Conservatism is a global plague of deception, oppression and death. It always has been.
Who downvoted this? Conservatism has always been an ideology that's opposed to progress, democracy and freedom. It holds back society to preserve tradition and "family values" while promoting xenophobia, bigotry, and unquestioned submission to authority. The most conservative states in the United States are also some of the poorest, with the lowest standards of living, and also the most backwards. It isn't much different in other countries. The Nazis were conservative. Islamic countries with Sharia Law are conservative. And right now, American Conservatives are trying to implement a Christian-flavoured Sharia Law.
~~Conservatism~~ Capitalism has always been an ideology that's opposed to progress, democracy and freedom.
There you go, I fixed that for you.
All political entities serve the needs of capital first and foremost in a capitalist system, people are only a secondary...if that.
Speaking as a Marxist, this is false. Capitalism was once the historical progressive force against feudalism. This was already waning two centuries ago, but it was not always true.
Glad another Marxist said it. The problem isn't that capitalism was always the wrong choice, it's that we're clinging to it long beyond its best before date.
Isn't democracy collapsing everywhere? The USA's electoral voting system means democracy doesn't exist. A vote in California is worth 27% of a vote in Wyoming in terms of representation. Add on blatant gerrymandering and you've got a rigged system.
The UK has introduced voter ID laws for a problem that never existed in the past. The UK has also had multiple unelected prime ministers due to the way that the parliamentary system works.
Democracy is on the wane everywhere.
Haven't seen any indication of it being in danger in Switzerland. But we have proportional voting rather than first past the post and referenda are common.
I was going to say this. The older democratic systems (easily identified by 1st-past-the-post) are falling apart at the seams, but the rest of us is (relatively) fine. Places like the US and UK need to change their system, but politicians have an incentive not to change anything.
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I would say they're better than a majority of other nations, but not much higher than the mean.
If you compared us to the worst we look great! We're closer to the best than the worst, but we should be competing for being the best and we're not nor does it seem like we will be any time soon.
Seems like the problem isn't with democracy, but with the western falvor of liberal parliamentary democracy. Democracy is working just fine in China according to people who live there. All the available studies, including ones coming from prominent western institutions such as Harvard, consistently show that China is democratic and that public satisfaction with the government is far higher than in any western country:
- https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2020/07/long-term-survey-reveals-chinese-government-satisfaction/
- https://ash.harvard.edu/publications/understanding-ccp-resilience-surveying-chinese-public-opinion-through-time
- https://socialistchina.org/2022/01/24/china-is-not-a-democracy-or-is-it-the-chinese-toolkit/
- https://www.csmonitor.com/World/Asia-Pacific/2021/0218/Vilified-abroad-popular-at-home-China-s-Communist-Party-at-100
- https://news.cgtn.com/event/2021/who-runs-the-cpc/index.html
- https://www.marketwatch.com/story/these-numbers-show-just-how-much-the-lives-of-everyday-chinese-have-improved-in-recent-decades-2019-10-02
- https://en.news-front.info/2020/06/27/studies-have-shown-that-china-is-more-democratic-than-the-united-states-russia-is-nearby-and-ukraine-is-at-the-bottom/
- https://www.csmonitor.com/World/Asia-Pacific/2021/0218/Vilified-abroad-popular-at-home-China-s-Communist-Party-at-100
- https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-06-26/which-nations-are-democracies-some-citizens-might-disagree
I'm not interested in any political system where I can't criticize the ruling party without fearing for my or my family's safety or permanently becoming unable to find employment anywhere except coal/steel plants working 12-14/hours straight 6 days a week for piss wages...
The UK has also had multiple unelected prime ministers due to the way that the parliamentary system works.
That's... not any indicator democracy is "on the wane". In most Western European countries we don't directly vote for the one man/woman, we vote for MPs because the legislative power is in the hands of the Parliament. As long as the Parliament is made of elected MPs then democracy is working just fine.
The US's system is unbalanced and unfair, but it's far from "doesn't exist". And while you have listed a pair of blue/red state pairs, look at the 2nd and next to last state and you see a red/blue state pair. So it's unfair, but it's not uniformly unfair.
I'm not really familiar with the problem of voter ID laws in the UK. Here (Spain) showing your ID is mandatory to vote, and nobody think that's a problem (but we need ID for basically any paperwork, so it isn't an additional burden). Afaik, the problem in the USA is that it is quite difficult to get an ID card, and intentionally so for certain demographics. Is it the same in the UK?
When I look at Modi I see another Erdogan
My exact thoughts, certainly a similarity between the two
can you even call it a democracy anymore?
Of course not. India used to be secular. the far right Hindu extremism is taking over. Also it's so good to be able to post this and not be trolled by pro Modi trolls. The amount of concentration of power due to lack of alternatives is so scary.
PS: I'm an Indian who now lives in Australia.
Yes it is still a democracy, maybe a democrazy. There are no widespread voter suppression, disenfranchisement.
The most recent election has shown that.
There are some pockets of election tampering, violence but nowhere widespread.
Well it is Bourgeois democracy that's slowly been consumed by corporate power. Globally
Yeah literally, this same thing can be said about every country on earth. The only places where corporations haven't infected the government are ones like Afghanistan that have no strong corporations.
Haha true that. This was inevitable btw, the further capitalism develops the more its will absorb everything. Religion is done for, community is done for, bourgie democracy is dying, next come nationality I guess, the environment is already compromised. It truly is a vampiric black hole.
Thought this would be about the US
"Oh no. Thats disgusting. Which one? There are like.. sooo many."
Reminder that Reddit still hosts the largest hatful subreddit that is r/IndiaSpeaks and nothing ever happens to it.
The content in the sub ranges from Islamophobia, death threats, misogyny and homophobia.
I don't really feel representative democracy falls into a category of democracy anymore.
In our modern age, it really doesn’t. We have the infrastructure to make direct democracy possible, we just lack the political will to take responsibility for our communities and vote and be informed as much as that would require. As humans, not as a nation in particular.
an Indian version of fascism.
Lol, what? Isn't fascism the same across the globe?
Not really. Every instance of fascism has been really good at adapting to a local culture and political environment. Just to cite the major ones from 1930s Europe, there are clear differences between nazism (German fascism), Francoism (Spanish fascism) and Italian fascism (the original).
It'd be absurd for fascism in the USA to parade with swastikas, pagan symbols and Hugo Boss uniforms. An American fascism would use stars and stripes, crosses and… red baseball caps, I guess. In the same way, Modi's Indian fascism uses Indian iconography to maintain power.
Fascism also exploits grievances, much like other populist movements. I'm not very familiar with Spanish and Italian fascism, but the Nazis had a whole stack of grievances. Many were complete nonsense, but that never stopped anyone.
It's as if western style liberal democracy is an inherently unstable political system.
You mean to say that the system that led to the Iraq war, the 2007-9 housing crisis, the unpreparedness for a predictable pandemic, and myriad other events of this kind – with no option for the 'represented' publics to prevent said events – is unstable? You might just be on to something.
In unrelated news, the Bank of England has raised interest rates with the stated intention of making homeowners poorer. About 20% poorer, I'm told. The board of the bank is unelected and the electorate have zero control over its decisions. The (unelected) Prime Minister appears to disagree with the decision but also has zero control over the board's decisions.
The bank hopes that by making people poorer, inflation will come down – after two years – and workers will become so desperate that they are too scared to go on strike for a pay rise! This is all public knowledge because several interested parties said the quiet part out loud.
Don't worry, though, Britain is a liberal democracy so the Brits can vote for different representatives in a year's time. Well, those who survive will be able to vote. And nobody will be able to vote for the Bank of England board. But it's still a democracy.
When a party form a government on its own i.e without any coalition partners, they tend to target the opposition with all the arsenal be it CBI , ED and sometimes even the Judiciary. However the elections are fair and impartial for the most part. Just recently, BJP got its ass handed to it in a state election in Karnataka. They may win the federal election again but it is hardly a death of democracy. Their grip on states have been slipping and once it goes out, they will most likely lose the federal government as well. The same happened during Indira Gandhi era. The same is happening now. Democracy survived then and will survive now. I am not saying there is no assault on democratic institutions in India. But they have proved resilient enough to prevent a democratic collapse as portrayed in this article.
And it's already been pointed out that the actions of Trump and Bolsonaro mirror the same undermining strategy but failed. Still, Modi controls nearly all the media now so it's going to be stronger propaganda than Fox News.
International commentators can't seem to wrap their minds around the idea that Modi's BJP is having so much success because Indians, on the whole, like them and think they're doing a pretty good job.
Americans in particular tend to think that if you don't have two equally strong parties duking it out over 50/50 nailbiter elections, it's not democracy. But plenty of postwar and postcolonial democracies end up with dominant parties, without falling into dictatorship. In Japan, for example, the LDP has held power for something like 95% of the time since WWII, and it's a pretty healthy democracy.
The LDP has never had opposition leaders arrested. Just because they are popular doesn't mean that they aren't anti-democratic. Democracy requires free elections, which cannot exist if a significant minority is being actively suppressed.
Dictators can also be popular, but that doesn’t make their systems of government democratic. I would suggest you read the article if you haven’t because it discusses both Modi’s popularity and the specific actions he has taken that undermine Indian democracy.
You want to know what's truly disturbing? The previous Australian Federal government did many of these same things too, or worse.
It seems true democracy has fallen out of favour.
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