Hated rotating corporate-puppets. Libs: good democracy.
It really is weird thinking about how like in the US, for example, people act like it’s normal to be at each other’s throats every 4 years and to keep electing presidents that a good half of the country at least hates, as if this is somehow stabilizing and prevents power from becoming too centralized or something.
And then they look at a country with a longstanding, popular leader and the imperialist narrative is like, “Dictator!” And I guess it’s easy for people to believe that because they quite literally have zero experience with having a leader who the majority of the country likes so much, they’d willingly elect them to stay in power for as long as possible. So it’s hard for them to wrap their heads around a democratic willingness to keep the same person and party over time.
It’s like people in those type of countries have been educated backwards on what democracy and popularity are, to believe that something is only democratic if it appears highly contested and it’s inherently dangerous if it’s too popular. Which I guess goes back to idealism (I think it is) and individualism, and the general idea that the problems of the world are due to supposed truisms like “power corrupting a good person” rather than a dialectical view. If somebody believes a person has a Corruption Meter that fills up the longer they’re in power, then I can see how they’d think a popular, longstanding leader somehow correlates to badness; their premise is silly, but I can see the connection.
It’s just Gramscian common sense that the tyranny of the majority would be bad. Bourgeois ideology has been baked in since at least The Federalist Papers.
It really is weird thinking about how like in the US, for example, people act like it’s normal to be at each other’s throats every 4 years and to keep electing presidents that a good half of the country at least hates, as if this is somehow stabilizing and prevents power from becoming too centralized or something.
And then they look at a country with a longstanding, popular leader and the imperialist narrative is like, “Dictator!” And I guess it’s easy for people to believe that because they quite literally have zero experience with having a leader who the majority of the country likes so much, they’d willingly elect them to stay in power for as long as possible. So it’s hard for them to wrap their heads around a democratic willingness to keep the same person and party over time.
It’s like people in those type of countries have been educated backwards on what democracy and popularity are, to believe that something is only democratic if it appears highly contested and it’s inherently dangerous if it’s too popular. Which I guess goes back to idealism (I think it is) and individualism, and the general idea that the problems of the world are due to supposed truisms like “power corrupting a good person” rather than a dialectical view. If somebody believes a person has a Corruption Meter that fills up the longer they’re in power, then I can see how they’d think a popular, longstanding leader somehow correlates to badness; their premise is silly, but I can see the connection.
It’s just Gramscian common sense that the tyranny of the majority would be bad. Bourgeois ideology has been baked in since at least The Federalist Papers.