does anybody have podcast reccies to help someone understand the different flavors of democracy?

[processparsnip@mastodon.ie]

does anybody have podcast reccies to help someone understand the different flavors of democracy? bonus if it covers majority tyranny specifically.

[riley@toot.cat]

@ProcessParsnip Pure majority tyranny was almost exclusively found in ancient Greece; virtually all later models implemented some safaguards against it. The concepts of inviolable personal rights and due process of law appear to have been the most popular basic such remedies.

[processparsnip@mastodon.ie]

@riley honestly, one of the reasons I need a podcast reccie is because theory gets so nonsensical so fast and I have 0 desire to listen to such a podcast myself.

It's just that this person has a mental hangup around The Will of the People being by definition Good, and I would love it if they understood that there need to be fences around that, or we get for ex: segregation.

[riley@toot.cat]

@ProcessParsnip Oh. Has he been listening to fascist theory?

Denouncing these safeguards is a common feature in fascist tirades, because it offers ample opportunities of dramatic performances about a "big man of the people fighting the nefarious red tape / fraud, waste and abuse" and such nonsense — and oftentimes, the specific tyrannical things that they want to do when breaking the safeguard are, indeed, popular among their constituents, allowing them to enfirmen support from these constituents.

And, as for specifity, no modern mainstream political thinker adocates against such safeguards in general; there's only debate over which safeguards would be the most preferable. The closest, perhaps weirdly — but as you point out, some of the theory gets silly fast — are the Libertarians and the Objectivists, when arguing against a special case: the safeguards against antisocial hoarding and dispensation of private property, which both sometimes do clad in quasi-electoral arguments (or, well, real electoral quasi-arguments in the context of corporate governance), but both are on the fringes of the ancap/fasc spectrum to begin with.