Well, consider the recent attempted coup in Turkey. The Western media definitely has portrayed the military in a sympathetic light and the Government/Erdogan less so. Not saying that's right or wrong - but it implies to me that not everyone will see these issues as black or white.
It might depend on the interpretation of "legitimate", and make more sense if "are legitimate" is interpreted as "ever legitimate". For example, could a military coup in North Korea be "legitimate"?
They give some more detail in their linked earlier paper:
Similarly, while 43 percent of older Americans, including those born between the world wars and their baby-boomer children, do not believe that it is legitimate in a democracy for the military to take over when the government is incompetent or failing to do its job, the figure among millennials is much lower at 19 percent. In Europe, the generation gap is somewhat less stark but equally clear, with 53 percent of older Europeans and only 36 percent of millennials strongly rejecting the notion that a government’s incompetence can justify having the army “take over.”
While still striking, and while I still wonder whether generational differences in terminology are a factor, the addition of "when the government is incompetent or failing to do its job" does make it more plausible.
This coincides with the invention of WikiPedia, Youtube, social media, search engines, and mobile phone cameras, which are the new pillars of democracy and allow the spread of information which in the past would not have been known.
Would you expand on this? Are you implying that the US isn't perfect in its civil rights in practice? Is actively against civil rights? Values civil rights and wants to improve? Had in the past huge disparities in civil rights and was still stable at those times?
I was mainly referring to the civil rights practices of the United States in the past (i.e. Slavery, segregation, lack of suffrage for women, etc).
The United States functioned just fine as a democracy when well over half of it's population was lacking basic rights. Civil rights aren't required in a democracy as long as a portion of the population (classically white males in the US) has the right to vote.
I think an entire generation has just learned a lesson in civics.
Our system worked as designed: The candidate that won the electoral college won the presidency.
I lost faith in democracy after the election because of the amount of companies and people that feel like the only way to beat Trump in the next election is to suppress the freedoms of the people that support him.
It shows me that they never really believed in democracy in the first place and only played along because their candidate was the projected winner.
"I lost faith in democracy after the election because of the amount of companies and people that feel like the only way to beat Trump in the next election is to suppress the freedoms of the people that support him."
Evidence of systematic suppression please? Who? What? When? Where?
Sexism and racism can be measured in meaningful ways. Even where not directly measurable (though there are direct measurements as well), their effects can be shown.
Covert racism and sexism, which happens much much less than what many portray, yes.
However, we aren't talking about that. We are talking about what can't be measured.
The pay-wage gap for women is a good example. The left seems to think this is due to covert sexism. When you compare for education, job title, and many other factors to equal out the comparisons, there is no wage gap.
In what way is the wage gap argument even relevant here? This is a measurable thing, and people can discuss and debate actual facts. As you pointed out, some analyses of the data don't indicate a systematic bias. Regardless of what you believe, there are data and factual statements that can be made. But it's also utterly irrelevant.
On the other hand, you've made the claim that a very large number of people who oppose Trump want to suppress the freedoms of his supporters. This is a falsifiable claim, but you say that it cannot be measured and you can't provide any other proof or evidence. This is commonly known as "making shit up".
If this argument is valid, then I can argue that most Trump supporters secretly want to bomb England. I can't measure it or provide any evidence, but it's clearly true, because I said so.
There were some stories popping up that minorities were also being attacked after the election. However, so many of them turned out to be made-up/fake, It's really difficult to believe that it's happening at any elevated level (especially with almost no video proof besides what someone said).
Fake news sites are banned from FB advertising, yet they only seem to be right-leaning. Sites like the Huffingtonpost, which has some of the most click-baity and outright fake news stories I've ever seen still gets to post their sludge on FB and get paid for it.
I don't see any of the censoring happening with violent and vocal BLM supporters that call for the death of white people and police officers. In fact, Jack Dorsey is good friends with one of the leaders of the movement.
These are just a small sampling of the censoring and violence that has been happening before and after the election.
It's relevant because people get fired and companies get boycotted over a highly politicized interpretation of the results, which actually is usually do to many other factors.
This thought policing stops, however, when it involves something like the abuse and silencing of a political opponent or someone you don't support.
I didn't even mention all of the Wikileaks that showed that almost everyone in the mainstream media was conspiring against Trump, Sanders, and all political opponents of HRC.
> Trump supporters attacked [...] There were some stories popping up that minorities were also being attacked after the election. However, so many of them turned out to be made-up/fake, It's really difficult to believe that it's happening at any elevated level (especially with almost no video proof besides what someone said).
First, anyone attacking Trump supporters physically is clearly a pretty terrible person and no one in any position of power is supporting this.
Second, a few nutso people don't represent a systematic effort to suppress Trump voters or their freedoms as you've claimed.
Third, you must see the hypocrisy of dismissing all claims of violence against minorities while believing every story about violence against Trump supporters. Even Trump doesn't believe this. On national television he told his own supporters to stop.
> Facebook bans vocal Trump supporter
A quick search indicates that she'd been banned repeatedly in the past before her Trump support. I don't have any visibility into what she was posting to get banned repeatedly. It seems like this particular ban was an overreach, but not surprising given the history.
> Facebook bans trump supporter page
I have no visibility into this either so I can't really speak to it. Maybe Facebook was pointlessly and senselessly banning? Maybe the ban came because the group regularly pushes the limits of what Facebook allows? I have no idea.
> Reddit CEO edits Trump supporter comments
This was stupid and wildly inappropriate but hardly constituted any kind of secret censorship. His edits were not subtle. He changed mentions of his own name to mentions of the_donald mods.
> Twitter actively censored Trump campaign
So this whole article is about Twitter not approving some particular custom emoji? I don't see what the issue is on these particular emoji, but I also think this is a mountains-of-molehills situation. They ran the rest of the campaign.
> fake news sites banned from Facebook
It says something that you assume banning fake news sites is an attack against the right.
> Fake news sites are banned from FB advertising, yet they only seem to be right-leaning. Sites like the Huffingtonpost, which has some of the most click-baity and outright fake news stories I've ever seen still gets to post their sludge on FB and get paid for it.
Huffington Post posts a lot of clickbait trash. That's not the same at all as fake news, though. I'm pretty sure Facebook also allows a lot of clickbait trash from sites like Breitbart.
> I don't see any of the censoring happening with violent and vocal BLM supporters that call for the death of white people and police officers. In fact, Jack Dorsey is good friends with one of the leaders of the movement.
I don't see any BLM leaders calling for the deaths of white people or police officers. You can't point to random assholes online and claim they represent an entire movement. Or if you can, I can point to David Duke and other overtly racist Trump supporters to condemn all Trump supporters.
> I didn't even mention all of the Wikileaks that showed that almost everyone in the mainstream media was conspiring against Trump, Sanders, and all political op...
Your main account has been posting primarily political comments, which is an abuse of this site and its community. To create another account so you can post more political comments faster is going much too far, so we've banned this account and we'll ban the main one if you continue.
Maybe? Consciousness is pretty ill defined. If you define it such that it can be measured, then the measurement answers the question. If you define it such that it cannot be measured, then I think it's kind of meaningless.
I've complained about Trump win and discussed consequences - and possible actions. However, I feel rather offended by a suggestion that I'm not democratic in views.
I also felt Trump won democratically, more or less. Played by existed rules, nobody loudly objected to rules before voting - sounds fair. That was until I looked into things with different perspective.
I think election and voting are two rather different things. While voting took a day and was fair by itself, election was going on for a couple of years - enough to be able to work out democratic approach. It this case it was a sort of propaganda - the populist way Trump chose and rather skillfully followed.
Now I don't think the winning is too legitimate. However in practice I think we're left more with attempts to keep the good parts of existing system, protecting them from possible and likely mistakes or deliberate attacks from the president. This protection will take efforts and won't likely be perfect, but that's I think what we have.
So, lots of work ahead. A good thing is that the election forces us to look into root causes of the problems. But all that has little to do with rejection of democracy by those who oppose Trump.
> Our system worked as designed: The candidate that won the electoral college won the presidency.
Well, yes, the system worked as designed. But that's not the question that's being studied.
The study evaluates if people feel that 'our system' is a good one. And the not just whether the electoral college to select a president is a good example of a representative democracy, but whether a representative democracy, where we hold elections for the people in the society to select representatives to govern us, is a good way to organize humans.
On the one hand, no, Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump were clearly not the smartest, wisest, most knowledgeable humans the United States could offer, who would be the most successful in communications with other countries, who would offer public policies that maximize the desired benefits and minimize negative consequences in the ideal ratio, who would handle the issues that they are presented with throughout the presidency with the greatest understanding of the issues, and who would select advisors and delegate responsibilities as required.
Someone with these characteristics would not likely be selected by the people, who would lack the information to determine which person they were. Even with a knowledgeable population, people would disagree on the policies they would implement. Also, someone with the best characteristics would be continuously improving their abilities, rather than campaigning.
On the other hand, the electoral college and presidency, flawed as they are, are better than a military coup, anarchy, or a dictatorship (assuming the dictator isn't this ideal leader, or wouldn't select an ideal successor).
There's no question that democracy as a system has some inherent problems. But I doubt that we can come up with a better alternative than a representative democracy, which is I think the main drawback of this survey.
There's also no question that the form of representative democracy we currently have is corrupted and inefficient, and that we could make one more fair and accurate than it is. But I doubt it would stay that way.
We don't have democracy, we have liberal democracy there is a significant distinction. People have lost faith in liberal democracy because they feel it's no longer looking out for their interests but the interest of the minority. Whether that's the rich or other groups, for the lower classes this is framed as a racial struggle. The issue is not that they have no experience with other forms, it's that liberal democracy is suppose to protect the minority from the majority, but it seems the opposite problem is now the case. The majority feels it needs to be protected from the minority.
Either the system caters to that, or people are going to rebel. You need to protect the minority because they are good for the economy and the masses. Until the masses no longer feel that this is the case. That's what the so-called pseudo-elite don't understand. The relationship is one of power sharing, not of ownership. This is not a normative statement, this is a realist statement. This is how things work in the real world.
We have no experience with this, other than perhaps Fascism, because liberal democracy has not had this problem before. In that there has been constant growth and therefore employment for its entire history, sharing the power between minority and majority. You can close your eyes to this, but if you have a bunch of unemployed people that feel dis-empowered as a group they are going to react. First they are going to react by electing the likes of Trump. When that doesn't work they are going to react with force. Unless you do something about the way that they feel about the political situation.
As Mark Cuban said, money makes everything better. They don't have money, they are reacting.
democracy being the best choice is so ingrained in us from childhood, questioning it becomes painful. its like finding out about santa. cognitive dissonance comes into play, and any critical thinking is squashed. its hard for people to even question democracy in a hypothetical environment, it being the fairest is almost established as a basic law of physics.
even the title of the article ... "lost faith" seems to imply its a bad thing to question democracy.
I wonder if part of the problem is democracy is rather ill defined. I'm sure you have seen the classic case where some one says the United States is not a democracy but a republic... usually its a troll comment. Regardless I think there is general confusion as to what a democracy is [1] and isn't.
Something to note in the article is how interest in politics overall has declined in the newer generation. Thus the lack of faith in democracy, if such a trend is legitimate, may be the result of an increasingly apathetic culture.
I think that it's interesting that a lot of the major social advances in the US—ending segregation, legalizing abortion, legalizing gay marriage—are the result of Supreme Court decisions, which is probably the least democratic part of our government. Not all, certainly. But I guess I'm not so surprised that some young people don't see democratic action as the only way to advance social progress.
One thing I do not see mentioned, Democracy depends upon a educated voters and that education has been eroded greatly over the last 50 or so years. Voters also need to review real facts, not facts created by "Reality TV" shows we call the news media and various Internet Sites. No wonder faith in Democracy is falling. An educated person can easily spot these fake stories from a mile away.
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[ 7.8 ms ] story [ 96.1 ms ] threadThey give some more detail in their linked earlier paper:
Similarly, while 43 percent of older Americans, including those born between the world wars and their baby-boomer children, do not believe that it is legitimate in a democracy for the military to take over when the government is incompetent or failing to do its job, the figure among millennials is much lower at 19 percent. In Europe, the generation gap is somewhat less stark but equally clear, with 53 percent of older Europeans and only 36 percent of millennials strongly rejecting the notion that a government’s incompetence can justify having the army “take over.”
http://www.journalofdemocracy.org/sites/default/files/Foa%26...
While still striking, and while I still wonder whether generational differences in terminology are a factor, the addition of "when the government is incompetent or failing to do its job" does make it more plausible.
What is interesting is all of the new information and our ability to process it as much as we want.
Can we see the data for this? Absolutely shocking to me.
The United States functioned just fine as a democracy when well over half of it's population was lacking basic rights. Civil rights aren't required in a democracy as long as a portion of the population (classically white males in the US) has the right to vote.
Our system worked as designed: The candidate that won the electoral college won the presidency.
I lost faith in democracy after the election because of the amount of companies and people that feel like the only way to beat Trump in the next election is to suppress the freedoms of the people that support him.
It shows me that they never really believed in democracy in the first place and only played along because their candidate was the projected winner.
Evidence of systematic suppression please? Who? What? When? Where?
Sound familiar?
Nope. Sounds like BS. You can't measure it? Doesn't exist, then.
I'm glad we can agree on something.
However, we aren't talking about that. We are talking about what can't be measured.
The pay-wage gap for women is a good example. The left seems to think this is due to covert sexism. When you compare for education, job title, and many other factors to equal out the comparisons, there is no wage gap.
On the other hand, you've made the claim that a very large number of people who oppose Trump want to suppress the freedoms of his supporters. This is a falsifiable claim, but you say that it cannot be measured and you can't provide any other proof or evidence. This is commonly known as "making shit up".
If this argument is valid, then I can argue that most Trump supporters secretly want to bomb England. I can't measure it or provide any evidence, but it's clearly true, because I said so.
Trump supporters attacked:
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=trump+supporter... (Just some of the Trump supporters attacked)
There were some stories popping up that minorities were also being attacked after the election. However, so many of them turned out to be made-up/fake, It's really difficult to believe that it's happening at any elevated level (especially with almost no video proof besides what someone said).
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3603345/Conservative... (Facebook bans vocal Trump supporter)
http://ilovemyfreedom.org/facebook-bans-trump-supporters/ (Facebook bans trump supporter page)
http://www.siliconbeat.com/2016/11/30/reddit-vows-combat-onl... (Reddit CEO edits Trump supporter comments)
http://dailycaller.com/2016/11/18/trumps-digital-director-tw... (Twitter actively censored Trump campaign)
http://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-bans-fake-news-sites-fr... (fake news sites banned from Facebook)
Fake news sites are banned from FB advertising, yet they only seem to be right-leaning. Sites like the Huffingtonpost, which has some of the most click-baity and outright fake news stories I've ever seen still gets to post their sludge on FB and get paid for it.
I don't see any of the censoring happening with violent and vocal BLM supporters that call for the death of white people and police officers. In fact, Jack Dorsey is good friends with one of the leaders of the movement.
Examples: http://hypeline.org/minutes-after-dallas-shooting-blm-radica...
These are just a small sampling of the censoring and violence that has been happening before and after the election.
It's relevant because people get fired and companies get boycotted over a highly politicized interpretation of the results, which actually is usually do to many other factors.
This thought policing stops, however, when it involves something like the abuse and silencing of a political opponent or someone you don't support.
I didn't even mention all of the Wikileaks that showed that almost everyone in the mainstream media was conspiring against Trump, Sanders, and all political opponents of HRC.
First, anyone attacking Trump supporters physically is clearly a pretty terrible person and no one in any position of power is supporting this.
Second, a few nutso people don't represent a systematic effort to suppress Trump voters or their freedoms as you've claimed.
Third, you must see the hypocrisy of dismissing all claims of violence against minorities while believing every story about violence against Trump supporters. Even Trump doesn't believe this. On national television he told his own supporters to stop.
> Facebook bans vocal Trump supporter
A quick search indicates that she'd been banned repeatedly in the past before her Trump support. I don't have any visibility into what she was posting to get banned repeatedly. It seems like this particular ban was an overreach, but not surprising given the history.
> Facebook bans trump supporter page
I have no visibility into this either so I can't really speak to it. Maybe Facebook was pointlessly and senselessly banning? Maybe the ban came because the group regularly pushes the limits of what Facebook allows? I have no idea.
> Reddit CEO edits Trump supporter comments
This was stupid and wildly inappropriate but hardly constituted any kind of secret censorship. His edits were not subtle. He changed mentions of his own name to mentions of the_donald mods.
> Twitter actively censored Trump campaign
So this whole article is about Twitter not approving some particular custom emoji? I don't see what the issue is on these particular emoji, but I also think this is a mountains-of-molehills situation. They ran the rest of the campaign.
> fake news sites banned from Facebook
It says something that you assume banning fake news sites is an attack against the right.
> Fake news sites are banned from FB advertising, yet they only seem to be right-leaning. Sites like the Huffingtonpost, which has some of the most click-baity and outright fake news stories I've ever seen still gets to post their sludge on FB and get paid for it.
Huffington Post posts a lot of clickbait trash. That's not the same at all as fake news, though. I'm pretty sure Facebook also allows a lot of clickbait trash from sites like Breitbart.
> I don't see any of the censoring happening with violent and vocal BLM supporters that call for the death of white people and police officers. In fact, Jack Dorsey is good friends with one of the leaders of the movement.
I don't see any BLM leaders calling for the deaths of white people or police officers. You can't point to random assholes online and claim they represent an entire movement. Or if you can, I can point to David Duke and other overtly racist Trump supporters to condemn all Trump supporters.
Stories of overtly racist and violent Trump supporters are not hard to find: http://www.cnn.com/2015/08/20/politics/donald-trump-immigrat...
http://www.cnn.com/2015/11/21/politics/trump-muslims-surveil...: "At least one man punched the protester and a woman kicked him while he was on the ground."
> I didn't even mention all of the Wikileaks that showed that almost everyone in the mainstream media was conspiring against Trump, Sanders, and all political op...
By that notion, do you also conclude that human don't have consciousness?
I also felt Trump won democratically, more or less. Played by existed rules, nobody loudly objected to rules before voting - sounds fair. That was until I looked into things with different perspective.
I think election and voting are two rather different things. While voting took a day and was fair by itself, election was going on for a couple of years - enough to be able to work out democratic approach. It this case it was a sort of propaganda - the populist way Trump chose and rather skillfully followed.
Now I don't think the winning is too legitimate. However in practice I think we're left more with attempts to keep the good parts of existing system, protecting them from possible and likely mistakes or deliberate attacks from the president. This protection will take efforts and won't likely be perfect, but that's I think what we have.
So, lots of work ahead. A good thing is that the election forces us to look into root causes of the problems. But all that has little to do with rejection of democracy by those who oppose Trump.
Well, yes, the system worked as designed. But that's not the question that's being studied.
The study evaluates if people feel that 'our system' is a good one. And the not just whether the electoral college to select a president is a good example of a representative democracy, but whether a representative democracy, where we hold elections for the people in the society to select representatives to govern us, is a good way to organize humans.
On the one hand, no, Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump were clearly not the smartest, wisest, most knowledgeable humans the United States could offer, who would be the most successful in communications with other countries, who would offer public policies that maximize the desired benefits and minimize negative consequences in the ideal ratio, who would handle the issues that they are presented with throughout the presidency with the greatest understanding of the issues, and who would select advisors and delegate responsibilities as required.
Someone with these characteristics would not likely be selected by the people, who would lack the information to determine which person they were. Even with a knowledgeable population, people would disagree on the policies they would implement. Also, someone with the best characteristics would be continuously improving their abilities, rather than campaigning.
On the other hand, the electoral college and presidency, flawed as they are, are better than a military coup, anarchy, or a dictatorship (assuming the dictator isn't this ideal leader, or wouldn't select an ideal successor).
There's no question that democracy as a system has some inherent problems. But I doubt that we can come up with a better alternative than a representative democracy, which is I think the main drawback of this survey.
There's also no question that the form of representative democracy we currently have is corrupted and inefficient, and that we could make one more fair and accurate than it is. But I doubt it would stay that way.
The issue is that this entire generation hasn't really had much direct experience with "all those other forms."
Either the system caters to that, or people are going to rebel. You need to protect the minority because they are good for the economy and the masses. Until the masses no longer feel that this is the case. That's what the so-called pseudo-elite don't understand. The relationship is one of power sharing, not of ownership. This is not a normative statement, this is a realist statement. This is how things work in the real world.
We have no experience with this, other than perhaps Fascism, because liberal democracy has not had this problem before. In that there has been constant growth and therefore employment for its entire history, sharing the power between minority and majority. You can close your eyes to this, but if you have a bunch of unemployed people that feel dis-empowered as a group they are going to react. First they are going to react by electing the likes of Trump. When that doesn't work they are going to react with force. Unless you do something about the way that they feel about the political situation.
As Mark Cuban said, money makes everything better. They don't have money, they are reacting.
even the title of the article ... "lost faith" seems to imply its a bad thing to question democracy.
No, it merely means that previous generations did have faith in democracy. Whether that faith is well founded or not is not addressed.
[1]: http://www.economist.com/node/8908438
Generation X is sick of your bullshit.
(decisions that your vote could influence)/(decisions that affect you)
...is low enough that they don't think it makes a difference either way?
Pro-tip: vote with your feet, this works.