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The US constitution was drafted by a cabal of wealthy slavers and landed aristocrats who repeatedly announced “we hate democracy because poor people might vote to not be exploited by us anymore” and crafted a political system to ensure their perpetual class rule and people are really unsure how the US could have ended up in the situation it’s in now.
Liberals in my mentions are working overtime to reconcile “Trump is a fascist dictator” with “the US constitution is good actually” as if he just came out of nowhere and suddenly found himself with absolute power over the state.
Me: the US constitution is anti-democratic
A liberal: um I’m not sure you know what democracy means, it comes from the Greek for “rule of the people”
Me: yes that’s explicitly how I’m using the term
A liberal: um you should know that no one else uses it that way
I'll try to put this into a better frame of disagreement:
Since "democracy" is almost universally used to mean a state that has rule by some delimited subset of the people rather than rule by the people, anarchists should oppose democracy.
Anarchists might approve of something called "direct democracy" or whatever, but then again might not. If direct democracy means majority rule in a small group, it's better but not that much better.
Sure—I have had plenty of disagreements with other anarchists about the usefulness of using the term democracy that I don’t need to rehash here.
But this person was all over the place—totally incoherent. The framers of the constitution were greedy slavers obsessed with guaranteeing cheap labor, but also somehow forgot to draft any of that into the constitution because they wanted to ensure democracy, which means “rule of the people” but not all of the people, that’s tyranny of the majority, but it’s good that the franchise has expanded to include more people because rule by a few is oligarchy, but they weren’t oligarchs because they had elections…and so on.
Sorry for rehashing the whole thing here! I generally try to rehash the common anarchist disagreement rather than go off on what some non-anarchist thought -- rehashing the anarchist disagreement may get people to think about something useful, but addressing some incoherence usually doesn't.
No worries. I like the term democracy, both because I think it is etymologically the most precise term I can think of for the concept I hold in my head and because of the common association that many people have with democracy as something good.
I fully appreciate why many anarchists are hostile to the idea—both because of how it’s actually used by states today and because of their rejection of the concept of *any* rule by anyone, or because of its suggestion of majoritarianism.
(I find the concern about majoritarianism to be misplaced. No system anywhere has actually operated along those lines, and if some majority of people *were* to come to rule over some minority, then they wouldn’t really be doing democracy!)