally Posted by Josef K
I don't understand why that's more "democratic" than everyone in the country voting and SSM winning out - and since, again, the majority supports SSM, that's what would have happened had there been such a vote.
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yea, it's not necessarily more democratic in this case. in this one case mob rule would result in the same result. representative/decentralized democracy (i.e. state autonomy instead of federal autonomy), on the other hand, would drag this issue out for decades to come.
to clarify: i never actually did say this was a bad thing. i'm pleasantly surprised that gay marriage is now legal across the board in the US. i am pretty sure the only way this would be possible is for the supreme court to unilaterally declare it as such, as opposed to waiting for state legislation to fall in line on an individual basis in each of the 50 states.
but i don't take this as a sign that direct democracy would be preferable in general... because the fact that a popular vote would result in the result i want in this one case is a completely arbitrary and circumstantial fact. and i would want equal rights for gays regardless of how popular or unpopular the idea was with the general populace.
to highlight an example of what i mean.. i think it was you who told me about switzerland and their more direct form of democracy (iirc). i googled that to look in to the idea a bit and found some credibility to what you were saying. i also found an example that runs contrary to pro-democratic rhetoric which manifested in that very country, and manifested as a direct result of populism and direct democracy. the example was the banning of minarets in that country, which was a piece of legislation that was spawned out of a basic grass roots movement that was essentially rooted in nationalistic and xenophobic sentiments in the general populace. so this is an example of democracy resulting in (what i perceive) as oppressive and counter-productive legislation.
of course this doesn't demonstrate that democracy is bad cause it results in bad legislation. it just demonstrates that it can swing either way. so dedication to democracy as an ideal must be overridden by other concerns via a more centrally controlled structure, in some cases
which, in this case, comes in the form of the supreme court, which as fiddler noted is set up for this purpose (to interpret the overriding law of the land/constitution). funnily enough, i believe the supreme court essentially granted themselves this power, as it doesn't actually appear in the constitution. which, yea, sounds a bit autocratic in spirit to me. but once again i am in favor of that sort of thing.
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Well yeah, of course nobody as a matter of ideology supports states' rights vs. federal power, just like how "judicial philosophy" in general is a sham. Court cases are a way of making policy, and all judges would like the policy that they're making to be policy they approve of. So, yeah, everybody uses legal arguments and says they think x reading of the constitution is better than y reading for some convoluted reason, but really they're just going to use whatever theory is prevalent at the time to support the policy position they like. I don't think that's a bad thing necessarily, and I think if more people recognized it instead of treating the constitution like it's the word of God we'd be better off. But I don't see how you get from there to "let's have a dictator!"
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that's fair enough... and i know i have an incendiary way of phrasing things... mostly for effect
i don't necessarily say this demonstrates we need a dictator. more that it demonstrates one advantage that autocratic rule has over democracy... that being efficiency/efficacy in terms of getting **** done.
of course autocratic rule has other problems which democracy works to safeguard against... so this can't be used to say "we should have a dictator"
but i just sort of find (in my perception) that many westerners are so dedicated to democratic ideals that they refuse to even acknowledge this simple fact.. because they dislike the ideological implications