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India's Battle to Control the Democracy Narrative

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Re: India's Battle to Control the Democracy Narrative

#71

Post by mmooss »

0xDEAFBEAD wrote: post #52
mmooss wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It doesn't help that the nature of "democracy" is itself endlessly contested. It's not really; I've never heard someone say that, in fact. The nature of propaganda is to make everything uncertain, and then everyone is frozen and nobody has done wrong.

>It's not really; I've never heard someone say that, in fact. Lots of disputes within democracies consist of both sides implicitly claiming their position is "more democratic". E.g. how much power should the US president have over US bureaucracies? Some say that because bureaucrats are "unelected", the president should have more control. Others say that too much executive control is authoritarian. In both cases, the…

I don't see that happening. I see lots of propaganda trying to make the same paralyzing arguments, especially the argument that 'it's all the same and you can't tell the difference'. Yes we can, pretty easily.

Re: India's Battle to Control the Democracy Narrative

#72

Post by AliveShine »

mandeepj wrote: post #11

Middle class (Upper, middle, and lower) are crushed into shambles. The Rich and those who can gather means are leaving the country at an alarming rate. The fake leader is worried about his narrative and ratings.

that is true almost everywhere in the world today.

Re: India's Battle to Control the Democracy Narrative

#73

Post by mmooss »

nonrandomstring wrote: post #50
mmooss wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It doesn't help that the nature of "democracy" is itself endlessly contested. It's not really; I've never heard someone say that, in fact. The nature of propaganda is to make everything uncertain, and then everyone is frozen and nobody has done wrong.

Hopefully I'm not nitpicking, "propaganda" in general form can be to any purpose; rallying/unity, sapping morale, creating a scapegoat... A lovely word for what your describing is "discombobulation" - sowing seeds of fear, uncertainty, doubt (FUD), gaslighting and disorienting.

No, I appreciate it. It's a great point.

And there is much propaganda - especially now - used to sow hate, violence, and division.

We need clear language for each form (how many are there?). And I think we need a more serious word than 'discombobulation' - for one, it describes the effect, not the cause; and for another, people won't take the issue seriously.

Re: India's Battle to Control the Democracy Narrative

#74

Post by rayiner »

rectang wrote: post #34
rayiner wrote: post #7

Modi has the highest approval rating, according to western pollsters, of any leader in the world. India’s elections are free and fair. That’s all democracy requires. Democracy doesn’t mean western democracy or liberal democracy. Shadi Hamid has done excellent work on this issue: https://www.brookings.edu/books/the-problem-of-democracy-ame... ; see also https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/jan/18/the-problem-of...

The definition of democracy as "free and fair elections" alone is subject to tyranny of the majority.

The problem with any other definition of democracy is that there’s an irreconcilable bootstrapping problem. Democracy is a way to make collective decisions about governance among people who don’t agree on things. The beauty of democracy is that we can all agree on a procedural rule (majoritarian voting) separate and apart from substantive decisions.

If you want to exempt certain decisions or categories of decisions from the majoritarian rule, that poses a conundrum: how do you decide what’s exempted, and how do you make decisions about issues within that exempted space?

Re: India's Battle to Control the Democracy Narrative

#75

Post by rectang »

mk_chan wrote: post #47
rectang wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The definition of democracy as "free and fair elections" alone is subject to tyranny of the majority.

Ironically, tyranny of the majority is a very very good definition of democracy if you drill the majority down into subcategorical majorities recursively until you reach the individual who might be severely disconnected from the averages.

That's amusing, but silly. A criminal screeching "tyranny of the majority!" as they get hauled away is not a revealing example and does not reflect the phrase's usual meaning.

Re: India's Battle to Control the Democracy Narrative

#76

Post by mmooss »

rayiner wrote: post #59
mmooss wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> India’s elections are free and fair. Are they, when people opposing one candidate are jailed? > That’s all democracy requires. That is certainly false. Democracy isn't mob rule, or as the saying go, it's not two wolves and a sheep voting on what's for dinner. Democracy is about self-determination for each person; if people in minority don't have self-determination, it's not democracy at all.

[flagged]

This is the old argument of dicators, going back to the Cold War and before. Like much propaganda, it tries to turn around the enemy's own arguments to disrupt and disconcert - the enemy cares about cultures and freedom, so brutal dictators should be 'free' to do what their 'culture' demands - I don't think their victims see it that way.

Democracy, with rights, has prospered and been embraced across cultures and around the world, on every continent. Before Modi, it was embraced in India.

Re: India's Battle to Control the Democracy Narrative

#77

Post by rayiner »

mmooss wrote: post #76
rayiner wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

This is the old argument of dicators, going back to the Cold War and before. Like much propaganda, it tries to turn around the enemy's own arguments to disrupt and disconcert - the enemy cares about cultures and freedom, so brutal dictators should be 'free' to do what their 'culture' demands - I don't think their victims see it that way. Democracy, with rights, has prospered and been embraced across cultures and arou…

I have no idea what “dictators” you’re talking about. Both my argument and Hamid’s comes from the experiences with fledgling democracies in the Muslim world, where the model of liberal democracy has been tried and failed repeatedly.

What does “democracy, with rights” even mean? Who decides what the “rights” are? In Asia, “democracy, with rights” exists primarily in Japan and South Korea, where it was imposed by the United States. Previously, it existed in Hong Kong, which was a British colony. Singapore also has “democracy, with rights” but again as a result of British colonization. And post-colonization, the “with rights” part is pretty circumscribed.

“Democracy, with rights” was a foreign import to India (and Bangladesh), imposed by an Oxbridge-educated Indian elite. Nehru didn’t get secularism and social democracy from India, he got them to England while he was studying at Cambridge.[1] What you’re seeing in India now is the result of India becoming more democratic as British colonial influence fades: https://unherd.com/2021/04/the-culture-wars-of-post-colonial...

[1] The last Congress prime minister has degrees from both Oxford and Cambridge. While the current leader of Congress is half Italian and went to college near Orlando, then got his masters at Cambridge.

Re: India's Battle to Control the Democracy Narrative

#78

Post by vmurthy »

whatshisface wrote: post #30
vmurthy wrote: post #2

A few things that stand out (not that it's that shocking!) - Narratives matter -- a lot . Second order effects of such subjective rankings are real . Imagine getting a credit downgrade because someone perceives the democracy to be under threat - "the government had reverse-engineered the ranking, strategically identifying procedural tweaks that directly boosted India’s scores in Delhi and Mumbai—the two cities evalua…

Statecraft at its finest? Next, I'll hear that KPI manipulation sets the standard for good engineering...

I agree re KPIs and engineering. But, statecraft is people. You’re not dealing with bits :)

Re: India's Battle to Control the Democracy Narrative

#79

Post by mk_chan »

rectang wrote: post #75
mk_chan wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ironically, tyranny of the majority is a very very good definition of democracy if you drill the majority down into subcategorical majorities recursively until you reach the individual who might be severely disconnected from the averages.

That's amusing, but silly. A criminal screeching "tyranny of the majority!" as they get hauled away is not a revealing example and does not reflect the phrase's usual meaning.

The way I put it was meant to be slightly amusing, but let me put it a different way for the sake of discussion.

For this purpose, I like to mentally model a country (or territory which decided to hold an election of some kind) as a collection of points in a multidimensional space of values or policies which are up for election. Each point represents where a voting person would stand according to their personal principles.

Now, I’d like to postulate that the act of voting corresponds to finding the center of the cluster of points. In this model, it’s easy to imagine the scenario where a very large portion of people (and possibly even the majority) are deeply dissatisfied with the result because they are too far on many dimensions from the center that was elected. This is actually further exacerbated by many factors in real life like the asymmetry of information between people.

The obvious solution would be to create more cluster centers instead of one fat cluster that leaves everyone not very happy. This corresponds to states or provinces within a country in the real world.

So coming from that line of thinking, it leads me to believe that sometimes to maintain a democracy, you need to cut the outliers away to move/make the center such that people are happy with the result. Essentially you enforce the will of the majority by cutting away the minority until it is no longer a tyranny to do so.

Of course this is gross simplification of real life. It is ignoring factors such as external threats, instability, unpredictability, information availability and so on. However, I think it’s useful to think this way for many purposes.

Addressing your extreme example of a criminal, that’s a point so far off in the space that you definitely want to cut it out of the system.

Re: India's Battle to Control the Democracy Narrative

#80

Post by [deleted] »

rectang wrote: post #69
rayiner wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

If majoritarianism is exactly equal to democracy, then a third of the citizenry can be in prison serving as slave labor and so long as they get to cast ballots for candidates promising freedom only to be voted down by the keep-slave-labor camp that's "democracy". I'd like to think that aspiring higher than that is neither western nor non-western.

[deleted]
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