If you must vote and vote for the "correct" party then you don't have a democracy. Either we exercised our democratic responsibilities this year or we lost our democracy a decade ago and we're just now finding out about it.
Either way, lesser evil voting is not a democratic ideal.
If you can't abstain then you don't have a democracy. (Yes Australia i'm looking at you) You have a system of coerced consent where the political parties wouldn't even know how to change, but that's okay because there's no incentive to change in such a system either.
It's literally the fastest way to get Party AB instead of Party A and Party B.
I'm not going to write a 20 page paper for you. This is what it is. If people have to vote then the sitting parties have no reason to respond to voters.
Look up what “ideal” means, and note that it doesn’t mean “only option.”
You specifically chose the word. I am responding to that. And to that end: Not participating in an election is NOT an ideal way to have a democracy. In fact- it flies is the face of it.
So in political philosophy ideals are only related to the common definition. This wiki page gives a good use of the philosophical definition in action.
I probably should have used a different word on Lemmy though.
If you must vote and vote for the “correct” party then you don’t have a democracy.
Considering that the discussion was not in the context of Aussie-style forced voting, nor legally restricted election choices, but in that voting for anyone other than the Dems in this election was the action of a total cretin, there's no other realistic interpretation of your words unless we're presuming that you spoke without any connection to the matter at hand, and were just spewing out random thoughts with no relevance to any context in this post or comment thread.
The statement stands on it's own. If you must vote for a party then you don't have a democracy. Even if the ruling class is benevolent and lets you believe you have a choice, it's still not a democracy.
The statement stands on it’s own. If you must vote for a party then you don’t have a democracy.
I'm sorry, were we rounding up people with our Dem paramilitaries and forcing them into the Voting Fields(tm)?
"The statement stands on its own"; no, it's dribble that you refuse to assign any meaning to, because that would mean having a position that could be addressed instead of vagueposting.
The basic democratic principle of "If there's only one moral choice, Party A, because a supermajority of people support either Party A or the very immoral Party B, it's not REAL democracy, which would suit MY ideals, not that of those filthy unwashed masses!"
I think you might want to use a term other than 'democracy' for your sentiment.
No. You're mad because people didn't like your choice, and more people liked the other choice. But that's what a democracy is. Nobody working in good faith promised you that democracy would always live up to the greatest human rights and global trade ideals.