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Don't worry, I'm sure you'll be privileged and safe
(lemmy.world)
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this post was submitted on 14 May 2024
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Jesus bud, take a breath. Any grass is fine, better if it's accompanied by some fresh air
I didn't say that. Extrademocratic force (e.g. protests, civil disobedience, BDS, ect) is used when democratic institutions don't provide adequate choices, not in order to 'make sure people vote the right way'. That's how every civil rights movement in the US has happened since its founding.
Please, explain to me how protests and civil disobedience provide choices in an 'extrademocratic' way against genuinely democratic institutions.
Not how they are part of a democratic process. Not how they express the democratic will of the people. How they provide a counterbalance in an extrademocratic way, specifically.
? Sorry, i'm not actually sure what you're asking...
Extrademocratic is just my way of describing activity that exists outside of electoral politics. Protests and civil disobedience work by pressuring systems of power through force or the threat thereof. The same way a union strike pressures an employer to make concessions in collective bargaining, a protest pressures a democratic institution to make concessions to protestors.
The threat of withholding support and lowering popular support is the vector by which democratic institutions are made to provide better choices.
That's definitely not what I took it as. Maybe 'extra-electoral' might serve better there, since, you know, extra-democratic necessarily implies outside ('extra') of democracy.
Fair enough - the point remains.
Then we're back to:
Which is contradicted by one of the essential points of liberal democracy being the tolerance of and responsiveness to democratic action outside of electoral politics - ie protests and civil disobedience.
A couple things:
Even if you include things like civil disobedience within your concept of liberal democracy, there will still always be limits to what a liberal democracy will tolerate, even given popular support
the system of power isn't limited to the immediate outline of the government. In a liberal democracy in-particular, outsized power is granted to private entities through ownership and is protected through the state. An organized protest can just as easily be put down via disenfranchisement and employer boycotts as with water cannons and pepper spray, and often they are put down with both simultaneously. Especially when essential arms of liberal democracy are privately owned (I assume you consider mass media and journalism to be essential arms of democracy), it can more than protect itself from effective protest when that protest represent serious threats to its functioning.
All that to say: it's a bit disingenuous to claim a lack of support for any particular systemic change when that system actively defends itself against those changes by - among other things - manufacturing consent against them and lashing out against those who push for it.